Four resolutions for Shopping success in 2017

Retailers like you are always looking for the best ways to promote your products and reach shoppers online, right when they’re looking to buy -- and throughout the past year, our mission with Google Shopping was to help you do just that.

In 2016, we introduced a handful of new setup, feed, and campaign management features to help you make the most of your Shopping ad investments. In the spirit of self-betterment, we invite you to make this year your best Shopping year yet! Kick off 2017 by checking out a few of our most impactful new features, and resolve to put them into practice for the new year, and beyond.

Get up and running on Google Shopping faster than ever before with e-commerce platform integrations.

Last year, we announced partnerships with three major ecommerce platforms -- BigCommerce, PrestaShop, and Magento -- to make it easier than ever to get started on Google Shopping. If you’re using any one of these platforms (or if you’re thinking of using one of these platforms), these partnerships let you easily and automatically submit your product information to Google Shopping and quickly reach millions of new customers searching for what you sell. To learn more about how we work with these ecommerce platforms, visit our Help Center, or visit the BigCommerce, PrestaShop, and Magento sites.

Show more of your products on Google by using high quality data. We know that creating and maintaining a complete and compliant data feed can be one of the most challenging parts of succeeding with Google Shopping. To make feed management easier, we’ve launched a variety of solutions to help connect your products to new customers -- whether you’re already running Shopping campaigns or you’re just getting started.

• Feed Rules help you make product data changes directly in Merchant Center without the hassle, like adding custom labels or transforming attributes into the correct format.
• Using the Google Sheets Merchant Center add-on and structured data markup on your site, you can automatically populate, update, and submit your product data to Merchant Center, making feed management a breeze.
• Merchant Center received a brand new look with a comprehensive Diagnostics dashboard that processes more quickly to give you a better snapshot of your product data across Shoppings ads, Dynamic Remarketing, Local Inventory Ads and other programs.
• We made updates to the Product Data Specification with the goal of helping you understand what product data Google needs to run your Shopping ads, including new structured data markup and GTIN specifications. Merchants who added correct GTINs to their product data saw conversion rates increase up to 20%.

Grow sales and save time with a routine to keep up with daily campaign management. Using recent features to Shopping campaigns, you can actually spend less of your time making adjustments to focus on other priorities. Enable product status insight reporting columns and smart bidding strategies in your campaigns today.

Product status insights and disapproval notifications in the products tab are your go-to columns to check on the health of your products. Did you have many out-of-stock items after holiday clearances? Some of those could still be disapproved. See which of your top performing products are no longer selling and how to fix them. Avoid missing out on missed traffic by keeping these top products eligible year-round.

Adopting a smart bidding strategy like enhanced CPC (eCPC) to enable the flexibility for Google to adjust bids on individual queries. Just set your max CPC and have eCPC do the rest of the heavy lifting. eCPC adjust bids for individual queries with a high likelihood to convert all while balancing out bids for underperforming products, maximizing possible conversions. When first adopting a bid strategy, we recommend giving two weeks to let algorithms learn about your campaign before it can reach the peak optimization and performance.

Reach even more customers by enabling shopping across borders.

These days, shopping is truly global. To make shopping more efficient for shoppers and merchants alike, we launched a tool in Merchant Center to perform currency conversions in select countries, allowing you to convert the currency in your product data locally. For example, a person shopping in the UK can see products sold by a US retailer, listed in British pounds. To see where currency conversions are available, check out our Help Center article.


Happy New Year from the Google Shopping team!