Consumers are already ramping up their holiday shopping. In fact, over the past week, searches for “holiday gift idea” have increased 95% in the U.S.1 To capture the comeback this holiday season, check out the best practices below:

Inspire potential customers while they’re browsing content with Discovery ads and Video action campaigns. 91% of Google feed users took some kind of shopping or product-related action immediately after discovering new products, services, or brands on their feeds.2 And 70% of shoppers report buying from a brand after seeing it on YouTube.

Encourage shoppers to purchase by highlighting shipping details and return options (e.g. Fast & Free badging), and promotions — right from your Shopping ads. If you’re a retailer with physical stores, check out the local promotions beta to share store-specific deals with your customers.

Showcase your in-store inventory and flexible pick up options to nearby shoppers with Local inventory ads. Many shoppers want to confirm their items are available nearby before heading in-store. In fact, searches on Google Maps for “curbside pickup” have increased globally by 5,000% year over year.

Grow total sales, whether they happen online or in your stores, by including store visits or store sales in your Smart Bidding strategy. Smart Bidding helps you reach your marketing objectives by automatically setting bids for each auction based on what matters to your business.

Follow these Google Best Practices to Drive sales to your business this holiday season. Get in touch with us if you want help with this.

A blog is more than just SEO. Of course there are numerous other ways to increase SEO on your eCommerce site, and I’ll explain that later, but let’s start with the benefits of a blog.

• Blogs help you build up a fan following. With every blog post, you’re either educating or entertaining readers. Produce amazing content and people will keep coming back for more.
• Blogs are engaging. The longer your posts, the more time people will spend reading it, meaning they spend more time on your site. Blogs also allows readers to communicate directly with you and start a conversation in the comments or on social media.
• Blogs get shares. People typically don’t share product pages. Let’s face it, there’s nothing share-worthy about a product. But if you write a seriously good blog post, then people will share that.
• Blogs allow you to soft-sell. Your main site and product pages are for the hard sell. You display your products, explain why they are awesome, and ask visitors to buy. With blogs you can tell stories about how your customers use your products, inspiring readers and at the same time showing the impact of your product on people’s lives. The Fitbit blog is a fine example of this.
• Blogs build your brand. You won’t start making sales from your blog immediately. It might take 5 or 10 blog posts before a reader even considers your product. But when the time comes to make a decision, the reader will think of you first because they’ve been reading your content and seeing your brand so often.

So blogs do a lot more for you, especially in the long run. That’s not to say blogs are the only way to create quality content on your site. If you don’t have a blog, you can still do these things –

• Write creative product descriptions. Don’t create boring copy that’s filled with keywords. Think of your product descriptions as a conversation between you and the customer. Do you really think rattling off some specs will make them eager to buy it?
• Enable product reviews. Reviews means that there’s fresh, user-generated content being created. That means your product pages are regularly updated and Google likes that.
• Create a FAQ section. This solves two problems with one stone. It answers any questions your customers might have about products, while at the same time creating new content for SEO.
• Create videos. Videos are a great way to explain how your product works in visual format and also keeps visitors engaged for longer on your site. This indicates to Google that you have an interesting site.

Getting the most out of every advertising dollar spent is an important part of using Google Ads for most advertisers. Here are some tips for effective advertising with Google Ads from Google Ads Community Experts.

Focus on your advertising goals

Before building your Ads campaign, decide what your marketing objectives are. Deciding what you want before you create your campaign rather than after it’s already built will ensure that your targeting, budget, and formats are optimally effective and will help you set realistic goals for what you get out of each of these campaign settings.

Allocate budget based on performance

If you’re managing several campaigns, be sure to assign more budget to campaigns that perform better and are helping you reach your business goals and less budget to those that you’re using to experiment or that generate lower ROI.

Understand your audience

Creating effective ads can often demand your time to really consider the people who you hope will see and respond to your ads. Think about their specific needs and the questions they might have, and address their questions and needs with your product information, ad text, and other assets. Here are ad creation best practices for App campaigns, Display campaigns, Search campaigns, Smart Shopping campaigns, Video campaigns

Use location targeting when applicable

Use the advanced location options during and after campaign creation for optimal location targeting and improved campaign performance.

