Free product listings in Google Shopping

Until now, being listed on Google Shopping was a paid feature. You specifically had to make and pay for Google shopping ads to be able to show up in the shopping search results. Now, after 8 years, Google will roll out free listings into its Shopping results. 

Google does this as part of an evolution to better compete with Amazon when it comes to product search. Amid the coronavirus crisis, many physical stores had to close their doors. A digital strategy and e-commerce activity had suddenly become more urgent for these merchants to not only able to thrive but survive. We can expect this change in mindset will be permanent. 

Google is also kicking off a new partnership with PayPal to allow merchants to link their accounts and to provide this easy payment method to their customers. 

What can it mean for you? 

For retailers, this can mean a lot of free exposure to millions of people who come to Google every day. Paid Google shopping campaigns can be augmented with free listings to cover the entire spectrum of Google shopping. 

If you’re an existing user of Merchant Center and Shopping ads, you don't have to do anything to take advantage of the free listings. 

These changes have taken effect in the U.S. from the end of April, and Google aims to expand this globally before the end of the year. 

Conditional IF functions now available in all Microsoft Advertising accounts

The IF function has been available for several years in Google Ads. It is used in order to change the messaging according to a user’s device or audience segment.

For example, if a user who has visited your website and is on the retargeting list, this function enables to reach her/him with a tailor-made message.  

Hereby an example with a specific audience. We are also able to do the same thing based on the user's device: {=IF(device = mobile, text to insert): default text if condition not met.}

Worth noting:  one cannot use both conditions in the same function.

As Bing Ads has enabled this feature, it is now possible to import the function from Google Ads to Bing. Watch out with audience targeting as you will need to have it in your Microsoft account.

The benefit of the function is that we are spending less time on writing ads for different audiences. We are more relevant, and we can reach each specific audience with an appropriate message.

Friends of Search Belgium : Technical and inspiring

Space attended the very first Friends of Search conference usually hosted in Amsterdam, but now, for the first time in Belgium. It is the unmissable congress for SEO and SEA marketers. We highly recommend this conference if you are interested in this area for two reasons: First, the level of expertise is very high and you get hands one tips and tricks you can apply immediately. Second, the international speakers have a huge expertise and will inspire you for sure to get your hands dirty.

Our SEA team was present and has taken some great ideas which will be discussed with our clients but here are some key take-aways from the day:

Brad Geddes from Adalysis, and Gianluca Binelli from Boosterbox both presented how the changing match type structure from Google as an impact on account structures and search terms. Especially the close variant can create chaos but is manageable with either scripts or by trying to incorporate these variants in an adapted campaign structure.  With some fun excel calculation we can measure the dispersion index on campaign/ad groups and act on that if necessary.

Martin Röttgerding from Bloofusion Germany presented the interesting idea of conditional ads which are special way to use ad customization. Instead of feeding the ads through the feed, they actually use the feed as a condition. If a certain condition is met, than the ad will be active. This gives more possibilities like time, location or weather based optimizations but is also beneficial to reporting since ads have more data than the customization feed.

Last but not least came Frederick Vallaeys from Optmyzr, a CPC guru who recently published the book: Digital Marketing in an AI World. He showcased the fact that current technologies like AI and machine learning are great tools but only in combination with a human mind. This way, he ensured that we will still keep our jobs in the future.

We thank Friends of Search and their partners for this great event and you want to hear more about these topics, don’t hesitate to contact your search expert.

Have you met BERT ?

Search is all about understanding language. Therefore Google introduced BERT an open-sourced neural network-based technique for natural language processing in 2018 (see also elsewhere in Mediafirst). This enables them to train their own excellent question answering system.

BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) is applied to ranking and featured snippets in Google search and this helped search better understand 1 out of 10 searches performed in English, more languages will be added over time. This is mainly the case for conversational queries with prepositions as “for” and “to” which have a great impact on the meaning. This will help Google Search understand the context of the words in a query. So users can now search in a way that feels natural to them.

What does this mean for your business? In the first stages there is not really a change happening. As soon as the people adapt their way of searching, advertisers will need to update their own content strategy and align it with new upcoming search queries. For SEA, your experts will adapt new queries when optimising the campaign and there is no need for a change in strategy.  

Google confirms Local Search update

In 2018 already, Google reports the introducing of neural matching. This technique goes further than the exact words in a business name or description in an attempt to understand conceptually how it might be related to the words used and their intents. Google reports the change had impacted 30% of searches in 2018. The actual consequence is to provide users with more local results. The launch of neural matching is now official and it involves all countries (not just the US). However Google  reminds you that the important points to focus on for a good ranking in natural search are still the same: relevance, importance, and distance.