Car insurance Channel

Product reviews provide critical information to shoppers making purchase decisions. To help shoppers easily find this information when searching for products, we’re introducing product ratings on Product Listing Ads.

Shoppers in the United States will see product ratings appear in the form of stars and review counts on Product Listing Ads across google.com and google.com/shopping. This 5-star rating system represents aggregated rating and review data for the product, compiled from multiple sources including merchants, third party aggregators, editorial sites and users.

Product ratings for juicers as indicated by stars and a count of total reviews below Product Listing Ads

We believe these ratings will help differentiate products across google.com and google.com/shopping and will help merchants drive more qualified traffic through Product Listing Ads. In initial tests, product ratings also helped increase click-through-rates of Product Listing Ads.

How to enable product ratings on your Product Listing Ads

Product ratings are available to merchants targeting the United States who choose to share all of their product review content with Google, either directly or through an approved third party aggregator.

In order to give merchants time to share their review content, we’re offering a grace period from late July through October, 2014. During this grace period, we’ll allow product ratings to be shown across all Product Listing Ads where we have product review data available. After the grace period, we’ll only show ratings for products from merchants who choose to share their reviews with us.

Product ratings are one of several extensions we may show with Product Listing Ads, so please note that just because a product has reviews does not mean that we’ll always show ratings.

How to share your review content

If you would like to enable product ratings on your Product Listing Ads, please begin the process of submitting your review content to us by completing our product ratings form. During the initial launch, we expect high inquiry volumes and appreciate your patience as we work to address all inquiries.

We also plan to open up product ratings to merchants targeting countries outside of the United States in the coming months, so please stay tuned.

Posted by Mike Capsambelis, Product Manager, Google Shopping

Whether it’s shopping for a TV or planning a trip, people perform multiple searches when completing activities online. Sitelinks have long helped to connect people to the content they’re looking for by linking to specific pages on your websites -- directly from your ad, with just a single click.

Today, we’re introducing dynamic sitelinks: automatically generated sitelinks that appear below your ad text, connecting potential customers to relevant pages on your website more easily. This is another example, like seller ratings, of AdWords tools adding value to your ads while saving time and simplifying campaign management.  However, it’s important to continue adding and optimizing sitelinks because impression share for dynamic sitelinks will be low. In fact, the sitelinks you set up will always show, except for the few instances when the dynamic sitelink might perform better. Learn more
Dynamic sitelinks will begin rolling out globally today. Clicks on dynamic sitelinks are free -- you’ll still be charged for clicks on the headline of your ad and other ad extensions. And while they typically boost the average performance of an ad, advertisers always have the option to disable.

We’re constantly working on ways to improve the ad experience for our users and advertisers. Sitelinks enhance this experience by increasing the relevance of your ads and the relevance of the user experience you deliver after the click. To get more tips on how sitelinks can improve your ads, check out this best practices article.

Posted by Rahul Lahiri, Senior Product Manager, AdWords

Small businesses know the importance of being online, but running that first ad can be overwhelming. Google introduced AdWords Express to help small businesses start advertising online easily, without the need for daily management. Fast-forward nearly three years to today, and businesses around the world are seeing success with AdWords Express.

Nick Valle, owner of Nick’s Towing and Roadside Assistance, uses AdWords Express to run his business from the road. After a decade of driving an 18-wheeler and working part-time for a towing company, Nick decided to start his own small business. He started using AdWords Express six months ago, and his business is doing better than ever. He gets enough calls to keep himself and a driver busy throughout the day, and can easily track calls back to his ad with the call reporting feature.

Get results on the go with the AdWords Express app
Nearly 74% of small business owners like Nick use mobile devices to help manage their business*, and earlier this year, we announced improvements to AdWords Express across all screen sizes. To make starting a new ad and managing an existing one even easier on mobile, we’ve now introduced a free app for Android and iOS users in the U.S. The app gives you access to all the features of AdWords Express while on the go:
Reach the right customers with new targeting options
AdWords Express has added more control where it counts for defining your target audience. Now advertisers can choose exactly where to promote their business -- in their zip code, city, state or others around the country (currently in English-speaking countries). When customers search from their phone, they can get driving directions, call your business, or visit your website in one tap.

Let AdWords Express do the rest
When you select your business category, AdWords Express makes sure that customers searching for related topics see your ad. To improve the targeting of your ad, products and services that are mentioned on your website can now be added by AdWords Express as keywords if they are related to your ad. We’ve also added more negative keywords to exclude unwanted searches, which improves the click-through rates of ads and means a lower cost for advertisers.

