4 ways we're helping retailers move fast this holiday season
The holiday shopping crunch that kicks off on Black Friday is fast approaching. And this year Black Friday falls five days later than last year — leaving the window between Thanksgiving and New Year’s shorter than it’s been in recent history. For retailers trying to meet their holiday goals, the sprint may feel especially high-pressure.
To help retailers maximize success and stay nimble in this year’s shorter holiday shopping season, today at our annual Think Retail event we shared some new updates to Google tools. Here’s the latest:
Understand the most relevant shopping trends to your business
In the coming weeks, users of the new Merchant Center globally will be able to explore shopping trends for retailers, showing popular shopping queries, ranked by popularity and organized by topic and product.
This means you can jump on viral moments, make better-informed inventory decisions and ensure your product descriptions use the same terms shoppers are. Say you’re a specialty denim retailer thinking of putting away some surplus inventory of knee-length denim shorts that haven’t been taking off. The new trends insights in Merchant Center might show you that not only are “denim bermuda shorts” surprisingly popular right now, but also people are actually using the words “long denim jorts” to find them. So now instead of pulling shorts off the shelf and back into storage, you can tweak your strategy to feature the shorts more prominently in campaigns — and of course, add “jorts” to the product description.
Stay light on your toes with new insights
We recently shared how we’ve made insights for retailers in Merchant Center Next more intuitive — and how the majority of surveyed Merchant Center users express high satisfaction with its insights and reporting tools.1 Soon in the U.S. we’ll be adding two new generative AI insights features to the new Merchant Center to identify the insights you’re actually looking for.
First, you’ll start seeing generative AI-powered insight summaries at the top of the analytics tab, which will show summaries of recent product performance. This allows you to quickly catch up on need-to-know performance updates when you log in, plus see what actions could move the needle for your business — like how your clicks on denim products were up 20% over last month, so they might be worth re-stocking.
We’ll also use AI to answer specific questions about your product data with new custom reports. With a simple description of the data analysis you’d like to review — like, “show me the performance of my best-selling dresses” — we’ll produce a custom data set with the answers you care about. This tool uses generative AI to translate a user’s request into a custom report that highlights their own performance data. This means you can skip the process of building custom reports manually when you need something more tailored.
Save time with automated in-store availability sync
Shoppers often turn to Google to find products in stock near them when they need something quickly. That’s why we’re introducing more capabilities for merchants to streamline the management of local inventory ads so shoppers can easily see in-store product availability, right from shopping ads. With the new automated onboarding process, Google will automatically sync in-store availability from your website and integrate it into your Merchant Center account when you’re setting up your campaigns. It’s less manual work for you and a more convenient, up-to-date shopping experience for your customers. We’ll begin rolling out this feature for Local Inventory Ads accounts.
Set up new goals to attract customers, faster
Our new and expanded solutions in Google Ads are designed to help advertisers attract new audiences and build seasonal creative faster to reach key customers.
To help you prioritize winning new customers before and during peak season, set new customer acquisition goals in Performance Max and Search campaigns. You can also optimize Performance Max and Standard Shopping campaigns with profit goals, now available in beta, to focus your ads on increasing profit with cart-level conversions and cost of goods sold in Merchant Center. And with a new enhancement to brand exclusions, you can customize exclusions at the format-level for Search and Shopping ads to tailor when you show up on branded queries with greater precision.
This holiday, brands that can stay agile and turn data into decisions will make the most of the shorter holiday shopping season.
