New tools to help you optimize for the holidays

Staying on top of trends and recommendations is key to driving results during the holiday season. In fact, we’ve seen advertisers that used recommendations to increase their account-level optimization score by 10 points saw a median 14% increase in conversions.¹ That’s why we’re introducing new tools this holiday season to help you set up more accurate measurement, optimize your Shopping campaigns, reach new potential customers, and more. 

Ensure accurate and actionable measurement 

To get the most out of your marketing, it's important to understand what actions people take after they interact with your ads. That's why we introduced privacy-safe solutions like enhanced conversions that ensure your measurement stays accurate and actionable. To make it easier to use these solutions, we've rolled out new recommendations to help you:

• Set up enhanced conversions to improve the accuracy of your conversion measurement. 
• Set up Consent Mode to adjust how your Google tags behave based on the consent status of your users.
• Set up Google Analytics 4 to give you deeper, cross-platform customer insights.

Optimize your Shopping campaigns more efficiently 

To help you better optimize your account over the holidays, we've added more recommendations for Shopping campaigns, including:

• Review Merchant Center account suspension warnings to keep your campaigns running throughout the holidays.
• Set a target ROAS to capture upcoming traffic increases to drive more sales at the same return-on-ad-spend.
• Target all of your eligible Shopping products to ensure they can be found when holiday shoppers are looking for them.
• Set up new customer acquisition goals to help your campaigns find more new customers.

In addition, our new Smart Shopping campaigns Performance Comparison tool helps you easily compare week-over-week split test performance between Smart Shopping and Standard Shopping campaigns.² The tool is available to Google Ads users using the Smart Shopping campaigns traffic split beta.

By Buy Bye, a Comparison Shopping Service, has been using the tool to test and scale Smart Shopping campaigns across their client base in time for peak season. “It’s great to be able to share performance transparency with merchants. It certainly makes it a lot easier to interpret Smart Shopping campaigns test performance,” said Sian Watkins, Lead Account Manager.

If you’re not already using the beta, reach out to your Google representative or Comparison Shopping Service. Then, try the tool and start comparing your Smart Shopping campaigns traffic split data.

Reach more people with improved keyword recommendations

Keyword recommendations can help you reach more potential customers during the holiday season. To give you more relevant keyword suggestions, we now consider more signals when determining keywords to recommend. These additional signals include landing pages, keywords in an ad group, and negative keywords.  

Save time by applying more recommendations automatically

To make it even easier to optimize your campaigns, you can now automatically apply more recommendations. This means that you can now automatically: 

• Set up a target CPA and ROAS to reach your goals by bidding more efficiently.
• Adjust your target CPA or ROAS to reach more potential customers.
• Review audience reporting to understand how your audiences are performing.

By opting in, we’ll apply recommendations of your choice as new opportunities are available. You can change these selections or opt out of them at any time. If you choose to opt in, note that we won’t increase your budget.

Apply recommendations at scale with Google Ads API

To help you apply and dismiss recommendations at scale, we've rolled out more recommendations in the Google Ads API.

Fluency, a technology platform, uses recommendations in the API to improve performance at scale. “Applying recommendations in the Google Ads API is easy and efficient to use. The ad extension recommendation is especially helpful as it automatically creates sitelinks saving us time,” said Eric Mayhew, President and Chief Product Officer at Fluency.

As a reminder, we recommend you start using the Google Ads API as soon as you can–we're ending support for the AdWords API in April 2022. To get started, visit the developer website.

To start using these new features, visit the Recommendations page.  

Posted by Danielle Jenks, Product Manager, Google Ads

 

1. Google Data, Global English, July 2nd, 2020 vs July 28th, 2021.
2. In Europe, Smart Shopping campaigns can be used with any Comparison Shopping Service (CSS) you work with. The ads will show on general search results pages and on any other surfaces the CSS has opted in to.