Google Adds New Shopping Campaigns Tools: Auction Insights, Diagnostics Tab And More

Strange things happen during the holiday shopping frenzy — search queries sky rocket and inventory fluctuates as demand surges on certain days. Managing spikes in search volume on brand and product queries and ensuring product feeds accurately reflect inventory pose particular challenges. Today, Google announced updates to help retailers keep their Shopping campaigns running smoothly. […]

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Strange things happen during the holiday shopping frenzy — search queries sky rocket and inventory fluctuates as demand surges on certain days. Managing spikes in search volume on brand and product queries and ensuring product feeds accurately reflect inventory pose particular challenges. Today, Google announced updates to help retailers keep their Shopping campaigns running smoothly.

To help retailers plan and manage the types of surges that come on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Google is adding Auction Insights to Shopping campaigns. Auction Insights allow advertisers to see how they stack up against their competitors and use that information in bidding strategies.

google shopping auction insights

Along with this update, Google has made some other reporting available for Shopping campaingns.

Search impression share stats for Shopping campaigns are now aligned to text ads. Google notes that it now calculates Search impression share at the account level, so advertisers may notice a change in impression share between October and November. Device and time segmentation are also now available for Shopping campaigns in the Dimensions tab and Bid simulator columns can be added to the Product Groups tab.

A new “flattened” view in the Product Groups tab allows advertisers to sort your product groups within an ad group based on performance data and easily identify which groups to optimize.

flattened view of google shopping product groups adwords

Diagnostics Tab In Merchant Center

The holidays are no time to have inconsistencies in your product feed lead to your ads getting disapproved from Google Shopping, and yet it’s the time that is most likely to happen as inventory and promotions are in constant flux. To help merchants avoid an ad blackout, Google is adding a Diagnostics tab in Merchant Center. This is the first update to Merchant Center in quite a while.

The Diagnostics tab is replacing the Data Quality tab. It shows consolidated issue reporting for Merchant Center account, feeds, and items to make it easier to spot and act on problems.

google merchant center diagnostics tab

In the tab, merchants will see a historic overview of item eligibility status and be able to download a report containing all affected items and the reasons for disapprovals.

Merchants also see traffic and impact metrics to help identify the number of items are currently impacted by specific issues.

This tab is live now, so you should see it upon your next login.


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About the author

Ginny Marvin
Contributor
Ginny Marvin was Third Door Media’s former Editor-in-Chief (October 2018 to December 2020), running the day-to-day editorial operations across all publications and overseeing paid media coverage. Ginny Marvin wrote about paid digital advertising and analytics news and trends for Search Engine Land, MarTech and MarTech Today. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, Ginny has held both in-house and agency management positions. She can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.

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