This holiday season, shoppers are acting more quickly and more purposefully than ever before, with 7% less time spent in each mobile shopping session.¹ Yet those same shoppers are making 64% more mobile purchases than last year in the retail category, according to Google Analytics data.² Intent-filled shopping micro-moments will replace shopping marathons this season, and we’re rolling out three new features to help retailers act on these critical moments.

Optimize your shopping bids with remarketing lists

We’re excited to extend remarketing capabilities to both shopping ads (PLAs) and local inventory ads (LIAs) with shopping remarketing lists. Now you can optimize your shopping bids to re-engage high-value customers the next time they shop on Google.com. For example, when those who’ve abandoned their carts on your sites or your loyal customers shop again on Google on desktop or mobile, you can use remarketing lists to tailor your shopping bids and reconnect with them at a more cost-efficient ROI.

Early adopters are seeing great success with shopping remarketing lists:

"Shopping remarketing lists have proven incredibly successful for Magazines.com. We're able to strategically target consumers who did not convert in previous visits, driving 285% higher mobile and desktop conversion rates with 68% lower CPAs, making it one of the most effective features we’ve ever tested."
- Yuly Gonzalez, Sr. SEM Specialist, Rakuten Search

"With Shopping remarketing lists, our client Cruiser Customizing increased their conversion rate by 78% and their ROAS by 66%. We don’t want to have a single Shopping campaign now without shopping remarketing lists attached."
- Jeremy Brown, Chief Marketing Officer, Metric Theory

Get better insights into the products in high demand online and near your stores

To help you make better decisions about which products to merchandise and promote in your stores, online, and via your Google shopping data feed, we recently rolled out two new tools:

First, with the new Shopping Insights tool, you can identify the products people are actively looking for online and around your stores.* Based on aggregated and indexed data from April to September of 2015, the tool lets you explore the most popular shopping product terms on Google, measure their significance over time, filter for cities, and compare how consumers search for products differently on mobile or desktop.

The Assortment Report uses your existing Google Merchant Center data feed to identify gaps in your product assortment based on the popular products shoppers are clicking on, in real-time, by product category. For example, if you offer toys, you might learn that you’re not yet stocking the Sphero BB-8 App-Enabled Droid from Star Wars, one of the hottest toys right now on Google. This report also provides benchmark selling prices for each of those missing products to help you with sourcing and pricing decisions.

Posted by Archana Kannan, Product Manager, Google Shopping

We’re constantly looking for ways to give thoughtful, relevant information as shoppers browse, compare and research during their I-Want-to-Know moments. At the same time, we want to help you differentiate your products and stand out on Google.

Promotional text, an optional message added to your ad groups in AdWords, was part of our first efforts to do just that. We noticed many of you use promotional text to highlight special offers or free shipping, so today, we’re excited to introduce new automated extensions for shopping ads (PLAs).

Automated extension for shopping ads

These new extensions are displayed alongside your shopping ads (PLAs) at no additional work or cost. They use existing information you’ve provided in your Merchant Center settings and data feed to automatically show free shipping and price drop information in a consistent and digestible way for shoppers.
Promotional text retirement

Based on initial results, we’re seeing shoppers prefer these new automated extensions over promotional text and advertisers are getting better click through rates with it too. Thus, we’ll be retiring promotional text at the end of September 2015 and start surfacing automated extensions more frequently instead.

For those who use promotional text, no additional action is needed. Your ads won’t be otherwise affected and will continue to reach shoppers searching on Google. If you want to highlight other offers aside from free shipping and sale prices, we strongly encourage you to take advantage of our other shopping extensions:

• Merchant promotions to share discounts and promo codes
• Product ratings to display aggregated star ratings and link to customer reviews
• Trusted Stores certification to show the world you’re trusted by Google as a great place to shop

Availability of this extension may vary by country, so check out the above help center articles for more details. You can find more information on automated extensions in our help center as well.

Posted by Tom Beyer, Product Manager, Google Shopping

Last year, we launched powerful reporting and campaign management features like Auction insights to provide more visibility into the auction and ranking for Google Shopping. Going one step further today, we’re excited to introduce a suite of bidding strategies for Shopping campaigns. These enable you to go beyond manual max CPC bidding to deliver specific bids for each auction, tailored to people’s context.

