Shopping Blog

Portlanders know how to mix the urban (killer coffee, music and art) and the small-town (easy walking, biking and socializing). There’s no end to the city’s great restaurants, coffee shops and hot spots, and the locals are more than willing to explore. That’s why, when we started planning the Google Offers beta trial, we knew Portland was the ideal place to get it all kicked off.

Today, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt and VP of Commerce Stephanie Tilenius announced at the D9 Conference that we’re launching Google Offers beta in Portland, Ore. tomorrow.

Our first Google Offer will be from beloved local java shop Floyd’s Coffee. Husband-and-wife team Jack Inglis and Cris Chapman opened Floyd’s seven years ago, offering up espresso, coffee, breakfast burritos and more. They now have two convenient locations—one cozy, brick-lined shop in Old Town and another Stumptown watering-hole in Buckman.



With Google Offers, we’re working with great local businesses like Floyd’s Coffee, Le Bistro Montage, Powell’s Books and Ground Kontrol Classic Arcade to help them reach more Portlanders. We hope to bring Google Offers to other cities soon, with New York City and the San Francisco Bay area as our next stops.

You can learn more about Google Offers and sign up at google.com/offers. If you’re a business interested in participating in Google Offers, you can let us know too. Finally, if you’re at the Portland Rose Festival this Saturday, visit our Google booth at CityFair to say hello to our team and learn more about Google Offers.

Posted by Kyle Harrison, Product Manager, Google Offers

As we shared last month, Google’s Online to Store research shows that online marketing campaigns are effective in significantly increasing in-store sales. In other words, digital ads influence shopping decisions made in physical store aisles as well as those made in front of computer screens.

This week, we’ll take a closer look at the individual Online to Store study results of technology company Hewlett-Packard (HP). HP collaborated with Google and Applied Predictive Technologies (APT) to quantify the impact of online search ads on in-store purchases. They conducted a four-week long study in which users were exposed to HP search ads co-branded with a leading national electronics retailer. Would a significant number of users who clicked on a co-branded HP/retailer ad after searching on keywords such as “hp laptop” and “laptop computer” then purchase a product at the physical retail location, generating incremental in-store sales?

The answer, the study showed, was yes. The online campaign resulted in a 530% overall return on advertising spend (ROAS) for computers, with a 1,090% ROAS in the top 25% of markets based on specific store attributes for the computing category. Furthermore, HP found that ads for higher-end models and ads in more prominent positions on the searchresults page were correlated with an even higher increase in physical store sales. This suggests that some users who conduct research online may be more comfortable purchasing higher-end items at a local store, and also highlights the importance of ad rank in influencing users.

To learn more about this and other studies, visit Google’s new Think Insights site.

Posted by Emily Parker, The Google Tech Team

At an event in New York City today, we announced Google Wallet, an app that will turn shoppers’ phones into their wallets. Google Wallet will enable consumers to store their credit cards, coupons, loyalty and gift cards securely on their phone, so they can pay, redeem offers, and earn loyalty points - all with a single tap of their phone. It is in a field test now and will be available to all consumers this summer.

A key benefit to retailers will be the integration of coupons, or offers, into Google Wallet. We’ve been testing a variety of offers - from discounts directly within search ads to check-in offers to offers in Google Places. Over time, consumers will be able to save each of these offers directly to their Google Wallet. That means consumers will get the benefit of carrying their offers with them at all times, bringing retailers targeted foot traffic.

The integration of offers into Google Wallet will enable merchants to close the loop by directly connecting their online and mobile advertising with offline purchases. In addition, Google Wallet provides merchants with a way to engage with customers in-store, enhancing the customer experience. Many leading merchants are integrating Google Wallet into their stores.



From the outset, Google Wallet will be compatible with more than a hundred thousand merchants nationwide that are part of the MasterCard PayPass network - a merchant point of sale service that enables consumers to tap to pay.

We’re also working with leading retailers and point of sale systems companies to integrate Google Wallet into their physical store experience. Participating retailers include: American Eagle Outfitters, Bloomingdale’s, Champs Sports, The Container Store, Duane Reade, Einstein Bros. Bagels, Foot Locker, Guess, Jamba Juice, Macy’s, Noah's Bagels, Peet’s Coffee & Tea, RadioShack, Subway, Toys“R”Us and Walgreens.

Google Wallet is currently being field tested, and we plan to release it soon. In the meantime, we encourage you to learn more at our website: www.google.com/wallet.

Posted by: Spencer Spinnell, Director of Commerce Partnerships

With the rainy spring this year, vacations are top of mind for most Americans right now, and this trend is expected to last through July. According to a recent USA Today study, more than six in ten Americans say it’s important that they get away from home this year.

Unfortunately, getting away from home might be more of a financial challenge than expected due to the high gas prices. As such, stay-cations are on the rise this year, with consumers placing an increased importance on staying local and decreasing spend. Among Americans who report making major changes to their lives to deal with gas prices, 32% said they will drive less or stay home more.

