To help with this rise in demand, Google announced yesterday in a blog-post possibly timed to steal some Prime Day thunder, that it will soon begin rolling out new mobile-centric features for PLAs, holiday booking filters, its YouTube’s TrueView shopping feature and a new Showcase Shopping ad format.

That’s a lot of new info to wade through, but it’s all designed to help prepare marketers and mobile users for the October – December holiday season, which you’re all thinking about now right? Right?

Travel planning and booking

According to Google, visits to mobile travel sites made up 40% of total travel web traffic in the first quarter of this year, while individual travel web sessions are becoming shorter and travel mobile conversion rates have grown 10% as users are increasingly ready to book on mobile.

To help with planning and booking travel ahead of time, Google has introduced a few new features:

Hotel Smart Filters

You’ll now be able to filter hotel search results based on rating or price with a single tap. So “pet-friendly hotels in San Francisco under $200” will theoretically find you something relevant.

Hotel Deals

When searching for a hotel, you may now see a ‘Deal’ label when a hotel’s price is lower than usual. These deals are automatically identified by Google algorithms when it sees a significant reduction in price. In early tests, Google saw that hotels marked with the ‘deal’ label received about twice as many bookings as other hotels.

Hotel Tips

The ‘Tips’ feature will offer real-time analysis to help users find the best hotels for their needs. Tips may be shown to people when they could save money or find better availability by moving their dates slightly.

Flights price tracking

Instead of having to continually check prices in Google Flights, users can now opt-in to track ticket-price changes for a specific date and route combination. When prices either increase or decrease significantly, they will be notified by email and Google Now cards.

Showcase Shopping Ads

This is a new format designed to help shoppers who use broader search terms, such as “women’s athletic clothing” or “living room furniture.”

Rather than present them with one specific product ad that probably isn’t relevant, Showcase Shopping Ads provides a more in-depth “visually rich experience” showcasing multiple related products.

All merchants running Shopping Campaigns in the US, UK, and Australia will be eligible to have their products automatically appear in Showcase ads in the coming weeks.

Google also states its experimenting with a premium version that allows retailers the ability to curate the experience.

New features for TrueView

Almost half of the US population (47%) says that YouTube helps them when making a decision about something to buy at least once a month.

TrueView is Google’s tool that allows ad viewers on YouTube to find out more information and click to buy.

According to Google, the number of advertisers using the product is up 50% since January and in recent weeks, about 1/3 of them are using it every week.

To help give retailers more control over branding, Google is introducing two new features:

Companion banner

A new interactive banner appearing next to the video that lets viewers scroll through products while the video is playing next to it. The banner also shows viewers the most up-to-date product information.

Product picker

This lets advertisers choose and prioritize which of their products are featured as cards in a TrueView for shopping campaign.

Currency converter

And finally, Google is currently testing a tool to perform currency conversions in Australia, Switzerland, Canada, and the UK. This feature allows you to convert the currency in your product data locally. So a person shopping in the UK can see products sold by a US retailer, listed in British pounds.

However, this year is different.

For the first time ever, mobile searches on Google exceeded desktop. To account for this massive shift, Google has made some of the most drastic changes to search results in years.

They removed the right rail ads and added a fourth paid listing above the organic results. This caused mobile results to be filled with paid ads.

See the example for the term “Car Insurance” below…

A search for this term required multiple scrolls before you got to true organic listings (past four paid results and a map with three local listings). This makes those top spots in organic even more precious since everyone is now lower on the scroll.

The other feature that has increased over the last few years is the appearance of shopping results. Google shopping continues to grow in the amount of impressions it receives and traffic it drives.

This year I started to track data for the number of times four paid ads, shopping results, or local listings appear in search results.

What did the data show us? Here are my two key findings from the data this year.

1) Paid search seems to rule the day, but don’t sleep on organic

With the screen shot above as key proof, paid search dominates the screen on mobile devices.

This plays into two factors for search engines: 1) stock valuation – Google, Yahoo, and Bing all need to drive revenue for shareholders, 2) User experience – I do believe that with call extensions on mobile and increased ad copy, the user experience with paid ads has improved.