Maximize Clicks
Mario Märzinger, Vice President Marketing at home24 says, “We are extremely happy with the ability of maximize clicks to deliver more traffic at significant cost savings! Testing this bid strategy on one of our key product lines, we received 7% more clicks at 13% lower CPCs one month into the test.”
Enhanced CPC
If you want to manage your own bids or use a third-party bidding platform, enhanced CPC is your best bet. It dynamically optimizes on top of your bid in real-time so you get more conversions or sales at a similar cost. We’re seeing advertisers get as many as 7% more conversions at the same cost with eCPC!¹

Radhika Aggarwal, co-founder and Chief Business Officer at Shopclues.com says, “We manage our bids as much as we can, and by using enhanced CPC, we’re able to optimize our bids based on user context and auction dynamics. Enhanced CPC’s real-time bidding has helped ShopClues improve our ROI and really elevate our performance.”
Target ROAS
If you don’t have time to manage your bids manually and are revenue-driven, let target return on ad spend (ROAS) do the heavy bidding lifting. With target ROAS, you choose your desired ROAS and it’ll dynamically bid so products that’ll drive more revenue will get higher bids.

Currently a beta, target ROAS is available to a handful of retailers. If you’re interested in participating in this beta and being an early adopter, please fill out this request form.
We’re very excited by these automated bidding solutions for Google Shopping. We'll continue to explore and invest in additional ways to help you be more effective and efficient with campaign management and bidding. For more information, check out the AdWords help center on bidding strategies and best practices for AdWords bidding.

Posted by Dimitris Meretakis, Product Manager, Google Shopping

Last year, mobile devices used before or during shopping trips influenced just under one trillion dollars — or 28% — of in-store sales in the United States.¹ Those sales grew from the billions of shopping micro-moments that power today’s buying economy. Fewer people wait to head to the mall on Saturday to go shopping; thanks to smartphones, shopping now happens anytime and anywhere. Read on for the latest ways we’re helping retailers reach shoppers in those crucial I-want-to-know, I want-to-go, and I want-to-buy moments.

I-want-to-know: Giving immediate answers for every shopping need
We're improving the mobile experience on Google to aid shoppers as they browse, compare, and research products.

1 in 5 people swipe to interact with shopping ads, expressing a strong desire to learn more.² So we’re rolling out a new enhancement that gently expands the shopping ads as you swipe, revealing information like product ratings and availability at a nearby store. The result: more qualified traffic driven directly to retailers. This feature will begin rolling out on Chrome for Android this month, with iOS to follow in the coming months.

Expandable shopping ads

Conversational search is also really important -- we’re seeing more shoppers literally asking Google to help them learn more about products. So we’re rolling out new experiences that answer them right back.

On searches for the top-rated products, such as “Best women’s Nike running shoes,” we’re starting to show newly-designed shopping ads with authoritative rankings and product ratings. The new design is so helpful to those specific users that we've seen click-through-rate increases of up to 11% for retailers for these queries.³ Product queries that include “reviews” or “recommendations" are also increasingly common, so we’re showing new product review cards with product ratings and snippets from the most useful reviews from around the web. Finally, shoppers who want to learn more about a product’s features, like the resolution of the camera they’re considering purchasing, may now see a product attribute card with the most relevant information.

New experiences for shoppers searching for the best products, product reviews and attributes

I-want-to-go: Helping shoppers find local stores
1 in 4 people who avoid stores say they do so because they don’t want to waste their time finding out that the thing they want isn’t in stock.⁴ So we’re doing more to serve people who clearly want to focus on products that are available within driving distance.

In late 2013, we launched local inventory ads, which show shoppers when the product they want is available at a nearby store. We’ve seen very positive results: retailers who enabled local inventory ads on mobile and desktop campaigns saw a 2% increase in overall clicks and no drop in online conversion rate when local inventory ads were served instead of shopping ads (PLAs).⁵ Because we’ve seen that LIAs are good for both shoppers and retailers, we’ll now be showing many more local inventory ads than we did before by prioritizing showing LIA over shopping ads on local intent shopping queries, like “coffee maker near me”. This new experience increased clicks on shopping ads by 85% for these queries.⁶

Local inventory ads for local intent queries

What if you could give shoppers the right information at the right time – without them even needing to ask? Google Now does just that by bringing people the information they need at the moment they need it. We’ve recently released two new cards for shoppers.