Prevent overexposure to your ads

Use frequency capping (available for Display and Video campaigns) to limit the number of times your ads appear to the same users. This helps ensure that your customers and potential customers aren’t overexposed to your ad.

Target for relevance

Content targeting, such as use of keyword, placement, and/or topic targeting, allows you to show ads alongside relevant content that your customers and potential customers are viewing. For greater scale, consider using audience targeting such as demographic targeting, remarketing, custom audiences, and affinity audiences, which targets the customer as opposed to the page content.

Observe to optimize

Take advantage of the observation setting, where applicable. The observation setting won’t affect who can see your ads or where they appear, but it does allow you to monitor how ads are performing for your selected placements, topics, or audiences while your campaign is running. You can use the data in these reports to optimize your ad performance.

Simplify

Try to consolidate campaigns of the same campaign type, when possible, so that you have fewer campaigns to manage and monitor and organize your campaigns for optimal budget allocation.

Use campaign types strategically

But consider using different campaign types if showing a variety of ad types in various places can help you meet your business goal(s). Learn about all of the different campaign types that are available so you can choose the one(s) that best line up with your marketing goals.

Bid with purpose

Use Smart Bidding when useful and applicable. For Search Campaigns, Smart bids are set in real-time at the search term level, and for other campaign types, dozens of signals are used to set the optimal bid.

Track conversions for quality

Use conversion tracking and offline conversion tracking to help optimize the quality of your conversions. Offline conversion tracking helps you track conversions when leads make it further down the sales funnel. You can also leverage Google Analytics with Google Ads to advance your insights.

Test, test, test

Test, test, and test to learn and then optimize. For example, you can run ads with different text for the same product so that you can see which text and/or images are most effective. You can also test different types of targeting. Then based on the outcome of that testing, you can optimize your ads to include the highest performing assets.

Lets Talk

To Improve Your Marketing Effort. Learn How We Can Help Google Ads. No Contract Obligations. Only Pay For Results. Advertise Globally. Show Your Ads In Local language. Set Your Own Advertising Budget. Pay Only When Your Ad Is Clicked.

Grow your business with Google Ads. Get in front of customers when they’re searching for businesses like yours on Google Search and Maps. Only pay for results, like clicks to your website or calls to your business. Get started.

Things to do

Google Webmaster Guidelines provide general design, technical, and quality guidelines. Below are more detailed tips for creating a Google-friendly site.

Give visitors the information they’re looking for

Provide high-quality content on your pages, especially your homepage. This is the single most important thing to do. If your pages contain useful information, their content will attract many visitors and entice webmasters to link to your site. In creating a helpful, information-rich site, write pages that clearly and accurately describe your topic. Think about the words users would type to find your pages and include those words on your site.

Make sure that other sites link to yours

Links help Google crawlers find your site and can give your site greater visibility in Google search results. When returning results for a search, Google uses sophisticated text-matching techniques to display pages that are both important and relevant to each search. Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote by page A for page B. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

Keep in mind that Google algorithms can distinguish natural links from unnatural links. Natural links to your site develop as part of the dynamic nature of the web when other sites find your content valuable and think it would be helpful for their visitors. Unnatural links to your site are placed there specifically to make your site look more popular to search engines. Some of these types of links (such as link schemes and doorway pages) are mentioned in Google Webmaster Guidelines.

Only natural links are useful for the indexing and ranking of your site.

Make your site easily accessible

Build your site with a logical link structure. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.

Use a text browser, such as Lynx, to examine your site. Most spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, DHTML, or Macromedia Flash keep you from seeing your entire site in a text browser, then spiders may have trouble crawling it.

Things to avoid

Don’t fill your page with lists of keywords, attempt to “cloak” pages, or put up “crawler only” pages. If your site contains pages, links, or text that you don’t intend visitors to see, Google considers those links and pages deceptive and may ignore your site.

Don’t feel obligated to purchase a search engine optimization service. Some companies claim to “guarantee” high ranking for your site in Google’s search results. While legitimate SEO consulting firms can improve your site’s flow and content, others employ deceptive tactics in an attempt to fool search engines. Be careful; if your domain is affiliated with one of these deceptive services, it could be banned from our index.

