With Thanksgiving just around the corner, followed by Black Friday and Cyber Monday, there’s little doubt that the holiday season is well and truly upon us. For marketers, this is a busy time of year with seasonal sales targets and plenty of opportunities to finish the year strong bearing down on us. This year, Google has made the prospect of bagging those all-important seasonal sales a little easier with the timely unveiling of several new Merchant Centre tools. If you’re an online retailer, read on to find out what’s new and discover a few new ways to get your virtual tills ringing before 24 December.
Supplemental feeds
If you’re a seasoned Merchant Centre user, you may well have been frustrated with the limitation set of only being able to upload product data from one primary feed. Thankfully, this restriction is now a thing of the past as Supplemental Feeds launches, marking a useful new addition to digital marketing services from Google.
The Supplemental Feeds function gives ecommerce stores the option to add or override product attributes and product values uploaded via the primary feed. This means that product information can be revised from multiple sources. You can use this option to add holiday promotion IDs to certain products or replace attribute values generated from the primary feed with new values from a supplemental feed.
You’ll find that this affords you much more flexibility to react to seasonal demand, push seasonal promotions and be more responsive to changes as the holiday season approaches. It’s a more time-effective and efficient way to manage your product information in Merchant Centre – which will hopefully translate to more sales.
Multi-country feeds
Those retailers who sell in more than one country will also get a seasonal boost as Merchant Centre unveils a single multi-country feed designed to make it much easier to take your products to new global customers.
This new capability is straightforward to use – as all digital marketing services should be. Simply specify new countries with the same language as your primary feed. Merchant Centre will then show the correct price in the local currency when your products are displayed in those new markets. If you want to sell in countries with a different language to that used in your primary feed, you can implement Feed Rules to fill in the relevant language-dependent values from a supplementary feed.
Use Opportunities to drive more clicks
In addition to exploring international markets with the multi-country feeds option, you can use the new Opportunities tab to get a much clearer idea of ways to improve your product data and Merchant Centre campaigns, along with a picture of the likely results for your efforts.
If you have been struggling to optimise your Merchant Centre account or hit sales goals, this is a useful tab and great way to ensure you aren’t missing high-value sales opportunities before the seasonal rush gets underway.