With more people remaining within their local communities, Retailers should focus on promoting seasonal products that are easy to transport or even use in your own backyard. Here’s a few helpful tips to keep in mind:

Use Display Ads to Drive Interest:
Show ads alongside relevant articles and content related to the rising gas trends or fun summer activities using eye-catching banner ads. Text ads are easier to create, but banner ads may have a longer-lasting impact. E-Marketer reported that use of standard banner ads grew 23.1% from 2009 to 2010. With the growth of display and increasing emphasis on local, relevant deals, display ads are a great way to supplement your text ads. Don’t forget to include all ad sizes!

Expand Your Reach Locally:
Explore ideas for new keywords with Google’s Contextual Targeting Tool to ensure you have as many potential keyword themes as possible. Type in a local attraction and let the system do the heavy lifting. Also remember to make as many tightly-themed display ad groups as possible.

Remember the Essentials:
Gas grills and tents are on the rise, so gear up and get ready for the camping trip and bonfire! Promoting outdoor accessories will be helpful for the last-minute camper looking to get away for a nice weekend.




It’s not too late to capture these growing trends and plan for local summer promotions. Remember to stay relevant and communicate the value of your offer through display advertising!

Posted by Nicole Poppe, The Google Retail Team

Editors note: HealthWarehouse.com is America’s largest and fastest growing, accredited online pharmacy, which boasts an inventory of over 4,000 unique prescription drugs. The company was recently featured in Consumer Reports as one of the top drugstores in the United States. We’ve invited today’s guest blogger, Marston Alfred, Director of E-commerce at HealthWarehouse.com, to share why HealthWarehouse implemented Google Commerce Search. To read more, download the case study.


























HealthWarehouse isn’t your typical pharmacy. Instead of physical stores, we rely on a website where we sell and ship medications to tens of thousands of customers throughout the country. And while an online-only presence allows us to save on typical infrastructure and personnel costs, it also presents some unique challenges.

From the beginning, implementing quality e-commerce search was critical to our business. Medication names are complicated and difficult for pharmacists to spell – let alone the consumer (amlodipine benazepril as an example) – so it’s necessary that we have a search and navigation experience that can interpret customer intent as well as a pharmacist could. But as we quickly found, e-commerce search can be very complicated.

To tackle the search problem we evaluated several third-party e-commerce solutions, but these providers would have required us to manually register thousands of common medication misspellings and synonyms – which wasn’t feasible or scalable, and would have required constant fine-tuning. Providing relevant results for our audience was also an issue. In search, our customers demand the expertise and intuition of a pharmacist, and you can imagine how this would be difficult to provide without reams of historical data related to medicine and our business. Enter Google.

Google Commerce Search utilizes the same underlying spellchecker and thesaurus of Google.com (tried and tested on over one billion queries across every imaginable category each day) to automate the display of results on retail websites. Google Commerce Search uses these signals to provide a search and discovery solution that performs phenomenally out-of-the-box, and only gets better the more people use it.

We implemented Google Commerce Search, and results for complicated prescription names were instantly more accurate, providing a 40% decrease in call-center volume (literally overnight). Clearly, visitors are now finding and discovering products much better on their own. In line with this unexpected drop in customer support calls, actual searches increased 85%, unique visitors and page views doubled, and conversions rose 19%. Search became a much more valuable component of our website.

Switching to Google Commerce Search not only increased our revenues, but also allowed us to focus and scale our core business (which, believe it or not is affordable medication and not IT). More importantly, Google’s search and navigation solution has significantly improved product discovery, putting affordable medication into the hands of more people.

Posted by Marston Alfred, Director of E-commerce, HealthWarehouse

Think it’s too late to launch an online campaign to drive sales this Memorial Day weekend? Think again! With Memorial Day less than two weeks away, now is the time to really hunker down and make sure your campaigns are ready for the first long weekend of the summer! Here are a few points to consider:

Online-to-Store
While this could easily be the topic of another post entirely, it’s worth pointing out that on big holiday weekends, consumers are looking to take advantage of the extra time off and do some shopping. If your business is offering Memorial Day weekend promotions, it’s never too late to get the word out about those deals! Don’t have time to create new ad copy? Consider leveraging sitelinks within your campaigns to highlight Memorial Day sales, printable coupons or even special online-to-store pickup and return policies! Using Google Insights for Search, we can see that the search volume for [printable coupons] experienced a bump around Memorial Day in 2010, and is expected to do the same again this year:














Big Ticket Items
Big ticket items, such as furniture, mattresses, and appliances aren’t usually purchased on a whim. Due to the large financial commitment, these purchases are often the result of a joint decision making process. With routinely busy schedules, what better time to plan a family shopping trip than a long weekend? Google search trends back this up. Take the term [mattress sales], for instance. In 2010 this term experienced the greatest search volume in the days leading up to Memorial Day weekend, Labor Day weekend and Black Friday, as illustrated here:














The same holds true for [furniture sales]:














If you’re a retailer in this space, make sure to capitalize on this opportunity! Whether or not you have brick and mortar locations, now is the time to get your deals in front of potential customers!

After you’ve spruced up your campaigns for the long weekend, sit back, relax and have a cold glass of lemonade in honor of our soldiers past and present. Happy Memorial Day!

Posted by Erin Maddens, The Google Retail Team