🔍 The role of pricing and promotions in Google Shopping

Oct 23, 2020

Good morning Search Marketer, what comes after "people-based marketing"?

We got a look at how Google is thinking about its approach to balancing privacy with ad personalization as third-party cookies are on the wane. The company released early findings from a test using audience cohorts grouped by browsing histories and interests to target ads rather than targeting users (IDs) individually. In short, it's promising, the company says while also acknowledging it will take much more work before a solution is market-ready.

With Google's expansion of Google Shopping to include free listings, the company is also emphasizing tools for users to find the best deals. New price insights will show users how a product's price compares to other listings, and they can use a new price tracking feature to get alerts via email or the Google app when better pricing comes along. Being a source to find the lowest price and deals across the web is one of Google's USPs versus Amazon.

All that to say, pricing and promotions could be more important than ever for retailers looking to drive sales from Google this holiday season. If you've been burned by merchant promotions not getting approved before your sale ends, that should no longer be a problem. Google says approvals will be much faster — and it's going to start showing merchant promotions in both free and paid listing in Shopping and in ads on mobile image search and local inventory ads. It also announced more reporting and insights coming soon for retailers.

Ginny Marvin,
Editor-In-Chief

Social Short

Snapchat's North America ARPU shoots up

Snapchat reported revenues increased 52% year over year to $679 million and average daily active users (DAUs) increased by 18% year over year to 249 million for the third quarter of the year. One stat that stood out to us in particular was the average revenue per user (ARPU) in North America. Overall ARPU increased 28% to $2.73, yet in North America, that number shot up $46% to $5.49.

Why we care. Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel said the company is making long term investments in its community and advertising efforts. The chart above indicates the company is seeing those efforts literally pay off. AR will continue to be a big focus. "The adoption of augmented reality is happening faster than we had previously anticipated, and we are working together as a team to execute on the many opportunities in front of us," Spiegel said in a statement. The company has partnered with Champs Sports, Clearly, Essie, Hoka One One, Kohl's, Levi's, Jordan Brand, and Sally Hansen to launch augmented reality-powered virtual try-on experiences on the platform.

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Search Shorts

SEO, links, featured snippets and passage indexing.

Google SEO podcast. Google published another episode of its Search Off the Record podcast and in this episode the three discuss rendering, signal collection, and SEOs & devs all have in common — listen to it.

Crawling, indexing & ranking. Just because Google crawls a page, it does not mean it will index the page. Just because a page is indexed, it does not mean it will rank the page, says Martin Splitt of Google.

Links per page. Gary Illyes from Google said, Google has a stupid high limit on the number of links it can extract on a single page.

Featured snippets and passage indexing are different. As we explained in our how passage indexing works article, Danny Sullivan of Google said they are different from featured snippets. Danny explained on Twitter, "Featured snippets are used for voice search. They are already identified using different systems than passages."

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