Let us know how AdWords Express is working for your business, and stay tuned for additional improvements in the coming months.

Posted by Xuefu Wang, Engineering Director

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With less than eight weeks left until regular Product Listing Ad (PLA) campaigns retire, we're excited that the majority of PLA advertisers have already started taking advantage of Shopping campaigns, and 85% of these have already fully upgraded. Advertisers who’ve upgraded like Farfetch, US Mattress, LiBoutique and ValuePetSupplies are seeing great success thanks to the retail-centric interface, item-level reporting and competitive benchmark data.

For those of you who’ve upgraded, we’re excited to introduce two new tools to make campaign management, specifically bid optimization, easier.

• Bulk Uploads: You now have the ability to download a product group report, edit your bids and destination URLs, and import your changes using bulk uploads. 
• AdWords Editor: We’ve heard your feedback, and with the latest version of AdWords Editor, you can edit your bids and destination URLs for individual product groups at scale. At this time, AdWords Editor doesn’t support the creation of Shopping campaigns or product groups, so please plan time to create your campaigns and subdivide your product groups directly in AdWords.

If you haven’t upgraded to Shopping campaigns, we strongly encourage you to start as all regular Product Listing Ad campaigns will retire at the end of August.

Many third-party agencies and platforms are upgrading advertisers to Shopping campaigns, so if you work with one, reach out and see how they can help. Here are a few resources to answer questions and get you started:

• Shopping Campaign Tutorial Videos
• How to create a campaign
• How to prep my data feed
• How to optimize my product groups
• Upgrade Hangouts on Air
• Shopping Campaigns Upgrade 101: Where and how to start (beginner)
• Shopping Campaigns Upgrade 201: What to do now (advanced)
• Help Centers
• AdWords Help Center
• Merchant Center Help Center
• AdWords Community

Posted by Eric Tholomé, Director of Product Management, Google Shopping

We’re excited to introduce upgraded location extensions, a better way to display your business locations in every ad by linking your Google My Business and AdWords accounts.

Consumers increasingly look online for information such as driving directions, store hours, and products and services available at local businesses. Research shows that 50% of consumers visit a store within one day of searching for local information on their smartphones.
As people are likely to visit a store based on what they see in online search, it’s important to capture every opportunity to showcase your locations. Newly upgraded location extensions allow you to feature your store locations in all campaigns so that every ad can deliver the most relevant local information at the moments that matter.

Many of you already include local business information using campaign-level location extensions in ads on Google Search and Maps. Now there’s a faster, better way to do this at the account level. You can manage all of your business addresses using Google My Business (formerly Google Places for Business). Then, link your Google My Business and AdWords accounts to automatically display relevant business location information in all of your AdWords campaigns.

“Account level location extensions save us hours of time managing large accounts. Adding store locations to a single Google My Business account then linking them to AdWords means we don't have to spend time manually updating addresses in each individual campaign while still maintaining accuracy. Every minute saved is more time that we can spend improving performance.”

Key Benefits

Scale and reach. The new Google My Business makes it easy to manage your business listings on Google and link them to AdWords. Previously, location extensions needed to be set up for each campaign. Now you can set up upgraded location extensions at the account level and they’ll automatically be enabled for all campaigns in your AdWords account.

Easier optimization. The business addresses you link to your AdWords account can also be used for location targeting and bid adjustments. For example: you can target ads to the United States, then bid +80% for the area within 4 miles of all the business locations that you’ve linked in a single step.

Getting Started

1. Create your Google My Business account and add your business locations.
If you’re the owner of a business with physical locations and aren’t using Google My Business yet, you can sign up for free. Google My Business makes it easy to connect with your customers, keep your business information up-to-date, add photos, and more.

2. Link your Google My Business account to AdWords.
Linking your accounts in one easy step allows your business info to appear with your ads. All campaigns will have location extensions automatically enabled when you link your accounts. You’ll also be able to customize your upgraded location extensions for different devices. Learn more
This change is part of our broader effort to help you better reach customers as more people search for locally relevant content while on the go. We’ll continue to improve account location extensions with the goal of upgrading all AdWords accounts over the next few months.

You can learn more about upgraded location extensions in our help center.

Posted by Aileen Tang, Senior Product Manager, Local Ads