When Google Merchant Center first introduced promotions, every marketer was excited.
There was now an element that could improve click-through rates and also drive the acquisition of more customers.
It did have its problems, and at times specific promotions were difficult to set up.
Google has revamped its promotion extension function, making it easier for PPC marketers to offer promotions with lower risk of disapprovals.
There are four types of promotion to select from – Amount Off, Percentage Off, Free Gift and Free Delivery.
This means you can offer a monetary discount to customers who buy a certain number of products for example. This is great for bundle selling.
The promotion builder allows users to pin point their spend thresholds, discount amounts and gift descriptions. Once a promotion category is selected, all the applicable options for your promotion will be displayed.
So, if you’re an electrical retailer and want to offer a promotion whereby a customer can receive £20 off their order when they buy a select amount of products, it is now easier to create the promotion in Merchant Center. This has proven tricky in the past for some marketers.
A key issue in Merchant Center previously was in relation to discounts on specific items. From the perspective of PPC managers, it was always great to hear there’s a promotion on the site as the products they advertise become more competitive.
But one headache was that the promotion ID had to be mapped to all products eligible for the discount. This could cause problems, as this needed to be implemented on the content management system (CMS) and the shopping feed.
For manual feeds, this would have been easy. But if you are a retailer selling thousands of products, ideally you want to do this in the CMS and have your shopping feed platform collect the data and feed it through to Google Merchant Center.
So the great thing about the revamp is that is no longer the case. You can now do this within the Merchant Center and choose between four attributes – Item ID, Product Type, Brand, Item Group ID.
This speeds up the process and means there is less reliance on developers. It’s easier to get promotions up and running without having to worry about whether or not promotions have been mapped to the right products in the CMS.
Hopefully, in the future, Google will expand on this and have other attributes such as custom labels available for selection. This will make it easier for PPC marketers to take full advantage of all Google Shopping has to offer.
Remember that in order to have the Promotions tab available to you, you must first apply for this function to be made available through Merchant Center programs.
If you’re interested in working with an experienced PPC agency, get in touch with Williams Commerce.
