Shopping Blog

When it comes to online marketing, retailers often have significant opportunity to expand their presence. However, limited budgets and/or ROI goals restrict them from reaching many customers seeking the types of products and services they sell. Geo-targeting allows retailers to accomplish their goals without an overwhelming incremental investment. Here are four strategies:

1. Increase sales while maintaining ROI goals.  
Identify campaigns with low impression share. Then pull an geo report (under the "Dimensions" tab in AdWords) for those campaigns to find local markets with high conversion rates. Develop separate campaigns targeting these markets and increase your CPC bids to ensure your ad is showing up in a top position.

2. Earn market share. 
Identify local markets where competitors are attracting more customers, either in-store or online. Beyond your internal competitive intelligence here are other ways to identify these markets:

• Use syndicated data like Hitwise or Compete to pull a report that compares each DMA's percent traffic contribution to your site and your competitor's site. Set up campaigns targeting those DMAs that contribute a larger percentage of total traffic to your competitor's site.

• Use the "Regional Interest" map on Insights for Search to see which states or metros index high against search volume on your competitor's brand terms, yet index on search volume for your brand term. See the charts below as an example. You can see on the heat map that search volume for "Staples" is higher in New England and the Mid Atlantic while search volume for "Office Depot" is higher in the south and west coast. Office Depot could implement geo-targeted campaigns to a few New England markets while Staples might want to consider geo-targeting markets like Miami, Dallas, Austin, New Orleans and Las Vegas.

Regional Interest in the term "Staples" for the last 30 days (report pulled on 1/3/11)

Regional Interest in the term "Office Depot" for the last 30 days (report pulled on 1/3/11)

Once you have identified your markets, develop separate campaigns geo-targeting these markets and increase bids to push your ad into a top position. Ensure your ad is showing up against relevant non-brand terms and implement geo-targeted display campaigns to heighten awareness of your brand among local consumers. Success metrics for this strategy should be a change in share of sales or new customers, click & impression share and an increase in local searches on brand terms.

3. Increase in-store traffic. 
Identify markets where you have a large store footprint and put a higher value on online influenced in-store conversions in those markets. For example, let's say a retailer has 2 stores in Nashville and 10 stores in Boston. When calculating ROI, on your online campaigns your Boston in-store multiplier should be higher than your Nashville multiplier. This should allow you to implement heavy-up campaigns targeted to Boston while maintaining ROI goals.

4. Promote new stores. 
If you are expanding your store footprint into new markets, heavy up on geo-targeted search & display campaigns to promote your store opening. Remember to include all promotions, events and offers associated with the store opening in your copy.

Posted by Eva Barbier, The Google Retail Team

Although many men and women live by the Boy Scout motto of “be prepared” when it comes to Valentine’s Day gift giving, some have adopted a different philosophy… wait until the last minute.

This Friday, millions of procrastinators will be buying gifts for their loved ones online to arrive in time for Valentine’s Day on Monday. For some retailers in the "Flowers, Gifts, and Greetings" categories, Friday is their second biggest sales day of the year (#1 is days leading up to Mother's Day). This means that potential last minute search assets for retailers will be highly generic terms such as “flowers” and “valentine’s gifts“. The top searches in the last seven days for the Flowers and Gift categories are listed below.



























Merchants looking to drive efficient sales volume tomorrow think and value at a geo-level. Monitor the search penetration against the conversion rates for particular cities and offer localized deals to consumers. For example, over the last seven days, Insights for Search indexed the highest search volume for flowers in Boston, with Philadelphia and San Diego following closely behind.














Don’t neglect in-store last minute purchasers who will be perusing the Internet for gift ideas, store locations, hours of operation, inventory selection and deals. Be prominently positioned with gift solutions both online and in-store to ease last minute purchase anxiety. Friday is only the beginning of the weekend warrior purchases prior to Valentine’s Day, so go ahead and let the procrastinators know it not too late to express their love.


Posted by Brett Goffin, The Google Retail Team

While the 2011 economic forecast may be looking sunnier, mother nature must have missed the memo. So much of the country has been blanketed in snow and ice the last several weeks (and may be for weeks to come), and nasty weather can have an interesting effect on retailers big and small, online and brick & mortar.

While schools, offices and roads were closed, the web becomes one of the few outlets still available to people for communication, work, and entertainment, and retailers with a strong online presence are in luck.

The East Coast cannot catch a break this winter, with storm after storm keeping snow plows busy and travelers delayed at airports since before the holidays. Has it been bad for retailers though? Not necessarily. Apparel retailers in Philadelphia actually saw a mid-week search peak on the 27th when they were in the middle of one of the worst blizzards. In fact, most retailers still posted gains in the month of January.















In the Midwest, Chicago was one of the cities that really got the worst of it with 70 mph winds, around 20 inches of snow and temperatures in the double digits below zero. From our Insights for Search tool, however, it’s clear that product search interest in the shopping category has picked up significantly in this metro area over just the past couple weeks and is continuing an upward trend into early February. “Boots”, “shoes”, and “dresses” tops the search term list here.















In Dallas, TX this month, shopping was probably the least of everyone’s concerns with Super Bowl XLV taking place this weekend and preparations for that being hindered by the thick layer of ice covering everything from roads to the Cowboys Stadium. Still though, ticket sales are climbing and event shopping took place online.















It seems that despite Mother Nature’s best efforts, strengthening online retail sales have not been set back by the sleet and snow for the first several weeks of 2011, though certainly the effects must be varied across pure-play e-tailers, multi-channel retailers and pure brick & mortar stores. What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, right?


Posted by Tiffany Lin, The Google Retail Team