Don’t use images to display important names, content, or links. Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in graphics. Use ALT attributes if the main content and keywords on your page can’t be formatted in regular HTML.

Don’t create multiple copies of a page under different URLs. Many sites offer text-only or printer-friendly versions of pages that contain the same content as the corresponding graphic-rich pages. If your site has identical content that can be reached via different URLs, there are several ways of indicating the canonical (preferred) version of a page. More information about canonicalization.

I hope this message finds you safe and well. As Google approaches the holiday season, Google is happy to announce two new beta features that will help you improve your price competitiveness.

1) Pricing Rules

“Buy on Google” is launching an automatic product repricer to help you be more competitive through dynamic price adjustments.

You will be able to set pricing rules that the new feature will use to adjust the product price within the range you set (ex. adjust price to 10% below regular product price). Find out more about early results here. 

If you would like to participate in this Beta launch, please fill out this form. 

2) Separate pricing for Buy on Google & Shopping Ads

This new feature will allow you to set separate prices for these two channels directly within your product feed. 

If you would like to participate in this Beta launch, please fill out this form. 

Need Help? Reach out to out support team. We’re here to help.

86% of online consumers say they’re on the lookout for shopping ideas as they watch videos or explore content across the web. With Discovery ads, you can connect with up to 2.9 billion people as they browse their favorite Google feeds—whether they’re watching videos on YouTube, scrolling through Discover, or checking new offers in Gmail—all with a single, easy-to-use campaign.

Follow these best practices to set up your Discovery Ads campaigns for success:

• Start with audiences that currently drive performance in your account. Focus on existing customers, people who have already visited your website, and people similar to your customer base. For example, you can start with custom intent and in-market audiences. Remember to keep audience expansion enabled to maximize your reach to new audiences who are likely to convert.

• Wait until the campaign has at least 40 conversions before making any changes. Since Discovery campaigns perform better with more data, we also recommend setting a daily budget at least 10 times your target cost-per-action.

• Use the single-image and multi-image carousel options with both square and landscape images. Discovery campaigns automatically select the best-performing assets, so it’s important to include several image options to drive performance. Download the creative asset guide for details on how to build visually inspiring ads.

Need help managing your Discovery ads in order to reach more potential customers and grow online sales for your business, give us a call — we’re here to help!

People are searching for new information and ways to manage their lives. In fact, a recent Google/Ipsos survey showed 32 percent of U.S. consumers shopped online with a brand they hadn’t before the pandemic. This shift in demand has created opportunities for businesses to find new customers and grow.

Below are some effective ways you can drive high-quality leads and connect with people who are most likely to buy your products or services:

• Uncover opportunities by using optimization score and Performance Planner. Use automated tools to make bid and budget changes based on shifts in customer demand.

• Include the optional “Visit website” link in your call ads. This option makes it easier for people to learn more about your business before calling you and can help you drive higher-quality calls.

• Add lead form extensions. People can tap your ad and easily share information with you right as they’re searching for what they need—even before visiting your site.

Resources to help you generate quality leads

Businesses now have to be better at both generating and managing their leads. Google is sharing a collection of lead generation resources on their Advertising Solutions Center. There, you’ll hear more about the latest updates and learn from other businesses who made the shift to digital.

When people visit your website or stop by your store, you have an opportunity to understand what they’re looking for and how your business can help. With Customer Match, you can use first-party data to engage with these customers and people like them—all in a user and data privacy-safe way. To learn how you can ensure user privacy within your marketing, download The marketer’s playbook.

Below are some best practices to help you make the most out of your data using Customer Match:

• Keep list segmentation broad and enable Smart Bidding. Smart Bidding will automatically take Customer Match lists into consideration when making bid decisions, so you don’t need to over-segment your lists.
• Use your match rate to help diagnose if you have any data formatting issues. Match rate is the percentage of your upload that was able to be matched to Google users, so the bigger the list size the better.

• Use similar audiences with Customer Match as a prospecting strategy. Similar audiences can use your Customer Match lists to find people who share similar characteristics, behaviors, and interests.
• Save time by using a verified Customer Match upload partner. For example, use the Zapier integration to automatically upload and refresh your customer lists. You can also add information to your lists like alternate email addresses, which can increase match rates and list size.