The Google Now in-store card appears when a shopper is near a store, displaying useful information such as sales, closing hours, loyalty card data, and more. When she clicks “Search store inventory,” a Google-hosted, retailer-branded local storefront allows her to browse that store’s shelves 24 hours a day. Also newly available is the Google Now price drop card. This card highlights a significant price reduction on a product the shopper has previously browsed, giving her a compelling reason to make that purchase now, online or in-store.

Google Now in-store card, local storefront & Google Now price drop card

I-want-to-buy: Making it easy to purchase on mobile
US retailers’ conversion rates on desktop computers are 2X higher than on mobile.⁷ So we’re working on new solutions to help retailers increase mobile engagement and sales.

There are lots of great shopping apps out there, and we want to encourage shoppers to use them. That’s why we’re starting to work with a select group of global retailers including eBay, Flipkart and Zalando to add deep links to their apps right in their shopping ads, driving people straight to their mobile app instead of their website. This is a tremendous new opportunity for retailers and app developers to drive engagement with their shopping apps, and we’ll be expanding it to more advertisers in the coming months.

App deep linking for shopping ads

Finally, to help smartphone shoppers buy with ease from their favorite retailers, we'll be testing Purchases on Google. When a shopper searches on mobile for a product such as “women's hoodies”, she may see a shopping ad with 'Buy on Google' text. After clicking the ad, she's taken to a retailer-branded product page hosted by Google. Checkout is seamless, simple, and secure, thanks to saved payment credentials in her Google Account.

Purchases on Google

For retailers, opting in to Purchases on Google means improved mobile conversions thanks to a simplified checkout process. Participating retailers only pay for clicks on the shopping ads to the product page; all clicks and interactions on the product page are free. While Google hosts the product page and provides purchase protection for customers, retailers own the customer communication and can offer customers the option to receive marketing and promotional messages. “Customers increasingly want to shop on their own terms. Purchases on Google facilitates that flexibility while maintaining the merchant’s ability to own the customer relationship.” says, Peter Cobb, eBags Marketing EVP and Shop.org Chairman.
Although we're still in early experiments with a limited number of retailers, we see Purchases on Google as a big step towards helping retailers drive more mobile conversions and win more customers. “Purchases on Google will simplify our customers’ ability to search for items on Google and then buy with Staples.” said Faisal Masud, Executive Vice President of Global E-Commerce, Staples, Inc. “Working with Google on this offering will make the discovery and purchase process even easier for the customers we serve, with the power of both of our companies behind it.”

Jason LaRose, Chief Revenue Officer, Digital at Under Armour echoes a similar sentiment: "As the consumer continues to rapidly adopt mobile as their primary device, we have to move at a similar pace in how we reduce purchase friction and enhance the user experience with our brand. Google's technology solutions help us innovate, so our collaborative efforts are rich and ongoing.”

Greater expectations
With shoppers today, big expectations come from the smallest moments. That's good news, because retailers now have the technology to deliver on those expectations. The tools we shared this week can help retailers be there in those billions (and trillions!) of micro-moments with the right experience, and in the right context, to win the moments that matter the most.

To learn more about Google’s solutions for retailers, visit google.com/retail or contact your Google account manager.

Posted by Jonathan Alferness, Vice President, Product Management, Google Shopping

Last year, we introduced product ratings on Product Listing Ads in the US to help consumers make better purchase decisions when shopping online. Since the initial launch, we’ve been working to bring product ratings to more countries, and this week we launched in the UK, France and Germany.

Product ratings appear in the form of stars and review counts on Product Listing Ads across google.com, google.com/shopping and their equivalents in the UK, France and Germany. This 5-star rating system represents aggregated review data for the product, compiled from multiple sources including merchants, third-party aggregators, editorial sites and users.

Product ratings for juicers, as indicated by stars and total review counts

Product ratings help consumers make better purchase decisions before they click, driving more qualified traffic to participating merchants. Since the US launch in July 2014, we’ve seen an average click-through rate increase of five percent on Product Listing Ads with product ratings.

