Making a List, Checking It Twice: The Essential Paid Search Holiday Checklist

The holiday season is about giving.  And, of course, buying.  You know this, and your holiday paid search plan is almost definitely in place by now - but is there anything that could have slipped through the cracks?  We want to help you get every drop of retail goodness out of the busy weeks ahead, so we put together this checklist to ensure that your plan accounts for everything it should.

Download the Essential Paid Search Holiday Checklist

Does your plan account for all of those little things that may get overlooked?

• Efficient communication with your team
• Driving performance with the right strategies and messaging
• Contingency plans if things don’t go as you imagined they would

Regardless of what your account and account team looks like, it’s never a bad idea to double check that the pieces to your master plan are all in place.

With every day during the holiday season being critically important, decisions can get magnified.  So make the right decisions and amplify your success.  Download the Essential Paid Search Holiday Checklist today.  Your team (and your account) can thank you once things settle down after the Last Day to Ship Before Christmas has come and gone.

Posted by Matt Lawson, Director, Performance Ads Marketing

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Google Trusted Stores expands and connects with AdWords

The holiday season is a time of the year when many of us spend hours finding the perfect gifts. It’s also a time when knowing that an online retailer is trustworthy is more important than ever. That’s where Google Trusted Stores comes in - we’re spreading holiday cheer by helping people find the best online stores and shop with confidence.

Google Trusted Stores is a free certification program to highlight retailers that offer a consistently great shopping experience. Qualifying merchants display a badge on their website, and Google stands behind these stores by offering $1,000 of free purchase protection. Since we introduced the program last year, we’ve been working hard to expand it, including launching a new integration with seller ratings on AdWords, updating the badge with more helpful information for shoppers, and broadening store participation around the world.

Shopper feedback powering seller ratings

Google Trusted Stores now helps to power seller ratings, which show on AdWords text ads as well as Product Listing Ads on Google Shopping. This integration provides shoppers with valuable information, while giving participating retailers a free and easy way to earn the ratings they deserve. Advertisers who display seller ratings on their ads typically see a boost in AdWords click-through rates, with higher ratings generally resulting in higher click-through rates.

Providing helpful information at shoppers’ fingertips

In the US, Google Trusted Stores now provides shoppers with an upgraded store performance summary that appears when they hover over the badge on a merchant’s website. The summary includes helpful returns, delivery, and customer support responsiveness metrics provided by StellaService, a company that objectively measures the customer service experience by shopping anonymously at online stores.

More confident shoppers fueling global expansion
Millions of people now see the Google Trusted Stores badge on retailer sites and in Google ads every day. In fact, we’ve more than tripled US store participation in the last year. Because shoppers value the badge, many of these stores are seeing sales growth. For instance, OnlineShoes measured a 4.2% sales increase from the Google Trusted Stores badge, and AutoAnything saw an increase of 5.2%.

Given the great shopper and retailer response in the US, we’ve started to expand Google Trusted Stores around the world. We recently introduced pilot programs in the UK, France, Germany, and Australia, each with a collection of excellent merchants such as Schuh (UK), Spartoo.com (France), PEARL (Germany), and Kogan (Australia). (Note - only shoppers located in a particular country will see the badge for that country.)

Learn more 
To learn more about the program, please visit our website. If you’re a US retailer, you can apply to become a Google Trusted Store. If you are a retailer outside the US, please let us know you’re interested here: UK, France, Germany, Australia.

Happy Holidays and Happy Shopping!

Posted by Brian Marquardt, Group Product Manager, Google Shopping 

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Better browsing, shortlists and 360° images on Google Shopping

With 89% of consumers planning to use the internet to help with holiday shopping this year, our elves have been hard at work improving Google Shopping to help them discover your products and connect with your store.

A new shopping experience on desktop, tablet and mobile
It’s easier than ever for users to browse and hone in on items they want to buy like cameras, ski jackets, and ice cream makers. They can quickly preview details like sizes, colors, description, and even if it’s available at a nearby local store. “Visually similar” results give shoppers suggestions if they’ve found something that’s almost perfect but not quite. Make sure your products shine by following our holiday tips.

