>> STEPHANIE: Hello, everybody! Welcome to the “Win Customers in the New Online Consumer Journey”
session. I’m Stephanie Shum, and I lead Google’s commercial experiences for shopping and retail.
My colleague, Nicky Rettke, and I are here today to talk to you about the new Ads innovations
that can help you reach more customers and drive online sales for your business.
In this session, we want to share with you the latest and greatest of new ways for you to build
your brand and win loyal customers.
COVID-19 has caused established habits and routines to break, and in their place,
new consumer behaviors have sprung up, fundamentally transforming the way people shop.
Online became the default purchasing channel for many customers during lockdown and will continue
even as restrictions begin to ease.
In fact, searches for “for sale online” have grown globally by over 100% year over year.
With so much information and choice available online, the decision-making process has become
even more complex.
Through the lens of behavioral science, our “Decoding Decisions” research, which you can find
on our Think with Google website, reveals how customers manage this complexity.
We call it the “messy middle,” and the research codifies behavior into 2 mental models:
exploration and evaluation.
People loop through these 2 stages, repeating the cycle as many times as they need to make a
purchase decision. During COVID-19, this process became even more messy as consumers
navigate new needs, new categories, and new variables.
Since discoveries made in the “messy middle” often determine the outcome, it’s more important than
ever for brands to connect with customers in this space and assist them with relevant and timely
information.
Did you know that every day hundreds of millions of people turn to Google for help with their shopping?
People turn to Google and YouTube for ideas, inspiration, and information on where they can buy
products or services.
For example, over the last year we’ve seen phenomenal increases in mobile searches globally
for things like “best affordable” growing 60% year over year;
“curbside pickup” growing by over 3,000% year over year;
and “available near me” growing 100% year over year.
These trends confirm what we’ve already predicted: that it’s becoming increasingly challenging for
customers to find the right product or service and make decisions because of information overload.
Now, here’s my colleague, Nicky, who leads product for YouTube’s direct response ad business.
She will talk through all the ways we’re activating on these insights and building our solutions
to meet customer needs.
>> NICKY: Thanks for the introduction, Stephanie.
I’m thrilled to share how our solutions are evolving to better serve customers and advertisers
throughout the entire shopping journey.
We can all agree that the shopping journey has become more complex, especially as we navigate
uncertainty through COVID-19 and explore new categories and brands.
Over the past year at home, my family and I have been doing a lot more cooking together, so I’ve
been intentionally seeking out new recipes to try and new ingredients for us to use.
But I don’t always know what to look for, so I appreciate it when I stumble upon inspiration.
I love this example from kitchenware brand Our Place, who utilized a combination of visual ad
solutions to educate customers on their brand and inspire them to buy their products throughout the
path to purchase, from YouTube to Search to the Shopping tab.
Let’s see how they accomplished this.
>> SHIZA: I grew up in Pakistan, and food was very central to my family and to my culture.
Now far away from home, cooking something from my childhood is the way that I reconnect with my family.
My name is Shiza Shahid, and I’m co-founder and co-CEO of Our Place.
We noticed that all the other cookware brands were selling elaborate, expensive, bulky,
difficult-to-use 16-piece cookware sets.
So we created the Always Pan to replace 8 traditional pieces of cookware.
We had created a brand and a product that we really believed in, and we wanted to share
that with the world.
For us, Google’s ad solutions offered a way to show people our product: to show it in use,
its design, but also to show how it feels to cook a meal and share it with someone you love.
We saw this tremendous spike in new customers during the holidays.
For every dollar we spend on Google Shopping, Search, and YouTube, we earn almost $5 in return.
I think my identity as a female founder, as an immigrant, as a woman of color informs
the way that I have built and shaped Our Place.
I know what it means to not be seen, and me and my entire team want our customers to always feel seen,
to feel like they belong, to feel like Our Place is their place.
>> NICKY: Our Place did a phenomenal job of reaching customers as they browse across many
touchpoints and jump between discovery, research, and purchase.
Building on momentum from last year, we want to unify our shopping experience across the board
and simplify the interactions customers need to take with your ads, shortening their
decision-making in moments that matter.
We’re focused on enabling you to better visually showcase your brand and products in moments of
exploration and evaluation and saving you time with automation solutions to reach the right
customers and drive better results.
To achieve this, first, we’re unlocking new YouTube ad inventory across a few of our campaign types,
like Smart Shopping and Video action campaigns, globally, enabling customers to have a seamless
shopping experience no matter where they are on Google or YouTube.
We know that increasingly customers are turning to YouTube throughout more of the shopping journey.
Whether that’s looking for inspiration through unboxing videos or seeking purchase advice by
watching product reviews.
In fact, 70% of viewers say they bought a brand after seeing it on YouTube.
