Google is updating some of its ecommerce features through a new feature: the Deals feed. The Deals feed is a new feed added to the Shopping tab on Google search results, categorizing items related to the search query with promotions, sales, price drops, and other running promos.
Google is updating some of its e-commerce features through a new feature: the Deals feed. The Deals feed is a news feed added to the Shopping tab on Google search results, categorizing items related to the search query with promotions, sales, price drops, and other running promos.
Finding the Right Deal
As part of a range of changes and fixes planned for the holiday season, Googles new Deals section will function by way of a deals badge applied to any items that are on sale, or part of a promotion. Deals will be shown automatically when a search query specifies sales, promotions, deals, or related search terms (such as Black Friday). Alternatively, shoppers can select to filter results based on deals in the Shopping tab, from a drop-down menu in the search result (next to Shopping home, Stores, Saved items, Tracked products, and so on).
Performance Metrics Over the Holidays
Another change coming to Google Shopping and its list of e-commerce functions will be in the form of new trackable performance metrics in the Google Merchant Center. You can access the Google Merchant Center via Google for Retail, and begin managing how in-store items and other aspects of your e-commerce offering are showing up in Googles search results under the Shopping tab.
The new performance metrics in question are largely going to help people separate traffic, clicks, click-through rates, and impressions for all products, and products with promotions, sales, or price drop badges (i.e. products eligible for the Deals feature). This will help webmasters and shop managers better gauge how effective a given promotion or sales drop has been. Managers can further segment their impressions and clicks by promotion type, product, brand, or product type.
Other Features of the Merchant Center
If you haven’t gone through the trouble of setting up with Googles Merchant Center for your e-commerce platform, you may want to know how it works.
The Merchant Center effectively functions as a hub for you to go over the metrics on your products as they appear on search results, and it allows you to purchase and schedule advertising services and campaigns with Google directly, as well as manage and review the improvement any given sale or marketing campaign has had on your products sales and impressions.
To utilize Googles Merchant Center, you will need a Google account through which you want to manage your products and sales data and follow Googles beginner guide to adding and measuring products. Googles Merchant Center isn’t exclusively for e-commerce platforms you can integrate your brick-and-mortar products as well, in which case advertising on Google will simply give customers the opportunity to find out more about how and where to buy from you. Note that for brick-and-mortar stores, these are local listings.
What this means is that anyone on Google making a rudimentary search for a product may have your listed product recommended to them if they’re from the same region. Alternatively, including the region in the search term (i.e. cheese-making kits Los Angeles) will likely help you and other local listings gain prioritized visibility. Other information Google will require from you includes the basics, like your business address, a verified phone number (they will call you), the website you use to list your products, and any third-party platforms you work with to promote products on Google.
Note that Google offers different options and opportunities for free and paid listings, or enhanced listings. The difference between free and enhanced listings is that the latter requires more product information (as Google will display more of it to customers).
Integration with Shopify and WooCommerce
We’ve mentioned earlier this year that Google Shopping is also integrating Shopify and WooCommerce globally, which meant that you could manage your Google merchant settings and review performance metrics for your Google product search results through WooCommerce and Shopify. A previous statement from WooCommerce explains that their users can upload their products to Google, create free listings and ad campaigns, and review performance metrics all without leaving their WooCommerce dashboard.
This integration now extends into the new deals feature, as well. In other words, if you’re a retailer, or are implementing e-commerce through WooCommerce or Shopify, you can take advantage of the feature of the new deal by showing your existing deals on Google. Starting December, Shopify users and WooCommerce users will also be able to show their deals in the Search and Shopping tabs.
How This Might Affect You
If you sell anything tangible and arent utilizing the Internet to send it halfway across the world or even just one or two towns over then you’re missing out on the biggest commerce shift of the century.
Online shopping was up a stratospheric 44 per cent during the onset of the pandemic, after having already achieved pretty significant popularity over the last two decades. This is far from a new thing, after all. But it’s never been as ubiquitous or easy as today.
And the profits have never been greater. While it’s true that a vast majority of the growth in the industry has likely been soaked up by online retail giant Amazon, there is a bit of general tide raising going on for all boats in the industry.
These new tools by Google will further help you boost visibility for your listings and drive traffic to your products or net you holiday sales directly through the search engine. Now, products offered on sale or via promotion will be featured in the related search items, the new Deals feed, and the deals carousel. Once your product is eligible to appear on the news feed, you may be seeing increased traffic as people gear up to snag sales items before they’re sold out during the big holiday rush. And the best news? Google doesn’t take a cut from the sale, unlike eBay or Amazon.
Of course, there’s more to leveraging this feature than a simple plug-and-play with your product information.
Managing your ad budget for Google product listings, carefully monitoring and comparing results from different sales and promotions, tracking your campaigns whether through Shopify or Googles Merchant Center can help you greatly improve the efficiency of this feature.
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