Product ratings also help merchants differentiate their Product Listing Ads. Dave Abbott, Vice President of Online Marketing for The Home Depot, says, “customers look for product validation through reviews and ratings. Providing this info is valuable to our customers and provides The Home Depot with a competitive advantage on Google.”

How to enable product ratings on your Product Listing Ads

Product ratings are available to merchants targeting their Product Listing Ads to the US, UK, France or Germany. Merchants must share all of their product review content with Google, either directly or through an approved third-party aggregator, in order to show product ratings.

If you would like to enable product ratings on your Product Listing Ads, please start the process of submitting your review content to us by completing our product ratings form. Our team will then reach out to you with details on next steps.

Product ratings are one of several extensions we may show with Product Listing Ads, so please note that just because a product has reviews does not mean that we’ll always show ratings. We’re also working to expand product ratings to more countries this year, so please stay tuned.

Posted by Archana Kannan, Product Manager, Google Shopping

Want to get more impressions and clicks for your Shopping campaigns? Or want to know how to spot missed opportunities in your bidding strategy and find your mobile share of voice? We introduced competitive landscape data last year so you can start answering those burning questions, and today, we’re excited to announce a handful of additions that’ll help you find new ways to optimize your Shopping campaigns and engage shoppers on all devices.

• Auction insights report lets you compare your Product Listing Ad (PLA) performance to other advertisers participating in the same auctions as you are. With impression share, overlap rate and outranking share, you’re able to see trends amongst your peers and strategic opportunities to improve your bidding strategies.

• Search impression share has been revamped to be more useful and aligned with text ads. You can now analyze your share of voice at the granularity you want with Search impression share in the Dimensions tab. You’ll know which campaigns are limited by a low budget with Lost IS (budget) and which ones need further optimization with Lost IS (rank). Note that we now calculate Search impression share at account level so you may notice a change in impression share between October and November.

• Device and time segmentation are available to help you refine your bid modifier strategy. You can see if your peers received more mobile impressions than you over the weekend with the Auction insights report segmented by device and day.

• Bid simulator columns show you what your advertising results could’ve been had you set different bids. You can add these columns in your Product groups tab and, for example, find product groups that’ll drive the most incremental clicks.

• Flattened view of your product groups presents another way to analyze your performance. It allows you to sort your product groups within an ad group based on performance data and easily identify which to optimize. For example, you can sort by impression share, find a few product groups with the lowest impression share, and fine-tune those bids within a matter of clicks.

We hope these additions will help you identify easy-wins for the holidays and unlock new, more actionable ways to optimize your Shopping campaigns. We’ll continue to explore other reporting needs so you have relevant and useful data at your fingertips. Visit our help center articles for more information on Auction insights, Search impression share, bid simulator columns, and the flattened product groups view.

Posted by Dimitris Meretakis, Product Manager, Google Shopping

Two years ago, we launched Merchant Promotions to retailers in the US, enabling them to show promotions alongside Product Listing Ads on Google search results and Google Shopping. Based on positive feedback, we’re excited to make Merchant Promotions available to retailers in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Australia and India.

Example of Merchant Promotions on Product Listing Ads on Google.com

Example of Merchant Promotions on Google Shopping

Participating US retailers have seen improved performance from their Product Listing Ads. For example, Venus’s PLAs with Merchant Promotions had a seven percent higher clickthrough rate (CTR), a two percent higher conversion rate, and an 11 percent lower cost-per-click (CPC) than their standard PLAs. Read more about Venus’ success with Merchant Promotions here.

Get started with Merchant Promotions
If you’re interested in learning more about Merchant Promotions or planning on running promotions this holiday season, please review this Getting Started Guide and fill out the interest form to get in touch with our team.

Posted by Christina Ilvento, Product Manager, Google Shopping

We know you’re busy preparing great deals for the fast-approaching holiday season. When shoppers find these deals on Product Listing Ads (PLAs), they will expect the price and availability to match your website. Any changes to this information on your website will need to be reflected on Google Shopping as quickly as possible. To help you with this, we’re announcing automatic item updates.

If you enable automatic item updates, we will update product price and availability shown on PLAs if we notice a difference between your product data and your website’s microdata instead of disapproving your ads. These item updates will persist until you make an update to your product data. Merchants who have participated in the beta have seen a 50% reduction in price-related item disapprovals.

