Google offers new ways for travel and retail businesses to get to their market niche via smarter search results and ads.
The company announced the updates during a New York City event, and followed up with an AdWords blog post.
Retailers will be able to tap into an improved ad format for Showcase Shopping. According to the company, these ads are crafted to target shopping search terms such as "women's evening dresses" or "bedroom furniture," but the broadness of the terms can sometimes be disconcerting.
Currently, there is only a single product result for these searches, but Google will allow merchants to build a small gallery of related products. This should help customers choose the appropriate item from the list.
Merchants who are running Shopping Campaigns in the UK, Australia and the U.S. will see the Showcase Shopping ads in effect sooner than others. Starting in July, the standard Shopping format on broad queries will apply to the three markets.
Shopping ads on YouTube will also get a revamping. The main concept remains the same: viewers see an item in a video and buy one just like that for themselves. However, advertisers will be able to add a companion banner ad below the video where they will highlight a number of related products. A product picker is also in tow, making it easy for users to select specific products that appear in the commercial.
Last but not least, Google promises that cross-border searches and purchases will be made easy. This means that buyers will have zero trouble converting prices into their local currency, as the feature will do the currency calculations for you.
Looking at the travel enterprises, Google wants to embed "smart filters" into its searches. They should help customers filter their hotel results based on detailed factors, such as pricing or review scores with a single click.
The company also touts that additional support for multi-layered criteria such as "child friendly hotels in Miami for under $200" is in the works.
A number of Deal labels are posed to appear in Google's hotel results, so that clients can easily pick out the lowest prices. Additionally, travelers will get some tips on how to obtain the best prices, such as shifting their travel dates by a few days. This applies both to plane tickets and lodging.
During the event where Google announced the new features, the company underlined the importance of mobile technology for both the retail and the travel sector.
According to its own data, Google reports that mobile sites constituted 40 percent of all travel-related web traffic for the first quarter of 2016. On a year-over-year comparison, shopping and travel-related searches went up by 30 percent.
At the event, Google's vice president of shopping and travel products, Jonathan Alferness, underlined how important mobile technology is to the shopping and travel sector. He mentions that the features will certainly be implemented on Google's desktop and laptop interfaces, but emphasized that the new additions to the search engine will land on mobile devices first.
For a broader perspective on Google's efforts to help mobile advertisers send their message across, read our coverage on the topic.
