Google Introduces New Features To Promote In-Store Sales

The tech giant Google is going to announce new tools for retail businesses to help them highlight in-store promotion and reach in-market consumers. This was hinted by this Global search engine in a post at its Google Ads blog, published on 26th June 2019 by Director of Product Management, Kishore Kanakamedala. On the same date, the global online shopping platform Amazon also announced its prime day (Black Friday) sale to extend for 2 days. Since its launch four years ago, Amazon’s Black Friday sale event has been observed for just one day.

Google anticipates customer’s needs well:

The above hint to introduce deals drive in-store shopping tools and features show the responsiveness of this multinational technology platform to the modern day customer’s needs. The Google blog posted by Its Director Product Management revealed that 60%customers say that finding a great deal is what they enjoy most about shopping.
The latest disclosure of the company’s intentions to help advertisers is in continuation of announcements made in May 2019 at Google Marketing live, its Annual conference for advertisers held in San Francisco. On this auspicious marketing occasion, Google had unveiled new” discovery” Ad formats and a revamped shopping experience, which it said will be more competitive with Amazon. Some of the features Google intends to introduce shortly are given below:

Local Campaigns for driving calls to Business locations:

The company announced that in the next few weeks, businesses will be able to drive calls to their locations by setting their local campaigns. This will be an important step for helping businesses in managing locations and improving them. The company emphasized that through local campaigns, a business will be accessible to more advertisers. Highlighting the benefits of local campaigns, Google Ad blog further explained that the initiative will result in complementing co-ordination with print media and TV channels and enhancing foot traffic to business locations during the important promotion. The news of this move was well-received within the industry. Commending Google on the intiative, the CEO of NamoBOT commented; “this will allow businesses to open new avenues of profit and increase their customer base.

Seasonality adjustments:

In an effort to fine-tune the bidding strategy, Google will soon launch a feature which will help you to bid smartly for shopping campaigns, based on your schedules for sale or other promotions. You will be able to make seasonality adjustments according to your own calendar of promotional events. So if you are shortly going to have a sale and expect a surge in conversions, this feature will make you signal the Google smart bidding system and enhance your readiness level and adjustability for the increase.

Audience targeting based on purchase intent:

The company had announced on May 23, 2017, that in-marketing audience, currently available for YouTube campaigns and display network only, will soon be available for search also. Now the company has added more than 2 dozen retail categories in its in-market audience segments for search purpose. Some of these include beauty, Autos and vehicles, sports, consumer electronics, real estate and, computers and peripherals, etc. This feature will use machine learning and analyze trillions of search queries and therefore will truly reflect audiences based on purchase intent.

Location groups:

Starting from 26th June 2019, advertisers will be able to use this feature and form location groups or subsets of business locations. This facility will help them tailor their budget because they can focus on location-specific products thereby cutting cost. It will also help them in creating location-specific Ads. According to Google, “near me, on-sale searches” have increased immensely by 250%, since 2017. To capitalize on this trend, advertisers can now devise their messaging strategy for a particular location based on their sale schedules.

Assets reporting:

Google keeps its monitoring eye vigilantly alerts always have its fingers on the user’s pulse reflecting their needs. Knowing that advertisers are keen to monitor the performance of their assets, the company has introduced this evaluation feature that will keep the marketers updated about how an ad, image, video, asset from App store page or a headline is performing for their local campaigns. Google has asked advertisers not to expect granular detail. The feature will rank the asset’s performance as “low” “good” and “best”.

Promotions in Local inventory ads:

Google is making it easier for retailers and advertisers to highlight their specific products through in-store promotions through shopping ads. In this way, searchers will be able to know about products available in stores near them. The Google informs that initially this feature will be available in the USA and Australia and later the company will roll out it for other markets as well. Google asks the advertisers in the USA and Australia to fill external interest form available at docs.google.com.
The Google explaining the effectiveness of Local inventory Ads, inform that retailers have been increasingly using local inventory Ads and have connected over 2 billion offers to physical stores globally. Businesses are driving more deal and bargain hunters to their physical stores by calling out their in-store offers like BOGO (Buy one get one free) or “15% off”.
The Google Merchant center help has briefly described the modus operandi of LIA (local inventory Ads) as follows:
LIA showcases your products to nearby shoppers searching through Google. On clicking your add searcher reaches a Google-hosted page for your products called local storefront. Through local store front, the searcher can access information about store hours, in-store inventory, direction and more.

Wrap up:

The features announced on June 26th, 2019 by Google, aimed at easing the consumer journey with automated solutions. The company is beautifully showcasing delights that technology can bring in the lives of retailers, advertisers, and consumers. Google through these features is focusing on in-store shopping which still accounts for a great majority of purchases. Driving traffic to brick and mortar stores through smart features is a great service to brick-and-mortar merchants that lack resources to launch marketing campaigns. Google informed in its small press event in San Francisco that it will focus on artificial intelligence for this refreshed experience. This means that more value addition to existing features and more new features are expected in the future by this tech giant.