You can follow these steps to get started with automatic item updates:

• Implement schema.org microdata on your website. Learn more about implementing microdata.
• Enable automatic item updates by visiting the automatic item updates tab in the settings section of your Merchant Center account.

Automatic item updates work in conjunction with a good feed rather than replacing it. Accurate and frequent data feed updates are still critical to ensure great results for shoppers. If many of your products are updated several times per day, we suggest using the Content API in addition to setting up automatic item updates.

To keep your items live during this holiday, you should always make sure to comply with our Google Shopping policies while participating in Google Shopping. For more help with data and policy requirements, please visit the Merchant Center Help Center.

Posted by Hannah Schlesinger and Tom Beyer, Google Shopping Team

More and more people turn to search to plan their local shopping trips. In fact, 83% of shoppers would be more likely to visit a store if they could check the availability of an item online beforehand.1 Since we launched local inventory ads in the US last fall, many savvy retailers have taken advantage of the opportunity to promote their store items to nearby shoppers on Google.2 Now, we’re excited to make these ads available in the UK, France, Germany, Japan and Australia.


Promote store-only products on desktop
We have also expanded support for store-only products and campaigns to desktop devices, enabling retailers to promote stores to the right customers at the right time. For example, you can prioritize showing local products to get shoppers in your doors during the weeks and days leading up to the holidays. As items go out of stock online and last-minute shipping costs increase, retailers who can provide cost-effective, quick in-store purchase options stand out in the crowd.


Get started with local inventory ads
Local inventory ads help retailers drive foot traffic and sales by showing local product availability, price and store information to shoppers in the area. If you’re a retailer with physical stores and are interested in getting started with local inventory ads, visit the program overview and fill out the interest form.

Posted by Christina Ilvento, Product Manager, Google Shopping

1 Research background: Google/Ipsos MediaCT/Sterling Brands, Digital Impact on In-Store Shopping, March-May 2014. Survey conducted among 6,000 smartphone users aged 18-54 who have influence in the purchase decision making process of Retail, CPG or Tech products and have used the Internet to look for shopping-related information.
2 Local inventory ads were formerly called Local Product Listing Ads.

With the growth of product queries across the web, advertisers are looking for new ways to connect their products to interested shoppers.

By opting your Shopping Campaigns into Google’s search partners, you can now reach users as they search or browse for products on retail and commerce sites in the Google Search Network. These retailers, such as Walmart.com, are part of AdSense for Shopping, our latest product to help monetize site traffic.

Extending your Shopping Campaigns to these sites helps you reach qualified users beyond google.com and Google Shopping. Your Product Listing Ads show alongside contextually relevant results, determined by the user’s search, the product category or the product name. For example, if you sell tailgating grills on Google Shopping and a user searches tailgating grill on a retail partner's site, your Product Listing Ads may be eligible to appear.

Product Listing Ads on Walmart.com

Similar to text ads, opting your Product Listing Ads into search partners won’t affect your quality score on google.com.

AdSense for Shopping is currently limited to a small set of retail and commerce publishers. As we release the product to more publishers, we expect advertisers with Product Listing Ads opted into search partners to see increased traffic to their sites. If you’re a retailer and you’re interested in monetizing your site through AdSense for Shopping, please complete this interest form.

To learn more about showing your Product Listing Ads on search partners and evaluating your performance, please visit our AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Jesse Adkins, Product Manager, Google Search Ads

Earlier this month, we introduced an upgrade tool for advertisers to upgrade to Shopping campaigns quickly and easily. If you’ve already upgraded, then you’re all set. If you haven’t upgraded yet and don’t do it by the end of this month, the following is what will happen to your regular Product Listing Ads (PLA) campaigns come September.

• Phase 1: Limited functionality of all regular PLA campaigns - Starting September 2nd, you will not be able to edit your product targeting, max. CPC bids, promotional text and destination URLs anymore. Campaign statuses and budgets will remain editable so you can manage your spend until your regular PLA campaigns are auto-upgraded to Shopping campaigns.

• Phase 2: Auto-upgrade to Shopping campaigns - Throughout September, regular PLA campaigns that received impressions in the preceding few weeks will be auto-upgraded to a new Shopping campaign with a similar campaign structure. Some regular PLA campaigns, settings and bids might not carry over to your new Shopping campaign due to technical limitations. Once your regular PLA campaigns are auto-upgraded, you’ll receive an email notification and your regular PLA campaigns will stop serving PLAs. Further details on the auto-upgrade are in the AdWords Help Center.