With that said, organic and paid overlap did drop slightly year over year, but still had the second highest overlap in seven years.

I believe this is due to brands paying more and more attention to SEO, especially in regard to user experience, as well as Google’s increased focus on quality content (Panda) and use of technology (mobile friendliness).

2) The importance of “other” search listings

Many of us still think of search as text links, but for years now, search has been much more than that.

From the knowledge graph, images, news, and local listings, the search engines have been pulling a variety of different information into its results for a long time.

This year, as we started to track how frequently these items appear, we are reminded of this fact. For example, we found that shopping ads appeared 100% of the time for retail terms and 94% of the time for retail “technology” terms (iPad, Fitness tracker, etc). So if you are an advertiser and your feed isn’t right and you haven’t been paying attention to shopping ads you are probably missing out big time.

Local listings didn’t appear nearly as much as shopping, but I think this is really one to watch. Especially with the recent announcement of ads within maps.

This new feature will not only provide local businesses with great opportunities to be seen, but will also drive more revenue opportunity for Google and this usually means increased ad inventory.

Overall the amount of change has really accelerated in the past 12 months around search results. This challenges a lot of the established protocols that brands and agencies have been using.

If you haven’t considered what these changes have done to your results, or you haven’t already seen an impact to your data you should take a look. A coordinated search strategy that includes all elements, paid, organic, local, and shopping whenever applicable will set your brand up for success.

This discussion revealed a few interesting nuances that I thought were worth sharing.

The focus will be how the search results page changes with just one additional change to the search query and what the implications of that word mean.

For this article I picked the keyword “best.” This is certainly worth looking into as much as a number of other terms like “near me,” “cheap,” or “men/women/kids,” however “best” also makes all the points I’d like to share.

How does the search results page change?

Let’s start by searching for “HD TVs” and then adding the word “best.”

From a user intent perspective you would assume that this is still pretty high in the funnel. The customer isn’t sure which TV or brand they are looking for. But by adding the word “best” to the query Google makes a few key changes to the search results;

• In-store only appears on the more generic “HD TV” search. Google makes an assumption that local inventory has a greater level of influence on this type of search.
• Ranking bubbles are included when the term “best” is included. Google is inferring that some type of ranking is desired by the consumer and uses ratings and reviews as the driver behind these rankings.
• Star ratings are included for all ads when “best” is included. Similar to the ranking bubbles Google is assuming that consumer feedback will be the most helpful in this situation.

What does the data say?

I also wanted to take a quick look at the data to see how these keywords performed. I pulled a search term report and filtered for keywords containing “best.”

What I found was pretty interesting. In all the metrics “best” keyword metrics were roughly 2X of the average across all keywords. This indicates two things:

1. Consumers are responding at a very high level to these keywords with high interest.
2. Due to this consumer reaction the cost for these queries is also much higher than the norm. This makes sense and is really the beauty of a free market economy.

What does it mean?

The keys to consider here are less about the inclusion of the keyword and more about how you support a robust search listing and how you use the data:

1) Robust listings

It is important not only that your product listing ads are included, but also that your local inventory and ratings are robust.

You can see that between these two queries not only are those 3 factors different in the results, but there is not a single repeat product shown between the two, although the same brands appear. This means that having multiple options and a deep product set available for Google to rank is key to getting displayed for these impressions.

2) Data use

Just because a keyword has a high CTR or CPC, it doesn’t mean that it is valuable or not unless those are your key performance metrics.

Even the lower conversion % for keywords containing best doesn’t mean that they are bad. You have to look at attribution, or their additive incremental impact your campaigns. Understand what metrics move your business and look at the problem through multiple lenses.

For example, does this keyword introduce you to new customers and therefore a higher CPC and lower conversion rate is worth the traffic? Only you know that answer for your business, but there is plenty of data to help make that decision.

You certainly wouldn’t have missed Google removing text ads on the right-hand rail of their search engine results pages, leaving the space wide-open for even more product listing ads (PLAs).

