As of May 2024, Google will be making changes based on how conversion data is used on Google Shopping. Tracking conversions helps to understand the effectiveness of your Google Shopping campaigns and enhances the shopping experience for users. If you have an online store that uses Google Merchant Centre or a Shopify store, this update will be relevant to you.
By analysing conversion data, you can gain insights into customer behaviour, allowing you to improve your campaigns. These changes aim to use conversion data to make shopping on Google more intuitive and trustworthy for users, ultimately benefiting both shoppers and merchants.
What’s being changed?
Google will use your conversion data to create a customer history signal that highlights an online shop’s popularity to Google shoppers. This may appear as a visual annotation, such as ‘3K shopped here recently,’ to help build shopper confidence in businesses.
But why is Google doing this? Google is adding a feature to improve its shopping platform by showing how many people have recently shopped at an online store. This aims to build trust and confidence among potential customers through social proof. Highlighting the popularity of a business encourages more users to make purchases, helping consumers make informed decisions and boosting sales and visibility for online retailers.
How does it affect Google Shopping Ads?
These changes will make shopping ads more informative and engaging for users by displaying indicators of a store’s popularity, which can boost consumer trust and drive more traffic to your website. Opting out of conversion data tracking may reduce the effectiveness of your ads and limit the visibility of useful annotations that attract potential customers. Therefore, we advise remaining opted-in to receive the benefits of these new features.
What to do next?
Google will automatically make these changes and does not require you to take any action at this point. Once this update is live, your Google Shopping Ads will include new annotations showing your store’s popularity based on recent shopping activity. These improvements will apply by default, but you can manage your preferences through the Merchant Centre.
How to opt-out
You can opt out of features that display specific conversion numbers by going to your settings or contacting our team for assistance. Opting out of conversion data tracking in the merchant centre will mean that Google will still use the data to power various annotations and features that benefit ad performance, but will no longer display exact conversion figures. To opt out, disable the conversion setting in Merchant Centre or Shopify, or unlink your Google Analytics and Merchant Centre accounts.
If you have any questions regarding this update, feel free to reach out to our team and we will be more than happy to help.