Don’t wait to upgrade
As a final reminder, upgrade your campaigns before September to ensure they are set up as you’d like. We recommend using the upgrade tool as it walks you through the upgrade process step by step.

For more information, visit this help center article on the retirement of regular PLA campaigns and the automatic upgrade to Shopping campaigns. If you have any questions, reach out to the AdWords Community Forum or contact us.

Posted by Eric Tholomé, Director of Product Management, Google Shopping

This is the final stretch. At the end of August, regular Product Listing Ad (PLA) campaigns will retire and be replaced by Shopping campaigns. A majority of you have started upgrading to Shopping campaigns, but if you’re one of the few who haven’t yet, we’re introducing a new upgrade tool that’ll help you upgrade in a matter of clicks.

This tool creates a Shopping campaign from your regular PLA campaign, with a campaign structure and bids based on your regular PLA campaign and historical performance data.
If you haven’t started your upgrade, we encourage you to use this tool as a jumping off point for your Shopping campaigns. Be sure to check your campaign budgets, settings and bids so they’re customized to your business needs.

Note that not all campaigns are compatible with this upgrade tool. If, for example, you use AdWords labels or groupings in your product targeting or inventory filters, you must update your data feed with custom labels before you use the upgrade tool, unless you’re happy to use another attribute to subdivide your inventory in AdWords directly.

You can access the upgrade tool, and check which of your campaigns are eligible, in the Settings tab of your existing Product Listing Ads campaigns. Learn more in the help center.

We’re here to help
We want to make sure you’ve thoughtfully upgraded and are ready for the holidays. Join us for a Learn With Google Hangout on Air on August 12 at 10:00am PST to walk through the new upgrade tool. If you have any questions, reach out to the AdWords Community Forum or contact us.

Posted by Eric Tholomé, Director of Product Management, Google Shopping

With less than eight weeks left until regular Product Listing Ad (PLA) campaigns retire, we're excited that the majority of PLA advertisers have already started taking advantage of Shopping campaigns, and 85% of these have already fully upgraded. Advertisers who’ve upgraded like Farfetch, US Mattress, LiBoutique and ValuePetSupplies are seeing great success thanks to the retail-centric interface, item-level reporting and competitive benchmark data.

For those of you who’ve upgraded, we’re excited to introduce two new tools to make campaign management, specifically bid optimization, easier.

• Bulk Uploads: You now have the ability to download a product group report, edit your bids and destination URLs, and import your changes using bulk uploads. 
• AdWords Editor: We’ve heard your feedback, and with the latest version of AdWords Editor, you can edit your bids and destination URLs for individual product groups at scale. At this time, AdWords Editor doesn’t support the creation of Shopping campaigns or product groups, so please plan time to create your campaigns and subdivide your product groups directly in AdWords.

If you haven’t upgraded to Shopping campaigns, we strongly encourage you to start as all regular Product Listing Ad campaigns will retire at the end of August.

Many third-party agencies and platforms are upgrading advertisers to Shopping campaigns, so if you work with one, reach out and see how they can help. Here are a few resources to answer questions and get you started:

• Shopping Campaign Tutorial Videos
• How to create a campaign
• How to prep my data feed
• How to optimize my product groups
• Upgrade Hangouts on Air
• Shopping Campaigns Upgrade 101: Where and how to start (beginner)
• Shopping Campaigns Upgrade 201: What to do now (advanced)
• Help Centers
• AdWords Help Center
• Merchant Center Help Center
• AdWords Community

Posted by Eric Tholomé, Director of Product Management, Google Shopping

We introduced Shopping campaigns in February to make it easier for you to manage your Product Listing Ads (PLAs). In late August, Shopping campaigns will be the default campaign type for all PLA advertisers.

To help retailers make the most of their Shopping campaigns, we’re excited to introduce a new best practices guide, “Shape Up Your Shopping Campaigns.” It addresses important questions like:

• How should you structure your campaigns: by product line, performance, or both? 
• Which feed attributes have the best chance of improving CTR?
• Are you adjusting bids quickly enough during peak seasons?

