Google has announced a bevy of tools and features for Shopping campaigns, just in time for the big Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales.
The new features, announced at Inside AdWords on Wednesday, include an auction insights report, an improved search impression share view, bid simulator columns, a streamlined workflow for product groups and a diagnostics tab in Merchant Center.
Auction Insights Report
Auction insights report gives advertisers more insights into how their Product Listing Ads (PLAs) are performing compared to their competitors.
The report shows your impression share, the rate of overlap between an advertiser's campaigns and their competitors', and outranking share - based on the number of times an ad outranks competitors' ads.
The accompanying text reads: "See how successful your Shopping campaigns and ad groups are compared to other advertisers in the same Shopping auctions."
These reports can also be segmented by device and day.
Improved Search Impression Share View
Google says: "Search impression share has been revamped to be more useful and aligned with text ads."
Under the dimension tab, it is now possible to analyze impression share at "the granularity you want".
Google notes that there may be discrepancies in Search impression share between October and November, as they now calculate it at account level.
Bid Simulator Columns
Bid simulator columns allow you to estimate results based on theoretical bid changes. For example, by seeing how many additional clicks you might get if you increase bids by 50%.
Streamlined Workflow for Product Groups
It's now easier for advertisers to spot optimisation opportunities within the Product Groups tab by sorting product groups within an ad group based on performance data.
As an example, Google suggests: "You can sort by impression share, find a few product groups with the lowest impression share, and fine-tune those bids with a matter of clicks."
Diagnostics Tab in Merchant Center
The new Diagnostics tab in Google Merchant Center replaces the Data Quality tab. It promises to provide "better insight into the health of your product data".
Google has introduced new reporting tools into the revamped tab to help discover the cause of recent item disapprovals, as well as impact and traffic metrics to aid in identifying the number of items with issues. Users can now also download a report listing all affected items.
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