Showcase Shopping Ads from Google: Major Change to PLAs for Broad Product queries

As sellers are starting to prep their holiday campaigns, Google announced several new updates to Shopping Campaigns on Tuesday (which also happens to be Amazon Prime Day), including a whole new look for generic product queries.

Showcase Shopping Ads for broad queries

The biggest announcement is a new ad format for broad, non-brand product searches like “women’s dresses” or “patio furniture”. Google says 40 percent of product queries are for these kinds of broad terms. Where in the past Google has often either not shown any product listing ads on broad queries or shown individual products (“patio furniture”, for example, might yield a mix of individual dining and lounge sets), going forward Google will show what it’s calling Showcase Shopping Ads. Ads appear with a main image and two smaller side images related to the product search. At the bottom of the ad is space for a promotional message or distance to the location for Local Inventory advertisers.

Google's "Showcase Shopping" ads, unveiled today to a small group of reporters in New York, are meant to help people find what they're looking for even when the search query they entered is quite vague. According to Google, more than 40 percent of shopping-related queries on Google are for broad terms, such as "summer dress," "women's athletic clothing," or "living room furniture."

With the new format, a retailer can choose to have a certain series of images appear in search results related to various search queries and keywords. If a user clicks an image, they'll be brought to another page with additional information about the products. According to Google, 44 percent of people mentioned using images to find ideas while shopping online, illustrating the role that images play in online shopping. Showcase Shopping ads will be available in the coming weeks to all merchants running campaigns in the U.S., U.K. and Australia.

"This is a different ad format for shopping that will put the retailer first and really help people explore and discover what they want to buy and where to buy it," said Jonathan Alferness, Google's vp of shopping and travel.

Mobile research and mobile shopping both continue to grow in prominence. According to Google, shopping and travel searches are up 30 percent year-over-year, and mobile search related to finding the "best" product has increased more than 50 percent.

Along with the Showcase Shopping ads, Google is also updating its TrueView ads. The format, which was first unveiled last spring, will soon allow marketers to include a banner companion next to a video ad so that users can scroll through product images and information while a video is playing. The latest updates will also let advertisers decide which products they want to highlight as a part of the campaign.

According to Alferness, the number of advertisers using the TrueView product has increased by 50 percent from January 2015 to January 2016, with one in three advertisers using the product on a weekly basis. While he wouldn't provide a benchmark for the growth, Alferness said Google is seeing "really, really great momentum."

"We're trying to find ways to better infuse the unique aspects of the retailer into the ad formats to really help that retailer come first to the consumer as a choice," he said.

Mobile is also playing an increasing role in travel research and booking. According to Google, visits to mobile travel sites comprised around 40 percent of all traffic to those websites during the first quarter of 2016. Mobile conversions have also grown, rising 10 percent. And now, nearly half of all referrals from Google Hotel Ads come from smartphones, growing nearly 2.4 times year-over-year. Brands like La Quinta are seeing mobile web traffic account for a third of all traffic to its website, with mobile bookings increasing by a factor of four in three years.

Because of this, Google is adding features related to booking hotels and flights. For example, through the company's Hotel Smart Filters, users will be able to filter based on prices, ratings or preferences like whether a hotel is "pet-friendly."

Google also is adding features related to finding deals to point out when a hotel's price is lower than normal or when a hotel is running a discounted rate. It's also adding tips for when prices are lower -much like it already does with flights.

Speaking of flights, price tracking also is getting an update and will now allow consumers to skip checking back all the time for the latest prices and instead opt in to track fares for specific routes and dates.

Embrace the new king of Marketing

Content creators ruled and reigned over the marketing and advertising circles for years. But the growth of new media platforms is shifting the power and ad dollars away from content creators to content platform owners. After all, the real value lies in reaching the consumer through the medium and form of his choice. All hail the new king set to reign in the new digital age.

Traditional models of content monetisation such as subscriptions, ticket sales, and license fees used by media companies have been disrupted forever with consumers moving online and demanding access to free online content. While the movement of ad spend from print to online channels has subsidised content costs and helped monetise content, it is yet again threatened with content consumption moving from traditional online media to newer channels offered by internet companies. Ad dollars are following suit proving to be both the biggest disruptor and an opportunity for the industry.

Decelerating content driven growth

“Build it and they come” was the mantra of most media companies in providing good quality content as they expected customers to buy tickets to see movies, subscribe to TV shows, pay affiliate fees to show content, or advertise on the content. This model has stood the test of time and proved to be greatly beneficial to customers over the past few decades in providing quality content at lower and lower costs. As long as ad revenues continued to flow in, media companies could afford to reduce their prices by subsidising it with ad revenues. As long as “content was king”, the advertising spend would follow and continue to fill their coffers up until the new-age customer started viewing content on different media platforms – apps, social media, and peer-to-peer sharing networks. The ad dollars too began shifting to where these customers spend their time and consequently, consume content – the likes of Google, Facebook and their spin offs. The coffers are now running dry.

The numbers speak for themselves:

The ad revenues generated by Google and Facebook already exceed the entire ad spend on TV – and this is without the internet behemoths activating their entire portfolio of media channels (WhatsApp being a case in point).

So why is this happening? And what are media companies doing about it?

Well, not much! Some media companies are imposing punitive price increases on customers who are moving to internet media channels and others are introducing data limits on content consumed. But both these measures are proving to be counter-productive as they drive customers, eventually in greater numbers into the arms of more “flexible” media channels such as apps and social media.

A case in point are the Indian online retailers who realised that they had huge unpaid advertising bills from advertisers who were just not paying up for ads placed on their site. The lack of prepaid ads for smaller advertisers or software to run large ad accounts (like Amazon) led to these gaping holes in their ad revenues. It is this gap that a Google can easily bridge – by providing publishers a safe reliable ad service to receive ads, advertisers an easy-to-use platform to launch their ads, and consumers access to content at a low cost. Media companies are severely restricted by their inability to control these new-age platforms from which customers are now consuming their content. As we now know, the new-age customer spends increasingly larger amounts of time online and demands his content online as well. With 43 percent of his time online spent on search (21 percent) and social media (22 percent), it makes sense for advertisers to spend their ad dollars on Google and Facebook to capture this piece of the customer’s time.

With the above kind of consumer mind share, we foresee that internet companies will morph into advertising firms raking in the ad dollars on different online channels while media companies will struggle with selling content to these internet channel providers.

A new reign and a new strategy

The future of advertising will certainly move online and into the realm of the internet companies. While media companies will continue to be the primary creators and custodians of content, it will certainly not be the king, as most of the media firms are competing for space on the new internet channels by pitching lower quotes. All will need to bow to the new emperor on the block – the internet marketeers. And with the dethroning of content, a new strategy that factors the shift in power and its impact on bottom line will be needed. Being good at creating content is no longer enough, rather how to distribute it on the web.

Credit : This post is first appeared on Forbes Blog