View the “Shape Up Your Shopping Campaigns” guide now to ensure you’re making the most of your PLAs and data feeds.

 For additional help, here are a few resources:

• Tutorial Videos to help you get started
• AdWords Help Center for more detailed information on Shopping campaigns
• Learn With Google Webinar (April 15) for upgrade tips
• Learn With Google Webinar (May 22) for more advanced upgrade best practices

Posted by Matt Lawson, Director, Performance Ads Marketing

Over the past year the Google Shopping team has made improvements to help merchants sell their products with new ad formats and a new campaign type. These improvements would not have been possible without great product data from merchants to help build better experiences for shoppers. Today, to provide merchants with more flexibility when organizing product data and reach more shoppers, we’re announcing an update to the Google Shopping Feed Specification:

• Mobile landing page links should be submitted separately to direct mobile shoppers to the right experience
• Merchant-defined custom bundles, such as a camera with additional case and lens, must now be identified as such in order to be displayed appropriately on Shopping
• Apparel attributes are added to allow more detailed descriptions of your apparel products
• Item availability now simplified to allow a clearer distinction between different availability states
• Mandatory character limits clearly stated for each attribute to help the right product information being displayed

Along with attribute updates, we are also revising image quality recommendations and creating a new landing page policy as part of the feed specification update.

Beginning September 30, we will start enforcing the updated feed specification globally, but merchants can submit the new attributes immediately. We encourage all merchants to review the new feed specification as some of the updates will require changes to your current product data. To find a list of all changes, view the updated feed specification in the Merchant Center Help Center.

Merchants should always make sure to comply with our Google Shopping policies and legal requirements while participating in Google Shopping to avoid any product or feed disapprovals. For more help with data requirements, please visit the Merchant Center Help Center.

Posted by Angelika Rohrer and Patrik Reali, Google Shopping Team

A few years ago, we introduced the Google Content API for Shopping to help you manage and update your Google Merchant Center product information programmatically and at scale. Today, we’re excited to announce a new version of this API, giving you more insight into your data quality and new options to help you keep your data fresh.

With this new version, you can, for example:

• Get item-level data quality information and see if an item was disapproved because your landing page URL isn’t working on a mobile device or if your unique product identifiers are inaccurate.
• Update price and availability for one or more items much more quickly so your customers have the latest price-point and know what’s in-stock before they click through to your site.
• Integrate more easily with Google Shopping thanks to a broader choice of programming languages and data formats supported.

While the current API will continue to be available until the end of February 2015, we encourage you to adopt the latest version of this API and take advantage of these new features as early as possible.

To learn more, visit the Content API for Shopping hub. If you have any questions, check out our Content API for Shopping support forum.

Posted by Eric Tholomé, Director of Product Management, Google Shopping

Earlier this month, we shared a few success stories on Shopping campaigns, our new campaign type for Product Listing Ads (PLAs), and that the regular PLA campaign type will retire in late August 2014.

To upgrade to Shopping campaigns, we encourage you to create a Shopping campaign from scratch and then customize your product groups and bids from there. That way, you can choose how granular you’d like to get and ensure all your inventory is included in your Shopping campaign.

However, if you would like to base your Shopping campaign on a regular PLA campaign, we’re introducing an option today to help you upgrade.
After setting up your Shopping campaign, you’ll be taken to a new page to create ad groups. Here, you’ll see two options: the ability to start fresh with one ad group or create one or many ad groups based on a regular PLA campaign.

Note that some parts of a regular PLA campaigns aren’t transferable to a Shopping campaign, like product targets that use AdWords labels or groupings. If none of your PLA campaigns are transferrable, you might not see this option.

Keep in mind
With Shopping campaigns, you no longer need to create separate ad groups or product targets to track your impressions, clicks and cost. You can analyze and report on your PLA performance by product attribute or by individual items in the Dimensions tab, regardless of your campaign structure.

As a reminder, all PLA advertisers will need to upgrade to Shopping campaigns by late August 2014, at which time all remaining regular PLA campaigns will be automatically upgraded. Over the next few months, we’ll continue to share more information and tools to help you upgrade your campaigns and manage them at scale.

