Google Product Updates

Tools, apps and e-commerce websites

January 7, 2020

Now that the business year is well underway, you may need to brush up on a couple of things to prepare for a great first quarter. With the madness of Black Friday and the festive season, you may have missed some Google product updates that were announced. Here’s our list of some of the most recent of Google’s announcements:

Google Shopping 100

Google has simplified the challenge of discovering trending products with the release of Google Shopping 100 last year December. The Shopping 100 list acts as a repository for the top 100 trending products in 8 different product categories. The categories include the following:

Kitchen gear
Tech
Toys & games
Accessories & apparel
Gaming
Sports & fitness
Home goods
Personal care

Google Shopping 100 will not only help customers get an idea of popular products, but can also give retailers insight into products with real potential. Rather than list the most searched products, Shopping 100 prioritizes products with recent search volume spikes in the U.S, so retailers can get a sense of those products that are gaining traction. With the listing focused on searches with the highest increases in search volume over the last year, the data can be extremely useful if you’re brainstorming relevant content ideas, conducting competitive research or just browsing trending products.

Tip: Think about creating a Gift Guide for your customers that includes a number of trending products, or advertise which of Google’s 100 are available from your online store.

Check out Google Shopping 100 here.

Google Merchant Center: Automatic Image Improvements

Getting products disapproved is a nightmare all e-retailers face at one point or another. One of the common reasons for disapproval is the quality of your product images. Google has strict product image requirements: images must be clear and without watermarks, logos, branding or promotional text. Your product images need to include only the product itself, sans any promotional overlays. To work around this issue, GMC has announced a new automatic image improvement feature which you can read about here.

Once you’ve enabled the automatic improvements feature, GMC will attempt to automatically fix your unaccepted images. Once any promotional overlays are removed, your product gets resubmitted and can then be approved for Shopping Ads.

Caution: The auto-fixes do not always work completely, in which case you may need to manually re-upload images. To keep track of which images GMC has attempted to change, go to your Diagnostics page and look under the ‘Issue’ column for ‘Improved image quality’. You can compare the original image with the improved image on the product detail page.

Conversion cart reporting

Google ads now offers product-level reporting on revenue and profit generated by your Shopping Ads.If your Google Ads Conversion Tracking and Global Site Tag is set up, you’ll be able to submit cart data for purchase and sales conversions. You’ll then be able to generate conversion reports on the following:

Which bidding entities drive product sales
Whether or not users buy products featured on clicked ads
How different bidding dimensions affect cart size and average order value
Which bidding entities deliver the highest profit

Remember, you can create and manage Shopping campaigns from the ShoppingFeeder app and access product-level reporting all from one platform.

You can read more about conversion cart reporting here.

Google Ads: Explanations

Google Ads beta-released a feature called Explanations yesterday. This feature helps provide insights on large performance changes in campaigns or ad groups to help marketers save time diagnosing fluctuations. Rather than cross-referencing reports, you can simply submit a date range and an explanation will be provided.

In the example below, the 100.65% change is attributed to a 6& increase in campaign search interest.