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 ...

Jun 05
2023

Product Ratings for Shopping Ads & Free Listings

Google can show star ratings annotations on Shopping Ads and Free Listings for products offered by eligible advertisers - officially referred to as Product Ratings. Both the product and advertiser must meet certain requirements to be eligible. Find out more below: Product has to have reviews. Reviews can be from any retailer that sells this same product (Google leans on the GTIN value in the feed to aggregate across all retailers). Let’s assume Website A ...

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 ...

May 04
2023

Feed Driven Product Ads for Groceries

With digital grocery sales on the rise (predicted to account for 20% of all grocery sales by 2026), retailers need to ensure they are keeping up. Google and Meta both offer support for product feed/catalog driven ads that not only help drive more traffic to grocers’ websites but can also help to promote delivery and store pick up/drive to store as well. According to Google, 37% of grocery shoppers said they used a ...

Mar 20
2023

Price Drop Badge/Annotation on Google

There are many ways Google highlights products when their prices change - specifically lower. The Sale badge and Special Offer annotation (aka Merchant Promotion) do a great job showcasing temporary price cuts on items but there’s another badge that can show up to alert consumers of a good deal. A Price Drop badge will show on the image and in the price section of the PLA, Google will explain what the drop is. Google’s ...

Mar 03
2023

Supporting Customer Retention with PLA

With inflation top-of-mind for both merchants and customers, maintaining a loyal base of customers is more crucial than ever in the ecommerce space. Loyalty, however, does not mean you still won’t have to fight to keep those customers. Here are a few tips for highlighting the areas that keep shoppers coming back to your digital storefront: Advertise Free Shipping Ease and speed of delivery are often the deciding factor for consumers overwhelmed with options ...

Feb 07
2023

Google's Top Quality Store Badge

Earning the Coveted Blue Checkmark While competition for PLA real estate continues to heat up, there are several small but significant additions that merchants can make to their Google Shopping program to help gain an edge on a crowded SERP. One of these is Google’s “Top Quality Store" badge. This badge appears to the end user similar to the blue check marks already popular on social media platforms. Quality, trusted stores are highlighted on ...

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 ...

Jan 23
2023

Google Hosted Local Storefront : LIA

Google has been steering advertisers for years now towards the Merchant Hosted Local Storefront, even providing them with 2 options - Basic and Full. Here, we will be covering details around the rarely talked about Google Hosted Local Storefront (GHLSF) . While these are uncommon in today’s SERP, the reality is that there are many advertisers who could likely benefit from this. These are advertisers that can’t meet Google’s requirements even for the “Basic ...

Jan 18
2023

Google Merchant Promotions for Local Inventory Ads

With Google’s Local Promotions moving from beta to a full-fledged feature, merchants running Local Inventory Ads now have the option to display promotions that are redeemable either online, in store, or both. Local promotions may be submitted either manually in Google Merchant Center or via a Google Sheets local promotions feed template that is easy to fill in with your promotion details. Once the Google sheet is updated, you can upload to the GMC ...

Dec 22
2022

Google Manufacturer Center :: Part 1

Google's Manufacturer Center is another tool to help brands improve the shopping experience for its products across the Google properties. There are 2 main purposes for using Manufacturer Center: 1Gain insight into your products' aggregated performance across all of Google - Impression and click data (and more) from your efforts and your resellers at the product level.2Control of product content in certain shopping experiences on Google (covered in Part 2)This blog (Part 1 ...

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 24
2022

Regional Availability and Pricing (RAAP) for Grocery Chains on Google Shopping

In response to a growing demand for convenient online shopping, grocery stores are rapidly adapting to increase their digital presence and expand order fulfillment options. With the introduction of Regional Availability and Pricing (RAAP) last year, Google has made regional inventory and price information independent from physical storefronts, focusing on an entirely online end-to-end shopping experience. This feature is available across the Google Shopping network in both paid and free organic shopping listings, allowing merchants ...

Sep 19
2022

Google Gets Smart With Titles

Google has quietly introduced a new "enhancement" to Shopping ad titles, referred to in their [title] attribute documentation as Optimized titles. Google will dynamically prepend product features or attributes to the front of your PLA title using values from the product feed that offer the best match to the customer’s search query, separating these attributes from the product title with hyphens. A real life example of this new feature in action can be found ...

Jul 08
2022

What Happened to CSE's?

For those of us that were online shopping prior to 2013, sites like PriceGrabber.com, Nextag.com, Shopping.com and ShopZilla.com were a big deal. They were the destination for finding the best price for a product you wanted to buy online. Digital advertisers would diligently send data feeds to each of these big players, including "Froogle" (which was Google's Free Listings) and manage their unique account logins, bidding, etc. May 31, 2012 ...