Earlier this year, Google released ‘Popular Products’ on Google Shopping, a new feature designed to enhance product visibility on Google Search and make it easier for shoppers to find inspiration, compare products and decide to make a purchase for Apparel, Clothing and Accessories. To fully benefit from this new Google shopping feature, retailers and online shops that operate through Google Merchant Centre will have to provide optimised and well-structured product feeds to get more visibility and boost conversions.
‘Popular Products’ is available on mobile device searches, and it’s a new opportunity for consumers to browse and find specific products from a multitude of retailers, all in one place. However, this new feature isn’t just beneficial for consumers, it puts retailers in a better position to appear on organic search results, reach more customers and boost conversions, without paying extra fees.
In this article, we look at how ‘Popular Products’ works, the benefits for e-commerce sellers and how to ensure your listings appear in the ‘Popular Products’ section.
Google introduced the ‘Popular Products’ feature in response to the increasing competition from Amazon and other online marketplaces. It’s part of Google’s efforts to increase product search experiences and up its e-commerce game. As Google states, “Once you know what you want to buy, it can sometimes be hard to uncover all the different stores that carry an item so you can pick exactly what you want. With this new experience, we’ve done the hard work for you by bringing products from many stores together.
To start browsing, consumers can search for specific products like “floral dresses,” “womens leather belt” or “high waist jeans.” Google will then pull together a list of popular products from various e-commerce stores, bringing them together in the new section on Search.
Shoppers can then filter the search results by size, style, fabric and more. Thanks to the images displayed for each product, customers can browse through them and choose their preferred item. Once they’ve picked the item, they can view the items and information about prices, images, brand and more.
As shown in the video below (Credits to Google), shoppers have to scroll down on their device to view the grid layout of ‘Popular Products.’
Google indexes, organises and regularly updates product information from over a million online shops and then shows them to shoppers. Merchants are not required to pay to be featured on Popular Products and they can on Google Search index for free.
In addition to being completely free, there are ways through which retailers can boost the chances of their advertised items appearing in the ‘Popular Products’ section.
Google 'Popular Product' does not come with additional costs. It falls under the organic search and is completely separate from other paid Google shopping Ads.
Fully-optimised product feeds allow retailers to maximise their potential and take advantage of the newest features on Google Shopping. We've covered the importance of product feed optimisation in several knowledge posts and with our experience, we've come to the conclusion that state of your product feeds will boost your chances of appearing on Google's Popular Products. Below are some good tips on how to optimise product feeds and boost the chances of being featured on ‘Popular Products’.
1 - Use relevant keywords and optimise product titles
Retailers should find the most important keywords for their products and ensure they are placed at the beginning of their product titles and across their product descriptions for better chances of Google indexing. Although keywords are an important part of the product feed optimisation process, merchants must avoid using this attribute incorrectly or excessively. Using an excessive number of keywords will only produce the opposite result to what you were aiming for.
2 - Submit high-quality images
With ‘Popular Products’, there’s a great emphasis on visuals, therefore it’s important that merchants only submit high-quality images that will best appeal to customers online. Google’s imagery requirements include submitting images not larger than 16 MB, of at least 650×850 pixels and that do not include watermarks, logos or other promotional content. Discover more about Google’s imagery requirements here.
3 - Submit demographic attributes
Defining demographic attributes is extremely important when it comes to selling clothing and apparel. Merchants should use the ‘Gender’ field to determine who the product is designed for. Google then combines this field to additional details such as Age Group and Size to determine the target audience to show each product to.
4 - Add optional attributes and complete GTIN fields
The more attributes you add to your product feeds, the better chances you have to appear in organic searches. These can be Brand, Colour, Material, Size or any other attributes that are important to a user when searching for a specific product.
A Global Trade Item Number (GTIN) is the number that uniquely identifies a product and including them within the product feeds increases the impressions on the product.
Are you interested in learning more about how to get your listings featured on Google ‘Popular Products’? Visit our Product Feed Optimisation page to read about product feeds best practices or contact us today to schedule a demo of our software, which gives you simple optimisation rules that generate the best results in conversions and Return on Investment.
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