To learn more about Shopping campaigns and how to upgrade, here are a few resources:

• Upgrade guide
• Learn With Google Webinar on May 15
• AdWords Help Center

Posted by Eric Tholomé, Director of Product Management, Google Shopping

In February, we made Shopping campaigns available to all Product Listing Ad (PLA) advertisers and, in March, we released AdWords API support to help you manage your campaigns at scale. Shopping campaigns offer the ability to browse your inventory directly in AdWords, report on your performance down to the product-level, and bid competitively with new metrics like benchmark data and impression share. We’ve received great feedback from you so far and are excited to share what’s next:

• Size your opportunity with Bid Simulator - To provide more actionable insight into your PLAs, we’ve been rolling out a Bid Simulator that’s now available in all Shopping campaigns. With a Bid Simulator, you can now estimate how bid changes could impact your impressions, clicks or costs.
• Options to create a Shopping campaign - In the coming days, we’ll be adding some options to help you get started. You would be able to create a Shopping campaign from scratch or, for many of you, use one of your regular PLA campaigns to create similar product targets, negative keywords or promotional text.
• Multiple ad groups for advanced retailers - While many of you will be happy with your Shopping campaign as is, we’ve heard from advanced retailers that they’d like to create multiple ad groups. It’s now possible to do this within a Shopping campaign.

Continued Retailer Success
Since we made Shopping campaigns available to all PLA advertisers, we continue to hear many examples of how it helps you manage PLAs and effectively grow your business. Here are a few:

“The benefits of Shopping campaigns can’t be overstated – the ease of setup, the transparency of data, the ability to group products into logical categories and manage to the product level make it a must. All of these contribute to our clients’ ROI almost tripling, and there’s still room to improve.” -JumpFly

“The new Shopping campaigns allowed us to achieve a much higher-level of profitability, cutting costs by 13% and increasing return on ad spend by about 22% on average. Not only that, the new campaign type trims about 2 hours of setup time.” -Exclusive Concepts 

“We used the product-level data from our Shopping campaign to fine-tune our bidding strategy, focusing on the products that acquired the most traffic & lowered the ones that are less important. This helped us increase visits 25% & ROI by 16%.” -Wiggle 

“Shopping campaigns effectively reduced the time spent setting up product-specific bids and optimizing in half. We can now invest even more time into each client, and the results we’ve seen have been no less than amazing. A client selling home accessories saw a 301% increase in revenue after only one month. As a result, we are now changing our agency standards within PLAs to only use Shopping campaigns.” -White Shark Media

Future of Shopping campaigns and retirement of regular PLA campaign type
Shopping campaigns offer a truly retail-centric and seamless approach to PLAs. We're very excited by the positive feedback we've heard so far and will continue to build tools and features into this new campaign type to help you manage your PLAs. Thus, we'll be retiring the regular PLA campaign type and asking all PLA advertisers to upgrade to Shopping campaigns by late August 2014, at which time all remaining PLA campaigns will be automatically upgraded. Over the next few months, we’ll share more information and release more tools to help you upgrade your campaigns and manage them at scale. We encourage you to start planning your upgrade to Shopping campaigns today to take full advantage of the new features as soon as possible.

For additional help, here are a few resources:

• Tutorial Videos to help you get started
• AdWords Help Center for more detailed information on Shopping campaigns
• Learn With Google Webinar (April 15) for upgrade tips
• Learn With Google Webinar (May 15) for more advanced upgrade best practices
• AdWords Ads Developer page for more AdWords API documentation

Posted by Eric Tholomé, Director of Product Management, Google Shopping

As part of our efforts to help you connect with consumers and promote your products online, we introduced Shopping campaigns to all Product Listing Ad (PLA) advertisers in February. Shopping campaigns offer a streamlined, retail-centric advertising experience with robust reporting and insightful competitive metrics like benchmark data and impression share.

Today, we’re excited to announce that you can now create and manage your Shopping campaigns at scale with the AdWords API. We are working with external agencies and search management platforms to add support for Shopping campaigns.

For more information on Shopping campaigns, here are a few resources to help you get started:

• Shopping campaigns tutorial video series
• Shopping campaigns Learn With Google Webinar in English on March 6
• AdWords API forum and Ads Developer Plus page

Posted by Eric Tholomé, Director of Product Management, Google Shopping