Are you making the most of these new Google features?

This week we received some updates to share for those using Google Merchant Center and an important update to audience features in Google Ads. I’ll explain both below.

Google Merchant Center

Are you making full use of all 5 of these FREE Growth features in Google Merchant Center?​

1. Shopping Experience Scorecard (new)

This a new feature being rolled out to selected businesses to incentivise providing excellent customer experience. Google will reward them with a boost in rankings, a badge to display and other benefits to help consumers find your business.

To find out if you’re eligible for the program, sign in to your Google Merchant Center (GMC) account and click ‘Manage Programs’ to see if Shopping experience scorecard is visible to your account.​

To view your current ‘score’ sign in to your GMC account, from the navigation menu click Growth then Shopping experience scorecard.​

More information is available on this feature in this section of GMC Help​

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2. Google Customer Reviews

Are you regularly asking your customers for google reviews of their customer experience with your business? It can be as simple as adding this request to your dispatch or post-delivery communications.​

Social proof is GOLD to instil confidence in your brand with consumers who are still in the ‘consideration’ stage. It’s also relatively easy to collect from happy customers and completely free!​

You can check you have Google reviews enabled on your account by:

Sign in to your GMC account, click Growth, Manage Programs, Customer Reviews.

Click Enable to sign up.​

To learn more about the basics of adding Google Customer Reviews to your site visit this section of GMC Help. Already have it enabled? Keep up to date with current guidelines in this section of GMC Help.

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3. Product Ratings

This program allows you to display aggregated reviews of your products as a 1-5 star rating in ads and free product listings.

​There are some pre-requisites, such as a minimum of 50 reviews across all of your products. It is recommended you have GTINs (Global Trade Item Numbers) for Google to accurately match reviews to individual products.​

If this feature is applicable to your business, learn more about how to enable and implement it in this section of GMC Help.​

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4. Market Insights Policy

Market Insights allows you to view the price competitiveness and best sellers reports in Merchant Center.

This data is made available for internal use by the retailer, it cannot be resold, publicly displayed or advertised.

Within your GMC Account, click Growth, then Manage Programs to enable Market Insights.

Details of the reports and their use policy can be found in this section of GMC Help.

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5. Opportunities

View customised recommendations based on your current Merchant Center data to drive more traffic to your ads and free listings.

This article explains how Opportunities work, and how to make best use of your customised recommendations.

To view your recommendations, click Growth, then Opportunities.​

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Google Ads Audience Features

Google have launched a number of exciting features to simplify the audience targeting and reporting features in Google Ads.

1. Audience Reporting

First, they launched a simplified view of your audience reporting, consolidating the detailed reporting across demographics, audience segments, and exclusions under a single “Audiences” tab within the left page navigation menu. All the same reporting features are still available.

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2. Change to Audience Terms

Second, you’ll see changes to some of the audience type names in your audience report and throughout Google Ads. For example, “audience types” (these include similar, custom, in-market, and affinity) are now referred to as “audience segments” and “remarketing” is now referred to as “your data”. If you’d like, you can learn more about audience reporting and new audience terms in the Help Center. In your Audience report the term ‘audience’ is being replaced with the term ‘segment’.

Here are the change of terms you’ll see:

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3. Reuse Your Audiences Across Campaigns

Finally, you will now be able to reuse your audiences across campaigns 🙌

When building an audience for use in a campaign, you’ll notice that it will be saved for use again the next time you run a campaign. This feature has already been launched on Performance Max, and will be coming to Discovery, Video Action, and App campaigns in the coming months. If you’d like to learn more about reusing audiences, you can read about it in the Help Center.

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You don’t need to take any action for these new features to take effect.​

As always, if there is anything above we can help explain or navigate how to implement with you please do reach out.