Helping Merchants Succeed: Updates to and Reminders for Google Shopping

We’re dedicated to helping merchants succeed with Google Shopping and a huge part of this success involves making it easy for businesses to optimize their accounts, especially before the holiday season. For example, we recently released an update to AdWords Editor that allows retailers to easily manage Product Listing Ads at scale and delivered a series of four Hangouts on Air to help merchants make the transition to Google Shopping.

We’re continuing to actively release improvements to the product and we recently started ranking the results in Google Shopping based on a combination of relevance and bid price--just like Product Listing Ads are ranked. While products listed without a bid will continue to show until the final transition to a commercial model is complete in the fall, advertisers who are promoting their products with Product Listing Ads will have better positioning and increased traffic.

Merchants who create Product Listing Ads will also have greater control over where their products appear in Google Shopping, due to the inclusion of bid as a factor in ranking. And in the future, they will have the opportunity to differentiate their businesses and market special offers, such as, "30% off all refracting telescopes”.

9 Days Left To Take Advantage of Limited Time Offer

In May, we announced Google Shopping, a new initiative to improve our shopping experience that makes it easy for shoppers (your customers) to easily research purchases, compare different products, their features and prices, and then connect directly with merchants to make purchases.

A key part of this initiative was helping make this transition easier for merchants by offering two incentives:

• All merchants that are promoting all of their online product inventory and who are compliant with Google Shopping policies by August 15, 2012, will receive a monthly AdWords credit of 10% of their total US spend on Product Listing Ads through the end of the year.
• Additionally, merchants active on Product Search as of May 30, 2012 can fill out this form by August 15, 2012 and receive a $100 AdWords credit to use toward Product Listing Ads.

With only 9 days left until the August 15th deadline, we suggest visiting this site to learn more about these incentives today.

We’re focused on ensuring that merchants of all sizes succeed with Google Shopping and the roadmap includes even more exciting changes that will make it easier to manage Product Listing Ads. To get started with Google Shopping, visit our getting started guide.

Posted by Jennifer Dulski, Director of Product Management, Google Shopping