Google signals start of holiday season with festive roll outs

If you’re already beginning to think about your Black Friday offers, getting your web site ready for Cyber Monday and otherwise planning to give your site a Christmas overhaul in order to ramp up orders, Google is right there with you. The search engine has just debuted the first two of its new seasonal initiatives – so if you’re an online retailer or brand and want to attract more traffic to your website this holiday season, read on …

Shoppable Image Ads No matter how slick your ecommerce website design, how great your products or attractive your pricing, sometimes you need a little extra help to entice those shoppers to visit your website and add a product or two to their virtual shopping trolley. Step forward shoppable image ads.Launched in beta specifically for Christmas this week, Google says this new advert format for retail and brand advertisers will help to generate more sales. The search engine reports that last year, around a third of all consumers shopping online during the festive season looked for pictures before they actually made a purchase.Shoppable image ads can help you to tap into this trend – they display a carousel of images from advertisers and will appear in Google Image search as well as on third party sites. Shoppers can see prices over the image, helping to drive more qualified traffic to your website, and click to see similar products.This function is in beta but is expected to ramp up as the Good Friday machine rolls into action. Video Showcase Shopping Ads One of the things that your web developer or marketing manager will likely have preached is the importance of video. Video is consistently the most shared content format and is a great addition to any website. Now, you can also incorporate your video assets into your Google Ads with the roll out of video in Showcase Shopping Ads. This is a second move which the search engine has made to help retailers and e-tailers make more online sales in the run up to Christmas.With this new initiative, you can use your existing videos within Shopping ads to make better capture user interest and drive more shoppers through to your website during the build up to Christmas and the New Year. Google stats say that Showcase ads can drive 3.6 times more click throughs to your website – making this a good addition to your other marketing plans ahead of the busy Christmas shopping season.