With this update, it’s important to understand the changes taking place made to accommodate for an increased amount of advertisers spending on Google Shopping Campaigns.

Here are some of the latest updates you need to be aware of:

PLAs getting more third-party traffic

In 2014, Google announced it was partnering with a number of retail and ecommerce sites to allow them to show product listing ads on their web properties. This was dubbed ‘Adsense for Shopping’, and after some initial buzz in the paid search community — all we heard were crickets.

Fast-forward to Merkle’s recent Digital Marketing Report and you can see huge spikes to Google’s Search Partners’ share of PLA traffic in Q3 of 2015. Sounds like the partnership is ramping up and hopefully will continue to do so into 2016.

What it means for you: were you a retailer running Shopping Campaigns in Q3/Q4 2015? If so, check your metrics, did you notice an increase in impressions YoY attributable to this? Did CTR and CVR metrics stay stable?

Google’s expandable and scrollable PLA tests

In January 2016, we reported on seeing an expanded PLA view – showing up to 16 products at one time. This allowed PLAs to take up the majority of above-the-fold real estate on the SERPs – likely causing an increase in impressions and clicks – especially for retailers who don’t typically fall into the “first five”.

Now, in March, many advertisers are starting to see ‘scrollable’ PLA results on desktop, almost like a carousel. The emulates the scrollable results seen on mobile search for PLAs.

What it means for you: Google is always testing different formats and we can see its attention is currently on the right experience for PLAs. Do a few, quick searches for your products and see how they are showing up. Have you seen any fluctuations that might be due to a new format?

These insights are hard to nail down since we don’t know the testing parameters or have insight into the backend data, but at least sharing the story of what’s going on behind the scenes should help explain some performance.

Ranked PLAs for key searches

Though it’s been in testing since 2014, a new PLA ranking system has just come out of beta. Now, when a user types in a keyword with a modifier like ‘best’ or ‘top’ they will provide a tiny grey number icon to rank the items.

Wait, isn’t that unfair? According to Google, no. The way it works is simple – on queries containing ‘best’ or ‘top’ only the top-rated products are selected to participate in the auction. Once in the auction, the products then compete against each other for ad position.

Essentially as a user you won’t always be getting the ‘top’ product – you’ll be seeing a list of top products with the how much the advertisers are paying being taken into consideration.

What is means for you: check out those ratings of yours and make sure your products are ranking high enough to be considered for auctions like this.

Another thing to do is pull a search query report for your Shopping Campaigns to see how many times your products have matched to queries like ‘best’ or ‘top’. How are those terms doing for you? With strong performance, you might want to start caring about your reviews even more.

Since these are just a few of the tests and features rolling out for Google Shopping Campaigns in 2016, please comment below with any features you’ve seen and of course, what they mean for you.

The feature will allow consumers to make purchases directly from Google, which will only host the retailer-branded pages; things like fulfillment, marketing and returns will be handled by the individual merchants. The idea behind Purchases on Google, which is CPC and will be available within the next month, is to make life easier for mobile shoppers.

“I don’t even think about where I am when I’m shopping on my mobile phone; it’s become that ubiquitous against the fabric of my life,” says Jon Alferness, vice president of product management for Google Shopping.

Alferness adds that over the last year, there has been a 115 percent increase in shopping searches. To keep up with the increasingly mobile world, Google will be rolling out other features in the near future, including:

• Mobile Voice Search, the use of which more than doubled last year, will be expanded to Google Shopping. Searchers asking about a specific product will see Google Now Cards with that product’s attributes or reviews, the latter of which is aggregated from all over the Internet.
• Google Now Price Drop Cards alert users when the price of an item goes down significantly.
• Because location is such a big part of people’s online shopping, particularly with mobile, Google Now In-Store Cards will provide information about specific locations, with inventory feeds integrated into the search. “If you’re near a Home Depot and pull up Google Now, the In-Store Card will show you information about that exact store location: sales, closing hours, loyalty programs,” Alferness says, adding that the feature is Google-hosted but locally-branded.
• Google is currently working with retailers – early testers include eBay and Flipkart – to deep link to their apps within shopping ads, driving consumers to their apps instead of their websites.

