Google AdWords has released Dynamic Remarketing to all advertisers with Merchant Center accounts. Previously Dynamic Remarketing was only available through limited Beta.
What is Dynamic Remarketing? Dynamic Remarketing allows ecommerce advertisers with Google Merchant accounts the ability to remarket to users who have been to their website and re-engage them by showing banner ads with images of the actual products the visitor looked at. Google uses product images from an advertiser’s Merchant account to populate the products on the banners. In addition, advertisers can customize the banners to their brand by editing the colors and designs and even add their brand’s logo.
In order to implement Dynamic Remarketing, an advertiser must have a Google Merchant account as well as add remarketing code throughout their website.
Dynamic Remarketing ads are more engaging to past website visitors because they show the exact products that the visitor was viewing.
Below is a screen shot that Google provided of Dynamic Remarketing banner ads.
In mid-October, Google transitioned its free, organic links of Google Merchant to a paid model called Google Shopping via Product Listing Ads. Google has just announced that it plans to release the same commercial model internationally to the following countries: the United Kingdom, France, Japan, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Brazil, Australia and Switzerland.
The search engine says that it will be a gradual transition in order for merchants to optimize their campaigns and the first major change will be on February 3, 2013. At this time, Google will release cleaner results for shopping queries in addition to some of the new commercial formats on Google.com that appear like square units. These new results will replace current search results and will be labeled as “Sponsored” and appear in the space that is currently paid search ads. Google expects the international transition to be complete by the end of the second quarter in 2013.
Google’s ultimate goal for the Shopping transition is to create a better shopping experience so that users will find products in one place and are able to compare features and pricing and read merchant reviews easily. Google believes that a paid model for merchants allows better, more relevant product data which will lead to a better experience for shoppers.
Google is in the midst of completing its transition from Google Merchant to Google Shopping and has made numerous changes from the old, free-click model to the new paid platform. Google is now showing results on the right hand side of the search engine results page (SERP) with mutiple Product Listing Ads (PLA) from Google shopping results in the same row. In the past, PLAs were stacked one on top of each other, as previously shown here.
Once the searcher clicks on the link to shop for the specific item on Google, the searcher is taken to a Google Shopping page where the item is categorized by most popular. Another feature to note is that Google tells the user how many nearby stores have the item in stock. Google uses the searcher’s location to find nearby Google Places that have the item in stock.
From there, when applicable, Google will give the user the option to shop by brand, type or by feature. In the example of the query of a digital camera, Google showed the user various digital camera brands, types of digital cameras, and different resolution options.
In addition, at the bottom of the SERP, the search engine has added the following disclaimer: Google is compensated by some of these merchants. Payment is one of several factors used to rank these results. Tax and shipping costs are estimates.
It will be interesting to see what other changes the new Google Shopping paid platform will have before its full transition by the fall.