Competitive pricing table
A colour coded table will show how your pricing compares to that of your competitors.
Retailers will be able to use this to improve their bidding strategy, so for example bidding up on products where you have a price advantage, or troubleshooting drops in performance due to competitor pricing. It can also help inform internal pricing decisions and promotions.
Affiliate location extensions on YouTube
Affiliate location extensions are being expanded to YouTube video campaigns, on top of Search and Display campaigns, helping shoppers locate physical stores where they can find the product they searched on.
A map and details of nearby retailers selling the product are displayed when a user clicks on an affiliate location extension.
New local catalog ads
New local catalog ads are designed to help shoppers discover what retailers sell through a simple scrolling feature in mobile layout. They features a banner image at the top, followed by product cards which also show pricing and in-store availability.
French retailer Boulanger, shown above, was one of the beta testers and ran a spring promotional event earlier this year which showed an impresive return.
“With help from both click-based and impression-based store visits the campaign drove over 20K visits to its stores, delivering a return of 42 times its investment on ad spend.”
Source: Google
Local feed partnership program
Under this new program, point-of-sale or inventory data providers can provide sales and inventory data to Google on behalf of retailers. This makes life easier for small businesses who won’t have to create their own local product feeds.
Google says retailers will be able to showcase their local inventory for free on the “See What’s In Store” feature on the search knowledge panel.
Shopping Actions
Google also gave an update on their Shopping Actions program. Launched in March this year, it allows customers to make a purchase via Search, Assistant or voice and over 70 retailers are currently live on the program. Google says retailers on average are seeing an increase in total clicks and conversions at a lower overall cost per click and conversion, compared to running Shopping ads alone.
The new features were announced by Google at SMX Advanced last week and in a blog post, and will be available soon.