Get on people’s shortlists
Shortlists help people keep track of products that catch their eye, compare them at a glance, and share ideas with friends and family. Shortlists now also stay at the top of the page while someone is browsing Google Shopping, so she can cross off items on her shopping list as she goes. When people add products to their shortlists, photos, price and detailed information are automatically saved, too -- so make sure your product feed is up-to-date and has all the necessary information that makes it easy for them to choose your store when they’re ready to buy.

360° views for more products
Sometimes it’s hard to imagine what an item actually looks like from the online picture. Now, for many items on Google Shopping, users can see a 360° view of the products. These interactive images bring users the in-store feeling of holding and touching a product. If you’re manufacturer or brand interested in displaying these rich images of your products on Google Shopping, please fill out this form.

We will continue to improve Google Shopping to help retailers of all sizes reach more customers not just during the holiday season, but all year long.

Posted by Karen Corby, Senior Product Manager, Google Shopping

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The increasing importance of a mobile-optimized experience

We're squarely in a multi-screen world and people are using smartphones to search, shop and get things done more often than ever. That means delivering a great experience on mobile devices is increasingly important, since it affects organic visibility, Quality Score, ad position and cost, sales, and customer loyalty.

The mobile experience matters
Recent research conducted with Nielsen shows that 48% of mobile consumers start their purchase journey with paid and organic search results. With mobile ads, the quality of your mobile landing page experience directly affects how your ad ranks (including whether it's seen at all) and what you'll pay per click. Mobile site experience factors can also directly affect your organic search rankings.

Getting more mobile traffic and lower CPCs is great. But after the click, your mobile landing page experience is even more important for converting visits into sales and building customer loyalty. According to 2012 research on what users want most from mobile sites, 67% of consumers say that a mobile friendly site makes them more likely to buy, and 74% say they're more likely to return to that site in the future.

The experience of ProFlowers, a major US-based fresh flower retailer, confirms the benefits of offering a great experience on smaller screens. After launching its mobile-optimized site, Proflowers saw its conversion rate increase by 20-30%. It has also seen mobile contributing more to conversions that occur on other devices.

“Many users check us out on mobile, and then convert on our [traditional desktop] site... Regardless of where the final sale comes from, staying ahead in mobile is an invaluable part of our successful marketing and customer relationship strategies.”

- Leif Heikkila, senior director of online marketing, ProFlowers

Resources for making your site more mobile-friendly 
We think every business can succeed at providing a great mobile experience. Here are some resources to help:

• Visit our new multi-screen home for resources and partners to help optimize your site for multiple screens. It's rich with web developer resources like the PageSpeed tool that analyzes your web site to provide code-level feedback on how to improve load times for a better mobile experience. 
• You'll find more information on how to make sure your website is well indexed and mobile-friendly in our Google Developers site for webmasters.
• For best practices and inspiring examples of winning mobile marketing strategies, please check out our recently updated Mobile Playbook. 

Posted by Adam Juda, Director of Ads Quality

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Smart Strategies for Multi-Screen Sites

Consumers today are ready to connect with you all day long on screens of all types. But is your website ready to serve those customers on small screens as well as on tablets and desktops?

Mobile screens are where it often gets tricky for business owners: How do I design for smartphones? What's the right technology? What are the big mistakes to avoid?

That's why we've created a new Multi-Screen Resources page. This site is loaded with help for anyone who wants to reach their customers on all kinds of devices. Resources include:

• Any Place, Any Time, Any Device: Building Websites for the Multi-Screen Consumer. Download this new guide for a close look at the pros and cons of common mobile website configurations. You'll find tips and best practices for improving the layout, content and speed of your mobile site. This white paper will help you build a great experience for all your users. 

• Approved vendors. Find a list of website vendors who can help you design a site, build a site, tweak strategies and go multi-screen fast.

• Success stories from others. Read how the Huffington Post boosted mobile visits by 37%, or how Beyond the Rack created a mobile site that now accounts for 44% of their sales.

• Tools that work. Try the PageSpeed Insights tool — it can help boost your site performance.

Get ready to delight your mobile and multi-screen users: visit the Multi-Screen Resources site today.

