Earlier this month, Google published an article on The Keyword blog offering up some tips for retailers to make their products stand out to people online. The article, entitled Helping your products stand out to shoppers discusses free product listings that allow you to promote your products in Google Search without paying for ads – or enhance your paid advertising strategy with organic impressions.
Free product listings have been around for a while now but Google has enhanced the format over the past couple of years to help retailers turn organic searches into business opportunities. Most recently, Google has introduced new reporting features that produce greater insights to help you maximise the performance of free product listings.
Make the most of free product listings
All of the tips in Google’s blog post relate to making your products stand out with free product listings in Google Search. So, before you’re going to benefit from any of these tips, you’ll want to make sure you’re using free product listings or set them up by submitting your product data to Merchant Center.
You can find out how to do this from the official Google documentation.
There are two types of free product listings currently available for retailers: enhanced listings and standard listings. The two listings types each have different requirements and they also display differently across Google products.
- Enhanced listings:
- Require more product data attributes and higher data quality standards
- Product data attributes are only submitted in Merchant Center
- Appear across the Shopping tab, YouTube, Google Search, Google Images, Google Lens, etc.
- Standard listings:
- Require fewer product data attributes
- Product data attributes are submitted in either Merchant Center or via structured data markup
- Appear across Google Search, Google Images, Google Lens, etc.
Again, refer to the official documentation for more information and you’ll also find plenty of guidance from this collection of YouTube videos from Google for Retail.
Build trust with Shopping Experience Scorecards
Google says 67% of holiday shoppers last year say the search engine helped them find new products, services and brands during the busiest consumer period on the calendar. However, choosing retailers and products from a collection of similar listings isn’t always easy and Google is taking steps to help shoppers choose with confidence while also helping retailers to stand out.
Google is rolling out a new Shopping Experience Scorecard programme to reward retailers that provides excellent experiences for their customers and helps shoppers choose with more confidence.
“Shoppers discover new brands online every day. But before they make a purchase, they want to know they’re spending money with a business they can trust. To reward merchants for good customer experiences and help them build their reputation with potential buyers, we’re introducing the Shopping Experience Scorecard program.”
With Shopping Experience Scorecards, retailers get the chance to showcase the great things they do for their customers so you’re not simply relying on the product listing itself to capture interest. For example, a retailer that provides excellent shipping and returns services might receive a badge on their listings to show they’re a Trusted Store.
You could also earn a Trusted Store badge on your listings based on other performance metrics including shipping speeds, shipping and return costs, return windows, and more.
Google says early insights show that shoppers are more likely to click on listings that feature Trusted Store badges, including lesser-known retailers that are winning clicks from bigger brands thanks to the Shopping Experience Scorecard programme.
Prove the value of free product listings with conversion reporting
Free product listings are a great way to promote your products online but purchases but it was difficult to prove their value when they first rolled out in April 2020. To solve this issue, Google has introduced a new conversion reporting feature that retailers can use to measure the impact of free product listings on sales.
“It’s free for any merchant to list their products on Google. And now, we’re making it easier to measure the impact of their free listings with free listings conversion reporting. This new tool shows merchants the total traffic, impressions and conversion rate of their free listings, helping them make decisions about future ones.”
You can access this report in Merchant Center to view the conversions attributed to your free product listings, in addition to the impressions, clicks and click-through rates. With these insights, you can optimise your free listings to maximise their impact on sales, not only traffic.
Keep your pricing competitive with data insights
One of the issues with listing your products in shopping feeds is that you’re competing with other retailers and pricing quickly becomes the key factor (but not the only one) in which retailer people choose to buy from.
“Product pricing in the market is dynamic, and staying competitive is critical. That’s why we’re introducing the price insights tool, which helps merchants see whether their products are priced competitively and the projected impact of price changes on their revenue.”
To help retailers respond to this challenge, Google is rolling out a new price insights tool that uses machine learning to produce data-driven price recommendations, based on the pricing strategies of your competitors.
The tool is capable of suggesting prices for individual products with predicted impressions, clicks, conversions and gross profit figures for its recommendations. This will help retailers see how their pricing compares to rivals selling the same product and how potential changes to their pricing strategy will impact revenue.
Based on Google’s comments, it seems the recommendations don’t only look at the pricing strategies of rival retailers, either – but also external factors.
“Let’s come back to our online hat seller. The price insights tool would give them insights into how to price different hats. For instance, during warmer temperatures, the tool might recommend lowering the prices of winter hats and raising the prices of sun hats.”
This sounds like Google’s new pricing insights tool is looking at external factors like weather patterns to suggest pricing changes to merchants that will help them maximise sales at any given time.
We have no way of knowing how many external factors the machine learning model being used here assesses – for example, will it include consumer trend data, fashion trends, sporting events and other factors that impact purchase decisions and demand?
Perhaps, time will tell or maybe the inner workings will remain a mystery in a similar way to Google’s search algorithm.
Online insights for brick-and-mortar stores
Google is also rolling out a new tool for local brick-and-mortar stores with no eCommerce system that miss out on the insights online retailers have access to. The local product insights tool will help businesses with a Google Business Profile view data from how users interact with the products linked to their profile.
The tool will reveal which products people show the greatest interest in and help them make informed decisions – both online and in-store.
“Now let’s pretend our online hat seller sells out of several brick-and-mortar locations. The local product insights report would show them which products from their Business Profile are most viewed. This may change their merchandising, assortment or even buying choices in the future.”
Initially, the local product insights tool is only available to retailers in the US and Canada but we expect to see it roll out for merchants in other countries in the near future.
Need help with making your products stand out online?
If you want to make your products stand out more online, our PPC team can help you increase visibility with free product listings and paid advertising campaigns. Call us on 0161 870 2580, email us at info@hotclickmarketing.co.uk or reach us on Twitter via @hot_click with any questions you have.