According to Jason Spero, head of global mobile sales and strategy at Google, 93 percent of shopping happens offline, though mobile still plays a huge roll. Deloitte estimated that mobile devices influenced $1 trillion worth – or 28 percent – of in-store purchases last year. For example, Local Inventory Ads boosted Sears’ in-store visits by 122 percent, while one-third of search ad clicks resulted in a visit to Target during the holidays last year.

“Shopping at Target doesn’t start when you get there,” Spero says. “The experience of shopping at Target begins on a mobile device well before you get inside the actual store.”

The ability to measure mobile’s offline impact, which has long been a part of Google AdWords: third-party data tracks Google ads to consumers’ devices, while in-store purchases identify them by their loyalty cards. The data provides matches and uploads to AdWords for optimization. This feature will soon be available on other platforms, such as DoubleClick, as well.

Due to the fact ad content is dependent on the product feed, the marketing department needs to take a more active role in the development and management of the feed content, much like it has done with SEO over the past few years. Here are some easy steps (often only one-time work!) to take without requiring significant coding expertise or investment in costly feed management and optimization tools:

Normalize product variants, especially product colors, as consumers who search for products online frequently use these.

Merchandisers have all kinds of interesting ways to describe the colors of their products to stand out from their competition.

Some of the more popular I’ve seen are “tangerine,” “sea foam,” and “azure.” Sure, tangerine is a cool name for a color in the print catalog, but people aren’t often looking for a “tangerine” dress on Google. Here’s a quick update for better match rates:

• Tangerine -> Orange
• Sea foam -> Green
• Azure -> Blue

Once you’ve translated your internal colors to primary colors, this should be a simple find-and-replace in your feed.

Remove extraneous information, especially from your product titles.

Online shoppers (outside of B2B procurement specialists) rarely look for retail products by their product ID, SKU#, ISBN code, etc.

If this kind of information is in your product titles, then you are hurting your keyword density and ultimately your relevance. You will pay higher CPCs for the same position and your ads won’t be as enticing to the end shopper. Better to scrub this stuff as there are typically columns in your feed for them specifically.

Always include the product category in your product titles.

People generally look for stuff online, not abstract concepts. While “Betsey Johnson Mermaid” sounds nice, it typically doesn’t connect to search behavior. At the very least let the shopping engines know that it is a cocktail dress.

Categorize your products deeply, especially your most popular ones.

Categorization is critical to the engine’s awareness of what types of queries your products are relevant for. Many merchandise categorization schemes do not align well with those of the engines. Clearly it is challenging to reclassify thousands of products to meet the needs of Google or other publishers, but doing this well for your best-sellers, at the least, will go along way to ensuring that your nest products show up when you need them to.

Summary

There are obviously much more sophisticated techniques to apply to feeds that would further improve the relationship between the product data and how consumers search. However, if you are light on tech resources, don’t feel like you are stuck with what you have.

Remember that these are your ads and they need to be treated with the same care and respect as your more “creative” ad units. Some of the quick techniques above can be the difference between success and failure in PLA and related channels.

Similar to Google Shopping, which replaced Product Listing Ads last summer, Shopping Campaigns streamline Bing’s product ad process, making it easier for advertisers to manage their listings. Two notable enhancements include the ability to manage campaigns at scale using APIs and import Google Shopping campaigns.

Easier management, including an intuitive hierarchal structure to organize products to bid on, allows marketers to view their catalog data within the campaign’s user interface and use settings to prioritize across campaigns. Bing Shopping Campaigns also offer more performance insights, including competitive intelligence that uses benchmark data to drive better optimization.

Bing Ads customers are welcome to reach out to their respective account managers if they’re interested in beta testing. The search engine anticipates its Shopping Campaigns will be available for all U.S. customers this summer.

