Aug 08
2023

Shopping Ads Badges and Annotations Guide

We’ve aggregated the most common PLA badges and annotations for you in the below graphic to identify their official names and we’ve covered each in detail within one of our blogs. As always, our blogs are intended to give you meaningful context on topics - we do not simply regurgitate what Google Help Center articles have to say. There’s obviously a lot of behind the scenes information involved with each so feel free ...

Jul 20
2023

Shopping Feed Tips for a Smooth BTS Season

With back-to-school (BTS) spending expected to reach a new high in 2023, advertisers need to ensure their online digital ad strategy is prepared to capture as many purchases as possible. Here are some specific tips for the feed driven product ads to get you ahead of the game: Highlight promotions and special deals across Search and Social campaigns Use Google Merchant Promotions or utilize the "Sale" badge and annotation - see how here. If your regular ...

Jun 30
2023

Return Annotation for Google Shopping Ads

The Returns annotation has become a common Shopping Ad element this past year. Google first required the return policy to be set up in the Google Merchant Center to showcase on Shopping Ads but slowly started trying to estimate for brands based on website crawls. If you see a notation saying "most items", it means the policy isn't properly set up in GMC and is serving as a disclaimer. Updating the return policy in ...

May 05
2023

Highlighting Shipping on Google

As Google continues to increase the visibility of product delivery options across Search and Shopping, here are a few ways to make sure your shipping options are highlighted accurately for potential customers: Free Shipping Annotation Products with a Shipping rate of $0 set up in the Shipping rate table within Google Merchant Center are eligible to show "Free Shipping" on Shopping ads and/or Free Listings. Shipping Time Annotations Delivery time can be an important ...

Jan 26
2023

Leveraging Your Product Feed for PMax Success

With the roll-out of Google’s automatic migration from Smart Shopping to Performance Max Campaigns, traditional PLA is now just one of many forms that your product listings can take across Google properties. For example, PMax campaigns will place products in front of potential customers who may not be actively searching for a specific item using formats like Display and Discover Ads. The addition of a few key product attributes in your feed can give ...

Dec 07
2022

New Discovery Campaigns Use Product Feeds

While Discovery Ads on Google isn’t technically a new concept, the ability to leverage your product feed to tailor these ads around products is. Here’s a quick overview of what Discovery Campaigns are about: Ads can show across multiple Google Properties in places where consumers would be browsing their favorite content:YouTube Home and Watch Next feedsThe Google Discover feedGmail Promotions and Social tabsThis campaign would align more closely with display as the ...

Oct 11
2022

Shopping Feed Tips for a Smooth Holiday Season

Many things go into preparing for the busy holiday season. Planning budgets for big days, sometimes down to the hour, can be time intensive but can have a large pay off. Reviewing bidding strategies to make sure automation will adjust properly on high volume days will be a headache but is a must. When it comes to preparations involving your programs that leverage a product feed, rest assured that VersaFeed is at your disposal throughout ...

Oct 10
2022

Getting the Most out of Social Shopping Feeds

As shoppable ads continue to grow their share of social media ad space it is becoming increasingly important for marketers to ensure that their product feeds are fully optimized specifically for social media ad platforms. Meta has led the charge integrating shoppable content into social ad campaigns, and their Commerce Manager remains the standard for most social media shopping ads platforms. With Meta’s feed recommendations in mind, here’s a handy list of some ...

Data Feed Considerations When Replatforming

Over our 16 years in business building data feeds for retail clients, we've experienced quite a number of ecommerce replatforms. Our #1 recommendation on this is to plan for problems. There's always going to be something that comes up but hopefully with preparation and awareness, it will be minimal. Here are things we've observed over the years to help you stay ahead: Losing Google Merchant Center Site Verification & Claim: Make sure your ...

Apr 25
2022

Solutions for Availability Restrictions

The steps below can solve for the situations where: The ability to ship a product depends upon the location of the shipping address (referred to as ‘Region’).The price of a product is consistent across all locations and does not change, no matter where the user is located. For any regional pricing situations, the full Regional Availability and Pricing (RAAP) solution is needed. How to Tell Google What Areas You Do Not Ship to Within ...

Mar 03
2022

Preparing for Planned Site Outages

From time-to-time websites need to come offline for maintenance. There's no way of telling Google about this so when they perform their regular checks of your data feed against your site, it sets off a wave of events that can include product disapprovals. So in addition to temporarily pausing your ad campaigns to avoid paying for clicks to a dead site, there is also a step that needs to be taken within your product ...

Dec 16
2021

Merchant Promotion vs Sale Price Annotations / Badge

Google steadily introduces enhancements to Shopping ads and before you can execute, you have to know how to choose the right approach. When product prices are discounted during a sale, there are 2 common options that websites will utilize to communicate the price cut. Taking a look at the product landing page can typically clue you in on what to do next to ensure that your ads effectively promote this offer. Discount Shown on Landing ...

Jun 22
2020

Google Feed Specification 2020 Updates

Each year Google updates their Google Merchant Center (GMC) feed specification with modest changes to how merchants should submit their product data. This year is no different and Google has just announced the changes as follows: Changes available now:Two new attributes are now available to submit: product_highlight and product_detail. These attributes let you submit additional product data to Google in a generic fashion. product_highlight allows you to submit bulleted lists of product highlights. product_detail ...

May 07
2020

Free Product Listings on Google Shopping

Google recently announced that they now offer an option for Free Product Listings on Google Shopping. This change went into effect in the US at the end of April with an expected Global rollout by the end of the year. What does this mean? Some of the digital real estate on the Google Shopping tab is now free through the “Surfaces across Google” program in the Merchant Center. What does it NOT mean? That Google ...

Feb 13
2020

Structured Data Help for Google Price/Availability Suspensions

Part 2 of our Google Merchant Center inaccurate price/availability suspension warning screencast series. Here we cover the gory details of what Google expects your structured data to look like, including examples with variants (size/color variations that may be priced differently). Links referenced in the video: Part 1: Google Suspension Warnings for Price/Availability GMC Structured Data OverviewGMC and Schema.org Attributes ExplainedGoogle Structured Data Testing Tool