Also, don't miss Building Multi-Screen Websites — our upcoming webinar on Tuesday, November 19th, at 1:00 EST.

Posted by Nabil Haschemie, Product Marketing Manager

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Text Ads and PLAs: A Winning Combination

Can shoppers find you in today’s crowded “digital shelf”? This question is particularly vital now, as four out of five shoppers consider the internet the single most useful resource for their holiday shopping. We conducted a recent study with Millward Brown Digital that suggests that consumers engage more with (and buy more from) brands and retailers who display both a Product Listing Ad (PLA) and a text ad than those who only show text ads. PLAs show photos of your products, along with prices and product names, right on the search results page when people search for items like yours on Google.

From this study, we learned that PLAs can:

• Increase brand recognition: People who see a brand’s PLAs and text ads are 75% more likely to search for that brand within 30 days than those who only saw text ads.
• Drive more engagement with your store: People who see both text ads and PLAs are 90% more likely to visit the retailer’s website. They are also more likely to visit product pages, add items to their cart, and click on store locator buttons.
• Drive more conversions: People who see both text ads and PLAs are 83% more likely to make a purchase than those who only saw text ads. 

Learn more on the infographic below:

Our research focused mainly on technology shoppers, but the positive results of PLAs and text ads apply to other shoppers as well. For major apparel retailers who sell their own brands, for example, our study suggests that shoppers are 70% more likely to click on the store locator and 42% more likely to visit a product page when exposed to PLAs and text ads.

Using PLA and Text ads helped Nine West gain visibility
Nine West is a great example of a retailer that combined PLAs and text ads to win the digital shelf. They worked with marketing agency RKG to develop a strategic approach to expanding their PLAs across devices alongside their text ads. Nine West’s conversion rate rose 8% and revenue rose 14% with the addition of the PLA campaign, which suggests that the PLAs drove plenty of incremental conversions. Likewise, the mobile conversion rate rose 3% when text and PLAs were combined, and mobile revenue rose 5%. Read the full case study.

Posted by Erica Sievert, Product Marketing Manager, Google Shopping

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Introducing the new Opportunities tab: find more ways to improve your AdWords performance

We launched the Opportunities tab in 2009 as your personal AdWords assistant, surfacing insights to help you improve your performance in AdWords. Today we’re announcing the new Opportunities tab. We've added several new opportunity types and made each easier to understand. Now the Opportunities tab is even better at answering the question, “What else can I do to improve my performance in AdWords?”

The new Opportunities tab

New high-impact opportunities

We've added several new opportunity types for more ways to improve your performance.

• Convert more customers in your best locations: If your conversion rate differs across locations, you might see opportunities to increase your location bid adjustment where your conversion rate is high, or decrease your location bid adjustments where your conversion rate is low. 
• Get more out of your existing budget: If you’re maxing out your budget, you might see opportunities to lower your bids to capture more clicks.
• Be there more often than competitors: If your ads are being seen less frequently than other advertisers competing for the same traffic, you might see opportunities to be seen more frequently with bids to show more often than advertisers like you.
• Show ads that are more relevant: If we spot an ad group with keywords related to lots of different themes, it's harder for you to show a highly relevant ad, so you might see opportunities to create new ad groups from existing keywords.
• Reach more customers on closely related searches: If you're missing clicks on searches that are very similar to your existing keywords, you might see opportunities to broaden your keyword match types.
• Be seen on the first page: If your ads are showing below the first page when users search on high-quality keywords, you might see opportunities to raise your bids to show ads on the first page. 

Pick your best opportunities

A totally new design makes it easier to decide which opportunities to implement. For each opportunity, you'll see a short summary under "What you can do” and the possible impact under “What you might get each week.” The opportunities you’ll see are tailored to your account and selected based on their possible impact to your performance.

More opportunities are just around the corner

Check the Opportunities tab often. Whether you optimize your campaign once a day or once a month, it's constantly working in the background to spot opportunities for you to improve. And we’ll be adding even more opportunity types over time.

To learn more about the Opportunities tab, please visit our AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Deepti Bhatnagar, Product Manager, AdWords

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