To reach these potential customers with your rich product information, we’re enabling ads
across more places where we’ve seen valuable viewer engagement, like the YouTube Search page,
for when people are looking up how to fix a pipe or what’s the best skincare routine; the Watch Next
feed, so you can be there when people are looking for their next video; and the Home feed on the
mobile app, so you can inspire customers who are browsing new content and open to brand discovery.
All of these surfaces are now globally available for your Shopping ads and Smart Shopping campaigns.
For Video action campaigns, you have access to the Watch Next and Home feed, with the YouTube Search
page coming later this year.
While we’re excited to expand the placements available on YouTube for our campaigns, we’re also
introducing new ways to make our existing ad formats more shoppable.
To make it easier to deliver immersive product experiences while customers are looking for
shopping inspiration, we’ve made product feeds globally available for Video action campaigns,
with support for Discovery ads coming in the next few months.
Your products will seamlessly appear in front of customers while they’re watching videos on
YouTube, exploring their interests on Discover, or checking for promotions in Gmail.
Once you’ve linked your Google Merchant Center feed to your campaigns during campaign setup,
shoppers will automatically see details from your product catalogue, like images and descriptions,
that are more relevant to them.
For the launch of the Galaxy Note 20 in Indonesia, Samsung wanted to build on its YouTube campaigns by
featuring more product detail and imagery to drive action with its video creative.
After adding product feeds to their Video campaigns, the brand saw a conversion lift of 39%,
with 16% lower cost per conversion.
Advertisers already using Video action campaigns are also seeing success pairing their campaigns
with Discovery ads to drive action with shoppers who don’t have a specific brand or product in mind.
In fact, more than 60% of advertisers who combine the 2 see incremental conversions.
If you’re already using Video and Search to drive performance, adding Discovery ads to close the gap
with shoppers in the “messy middle” can help you drive demand with interested audiences.
On average, Search advertisers who add Discovery ads see 12% more conversions.
But showing up is only half the equation. You’ve let us know how critical it is for you
to optimize for your most valuable customers while more accurately tracking conversion value.
So you’ll be able to do both for Video action campaigns and Discovery ads with target return
on ad spend bidding.
This is available now for all advertisers globally in Video action campaigns, and it’ll be coming
to Discovery ads in the next few months.
As an early adopter of target return on ad spend bidding for Discovery ads,
beauty brand Estée Lauder has seen great results.
They saw a 146% increase on return on investment during the post-holiday season,
which is traditionally slow for retailers.
We look forward to seeing how these new features for Video action campaigns and Discovery ads help
retailers build interest and action with shoppers while accelerating growth for their business.
And with that, I’ll hand it back to Stephanie.
>> STEPHANIE: Thanks, Nicky!
And we can’t forget about Search.
As we all know, Search is a critical part of the path to purchase. People turn to Search during
the “messy middle” to make sense of all the available information and ensure they’re making
an informed decision.
86% of shoppers in surveyed countries around the world say they expect photos to be a feature
businesses offer them when shopping online.
Last year, we announced image extensions, a new way to visually augment your search ads.
This beta allowed advertisers to upload relevant visuals that would complement their existing
text ads, helping potential customers learn more about products and services and take action faster.
I’m excited to announce that image extensions on search ads are now out of beta and available
to advertisers globally.
Since allowing advertisers to test this feature, some brands have seen phenomenal engagement results.
As an early adopter of target return on ad spend bidding for Discovery ads, Estée Lauder was also
one of the first brands to use image extensions.
By adding a library of relevant images to their Google Ads account, their unbranded search campaigns
using image extensions saw a 91% increase in click-through rate and 14% improvement
on return on ad spend.
In addition to adding imagery to your search ads, you can now create more compelling and relevant
messages at scale with ad customizers for business data launching for responsive search ads.
This feature will dynamically show details about your products or services based
on the information you provide.
For example, let’s say you offer a wide range of insurance products. Now you can insert the names
of different types of insurance offerings and their rates in real time based on what is being searched.
Utilizing these new features to add in rich imagery and a timely, relevant message to your
text ads helps you better assist customers as they evaluate their options.
By adding this value, you can differentiate your brand in these critical shopping moments and
win the “messy middle.”
So we covered a lot in today’s talk, from new ad inventory on YouTube to product feed integration
to new Search features. And I hope you’re as excited as I am to see these new product
innovations and features become available to use.
This high-level tour of some of the new ways we’re helping you win customers in the new online
consumer journey is just the beginning.
If you’re a retailer looking for new ways to differentiate your offerings across Google and
take advantage of unique-to-Google performance insights, then I’d recommend checking out the
“Highlight Your Brand Assets and Inventory to Get Discovered Across Google” session,
available on demand.
Thank you all for tuning in, and I hope you enjoy the rest of Google Marketing Livestream.