The company announced Thursday that Google is introducing a new “Deals” feed in the Shopping tab and additional Merchant Center features to support retailers running promotions, sales, and price drops. It is also expanding its integrations with Shopify and WooCommerce to enable merchants to showcase their deals across Google surfaces.
The new “Deals” feed
All products with a deals badge are now automatically eligible to show in a news feed within the Shopping tab of the search results. This news feed is displayed when a user searches for generic deal-related or shopping event-related queries, like “deals” or “Black Friday” (shown above), or when “Deals” is selected from the drop-down menu in the Shopping tab (shown below).
New ways to track your deals in Merchant Center
Merchants can now see which products are eligible for a deals badge from the products tab in Google Merchant Center. Eligibility is based on promotions, sales, and price drops. In addition, a new dashboard (shown above) breaks out data on impressions, clicks, and click-through rates for Shopping ads for products with a deals badge. The data can be segmented by promotion type, product, brand, and category.
Deeper integration with Shopify and WooCommerce
Building on Shopify and WooCommerce integrations announced earlier this year, retailers on these platforms can now show their existing deals across Google surfaces (Search, the Shopping tab, Images, and Lens). And starting next month, retailers that use Shopify’s Google channel app or WooCommerce’s Google Listings and Ads extension can show their promotions in Search and the Shopping tab. Retailers can sync existing and new upgrades to their products listed on Google directly from their store dashboards.
We approach the peak of the holiday shopping season, retailers now have multiple places in Google where their deals can appear — the newly announced Deals feed, the “Deals related to your search” section of the Shopping tab, and the deals carousel (which occurs when users search for deals during significant sales events). Retailers offering promotions, sales, or price drops should keep their product feeds current to ensure they’re eligible for these organic opportunities to get in front of shoppers. To that end, seeing which of your products are eligible for a deals badge can be very useful, and now Google is showing that information in the products tab of Merchant Center.
Breaking out the performance of Shopping ads based on products with a deals badge can help merchants understand the types of deals driving conversions and the product categories that perform the best when on sale. And the proliferation of e-commerce integrations offered by Google (and Bing) lowers the barrier to entry for discovery and promotion in Search. This leveling of the playing field favors smaller retailers that may not have the resources or technical savvy to establish a presence on these platforms. For Google, this strengthens it as a shopping destination and makes it a no-brainer for retailers since, unlike marketplaces like Amazon or eBay, Google doesn’t take a cut of the sale.
About The Author
George Nguyen is an editor for Search Engine Land, covering organic Search, podcasting, and e-commerce. His background is in journalism and content marketing. Before entering the industry, he was a radio personality, writer, podcast host, and public school teacher.
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