Google Ads announced a slew of updates yesterday, including new reporting, shopping tools, and other advertising features, including, of course, AI advertising capabilities. “Today, at our annual Think Retail event, we announced several new updates to Google tools to help retailers maximize their success and be agile during this year’s shortened holiday shopping season,” Google said.
The new Shopping Trends report helps Google Merchant Center users and advertisers explore shopping trends relevant to their inventory, helping retailers discover viral moments that may interest shoppers and ensuring product descriptions use the right terminology for where shoppers are.
The new reports are:
These display popular shopping queries ranked by popularity and organized by topic and product.
Merchant Center also now provides a generative, AI-powered analytics summary at the top of the Analytics tab. This was previously available in the Google Ads AI summary, but Merchant Center now provides a summary of recent product performance.
It looks like this:
And with new custom reports, Google is using AI to surface answers to specific questions about your product data. Just enter a brief description of the data analysis you want to see (such as “Show me how my best-selling dresses are performing”) and Google will generate a custom data set with the answers you need. The tool uses generative AI to turn your request into a custom report that highlights your own performance data.
It looks like this:
In addition to the above, Google has also added new Google Ads features such as an automated onboarding process, which allows Google to automatically sync store inventory from your website and integrate it into your Merchant Center account. Also, the “pick up later” feature in local inventory ads helps you convert local shopping intent into in-store sales and foot traffic. New profit goals, currently available in beta, will also help merchants better understand their ad performance and further optimize their campaigns. Additionally, brand exclusions can now be customized at the format level, giving you more granular control by specifically excluding brand queries across either search ads or shopping ads within Performance Max.
More information can be found here.
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