Holiday season 2023 is coming soon! Here are four things you can do right now to prepare your business and help turn more shoppers into customers:
1. Showcase fast, free deliveries and easy returns
Be sure to feature shipping information and, if you can, adopt practices that could appeal to holiday shoppers: free shipping, fast delivery, free and extended return policies. You can even showcase a “same-day delivery” if that’s a service you offer.
Google can add your shipping speed automatically if you’re a retailer who ships to the United States. Share your carrier info with us, and we’ll calculate and display estimated delivery times on your products showing organically and eligible shopping ads.
2. Freshen up your product details & make holiday deals stand out!
Fresh, high-quality product details in your Merchant Center feed can make a real difference at the holidays. Now is a good time to make sure your product information is up-to-date:
- Write great titles and descriptions. Are they up-to-date? Are they compelling? Remember to include important attributes like brand, product type, size and color, or check which titles are trending on trends.google.com
- Upload plenty of good images. Offers featuring more than one image often receive 32% more clicks and a 76% increase in impressions. For best results, provide at least 3 high-resolution images for each of your products.
- Make those Holiday Deals shine: Your products can feature the % off badge and strikethrough price or promotions annotations like 10% off. These are enhancements that will really catch shoppers' eyes. You can also show the coupon codes customers need to use to avail of your offer. These badges boost visibility, get more clicks, and convert more.
- Help shoppers complete their purchase with less friction by sending them directly from the Product listing to your checkout page with the checkout feature. Businesses using the Google checkout feature see an improvement in gross merchandise value (GMV) between 1-10%.
- Help customers discover your products by adding reviews and ratings on Google through a supported aggregator for product or store ratings. If you're unable to work with an aggregator, consider uploading a product ratings feed in Merchant Center or integrating with Google customer reviews.
3. Drive more sales with Performance Max
Performance Max campaigns help you reach more customers and optimize ROI across all Google Ads channels and inventory– including Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Discover, and Google Maps.
If you have a Merchant Center feed, your product images, pricing, and other details will be used to develop engaging creative. You should also provide additional text, image and video assets to help Google AI serve even more relevant ads and engage more customers as they move between channels to complete their holiday shopping. Check additional best practices for Performance Max for retailers.
Getting started is easy and you can even run a Performance Max campaign directly from Merchant Center. In addition, if you use an e-commerce platform like Shopify, Woo, WIX, or PrestaShop, you can easily sync your products and run Performance Max campaigns directly from your e-commerce platform.
4. Improve your results by checking out your Performance tab
The new Performance experience in Merchant Center and Merchant Center Next is designed to provide answers to your top performance questions, whether that means a quick overview or more detailed analysis. You can see your top-selling products and brands, pricing benchmarks, explore the competitive landscape, and get ideas for even better performance.
- Regularly check your tailored suggestions: Go to the Merchant Center overview [Classic, Next] to find recommendations forwhich products to focus your attention on and quick performance tips that are relevant to your business.
- Optimize your product assortment: Check what needs re-stocking, ideas for new additions, show best selling products on your homepage or set the right bids and budgets to your ads campaigns. With Market Demand you can discover the top selling products on Google, the most popular from your catalog and those that are gaining popularity.
- Improve product pricing with thePricing report: Get suggested pricing for your offers and see the estimated impressions, clicks, conversions, and gross profit uplift for each.
- Understand market trends and your competitive landscape with the competitive visibility report, to make the most out of seasonal offers and estimated click potential by product, and take action with Price Insights and assortments insights.
- Find out how to deliver a great shopping experience for your customers, through the Shopping Experience Scorecard: The scorecard shows you how you compare to other merchants that sell within your category across delivery times, shipping costs, return windows and costs and (if you are opted in) Store rating.