Google enhances trend-tracking, insights, ad management for retailers
Google is upgrading the capabilities it offers retailers in advance of the upcoming holiday shopping season.
At its annual Think Retail virtual event on Tuesday, Aug. 27, 2024, the tech giant announced several new features for users of its Merchant Center retail hub. These include:
Shopping trends
In the coming weeks, Merchant Center users globally will be able to explore shopping trends for retailers by viewing popular shopping queries ranked by popularity and organized by topic and product.
The upgraded trends insights will reveal the actual language consumers are using in product searches, such as “long denim jorts,” to help retailers optimize product descriptions for search relevance.
Generative AI insights
Google will be adding two new generative AI insights features to Merchant Center. Retailers will start seeing generative AI-based insight summaries at the top of the analytics tab, which will show summaries of recent product performance.
This will allow retailers to see critical performance updates when they log in, such as what products show a large increase in clicks. Retailers will also be able to use AI to answer specific questions about their product data with new custom reports.
With a basic description of the data analysis users would like to review, such as "show me the performance of my best-selling dresses," Google will produce a custom data set highlighting a retailer’s own performance data, eliminating the need to build custom reports manually.
Google Ads
Google is introducing more capabilities for retailers to streamline the management of local inventory ads so shoppers can more easily see in-store product availability directly from shopping ads. Google will automatically sync in-store availability from a retailer’s website and integrate it into their Merchant Center account when they set up campaigns.
Other new and expanded solutions in Google Ads include the ability to set new customer acquisition goals in Performance Max and Search campaigns, as well as optimize Performance Max and Standard Shopping campaigns with profit goals, such as cart-level conversions and cost of goods sold.
In addition, retailers can now customize exclusions at the format-level for Search and Shopping ads to tailor when they show up on branded queries.
“This holiday, brands that can stay agile and turn data into decisions will make the most of the shorter holiday shopping season,” said Jeff Harrell, senior director, merchant shopping, Google, in a corporate blog post.
[READ MORE: Google enhances product search, advertising with AI]