Below is a basic setup:

How this works:

Both of these campaigns are targeting all products. This means that the high-priority campaign will trigger for any impression your feed is eligible to appear on as it will trump the low-priority campaign with the same targeting. However, we have a brand negative list applied to the generic campaign so any search queries blocked by this list will be triggered by the low-priority campaign instead.

This method allows you to have separate bids for your brand and generic terms. Ensure you achieve 100 percent impression share on your high-intent brand searches without over-bidding. This setup is particularly useful for retailers where the proportion of brand traffic is high and a small change to maximum CPC can make a big difference to spend and ROI. The split now allows you to bid based on performance for the more competitive lower intent searches filtering through the generic campaign.

If you decide to add a negative to the generic campaign due to poor results, this will start triggering in the brand campaign. A useful tip is to create a list of shopping negative terms that you have applied to your brand and generic campaigns, which will prevent this from happening.

The Next Step

Once brand and generic terms are split out we are able to review performance and assign separate budgets really easily. There are a couple of reports that can help us push our brand ads further.

The product performance reports will give you a good idea of which products are driving the best-quality traffic to your site. You can increase the bids on these products to get them showing more often. This is a good practice to take if you are trying to win clicks over a competitor. Increasing bids on a cheaper version of a product or on a color variation that stands out will help gain the attention of the searcher.

Auction insights for shopping also became available at the end of last year. Use this to see who is appearing against you and what the overlap is like. Is there anything you can change in your offering – such as delivery price – that will allow you to trump those competitors. In this report you can see impression share, overlap rate, and outranking share.

Another big change that happened for shopping ads last year was the positioning of the ads themselves. Shopping ads were able to appear above the top search ad. For most retailers this is fantastic news, as the performance of shopping tends to be very strong compared to text ads. However, if your brand is not occupying all five spots this is directly putting resellers and competitors above your main ad. Currently there isn’t a report to tell us exactly where shopping and text ads appear on the SERP, but hopefully this will come as there may be some benefit to pushing brand bids on your search keywords to try to force the text ads to appear above the shopping ads.

What to Do Next

Above is just a basic way to split out brand and generic. There are many other ways you can utilize this technique to ensure strong coverage on your key terms, such as product-specific searches or long-tail vs. short-tail searches. We have seen huge improvements in results by taking this approach so would highly recommend testing it.

Homepage image via Shutterstock.

A recent IBM study showed that 9.1 percent of all online sales during the holidays were conducted on a smartphone. To put that in context, that is a greater number than online’s percentage of total retail sales. That is how fast things are accelerating on the smartphone front when it comes to shopping.

I have seen these trends in our clients’ mobile shopping data as well. For the heaviest shopping days over the holidays, total click volumes in product listing ads (PLA) campaigns were actually higher for smartphones than desktop computers.

Consumers are searching for, looking at, and clicking extensively on specific products on their phones very frequently. Even if they don’t end up buying, they are deeply engaged in the shopping process while on their devices.

This huge growth in mobile commerce will certainly necessitate some significant changes to online marketing programs in 2015. Here are a few that will be critical to continued success:

Campaign Segmentation

While Google’s Enhanced Campaigns has made it more difficult to have mobile- and desktop-specific campaigns, the fact remains that mobile and desktop consumers behave and perform very differently. Add to that very large variations in how mobile sites fare at converting shoppers to purchase (on average we are seeing smartphone CRs about 30 to 40 percent of desktop), and it’s clear that these campaigns must be managed separately within AdWords and other publishers.

Mobile Shopping Experiences

Now that we know there is significant search and shopping activity on mobile devices, it is essential to optimize experiences and take advantage of that traffic. Conversion path should be clear with sizable font and imagery leading the way to purchase. However, not all of these consumers are looking to transact on their device, as indicated by earlier data which shows up to 50 percent of PLA clicks but less than 10 percent of overall revenue comes via smartphone. Therefore, mobile sites/apps should be location aware such that store locations, hours, and contact information are never difficult for consumers to find.

Locally Relevant Ads

If 2014 was the year mobile commerce transactions exploded, 2015 will be the year of the locally relevant ad experience. Products like Google’s Local Inventory Ads can drive substantial traffic to local stores from mobile devices, while companies like Yext seek to tackle the issue of inaccurate and stale business listings popping up all over the place. At the very least, marketers with physical locations need to be very cognizant of how the store side of their business is being represented on mobile devices. These new and exciting ad products can help them influence these mobile shoppers and present in-store options to satisfy purchase intent.

Geo-Fencing

With all of this shopping activity going on at all hours of the day and night, it makes sense to try to encourage customers who are currently near to store to come in and transact now. By drawing a fence around your physical locations, marketers can tailor offers and messages to those who are in that fence vs. those who are currently outside of it. This is a great strategy for announcing special events or promotions, but also to quickly move seasonal or distressed inventory from stores.

If 2014 was the year of the mobile consumer, then 2015 is poised to be the year of the mobile marketer. Start with some of these techniques to ensure that customers’ shift from desktop to mobile doesn’t also signal a profit shift from green to red.

Product Listing Ads (PLAs)

Retail has always been a leading category for Google and the other search engines. Large retailers have bought millions of keywords on Google and turned those buys into huge revenues. However, in the past year or so, Google has been replacing standard keyword driven text ads in retail with Product Listing Ads (PLA), graphical units driven by a product feed. A recent AdGooroo study showed that the top 20 retail advertisers are spending 63 percent of their search budgets on PLA and only 37 percent on text ads. Clearly the scales are starting to tip in retail and that will likely continue across other verticals as Google continues to bring new ad formats to market.

Attribution Modeling

In the early days of search, most advertisers leveraged the last-click attribution model to prove the value of their keyword buys, and as such, keywords received the bulk of the credit for online conversions. However, with the advent of more sophisticated analytics systems, it is becoming much more common for advertisers to use multi-touch attribution models, which give significant credit to earlier touches in the conversion path. While this doesn’t render the keyword inconsequential, it raises the profile of other channels. Performance marketers can’t continue to rely on Google as their sole source of conversions, and newer attribution models are now demonstrating that.

Mobile Apps

The early days of mobile only served to solidify Google’s dominance, as consumers just replicated their Web browser behavior on their mobile devices. A recent Forbes article shows that nearly all mobile activity has shifted to applications, or apps. With this move to apps, behavior seems to have fundamentally changed away from keyword search to social networking, app browsing, and voice search. All of these new behaviors will necessitate different advertising models than traditional keyword buying.

Audience Buying

The ability to target specific consumer audiences through the use of massive and complex data stacks is a rapidly growing theme in online advertising. Most advertisers would prefer to think about the type of people they want to target, as opposed to the keywords they have to buy, to hit that target. Recent moves such as Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RSLA) by Google and Bing’s addition of first-party data to its ad targeting system, show just how much advertisers crave profile data in order to efficiently price impressions/clicks. While this doesn’t necessarily degrade the importance of purchasing keywords relevant to your business, it does indicate that there are other features of a user that could be equally, if not more, important in the mind of advertisers.

Goodbye Pure Exact Match

Recently, Google pulled the plug on the ability to target “exact” keywords through AdWords. While this seems like a minor change, since Google will now only match your keywords to “close variants” of those keywords, it does seem like the first step toward the future of Google.

If you remember, Google recently introduced Enhanced Campaigns, which mashed together keyword traffic from different types of devices. It also stopped providing keywords to analytics tools, virtually eliminating the practice of keyword-based SEO. All of these moves start to chip away at full marketer control over where and when their ads show up. Couple this with Google’s investment in PLA and Dynamic Search Ads, and you can see a keyword-less world starting to emerge.

In summary, there are many changes happening in the performance marketing world that point to the decline in importance of the keyword buy. While keyword search is still a multi-billion dollar industry, its influence is beginning to erode at the hands of a number of new channels and techniques. For all of us in the search community, this should serve as both a wake-up call and an opportunity to broaden our skills. Search marketers have always been at the forefront of data-driven performance marketing…there’s no reason that can’t continue in this new and exciting world.