Ahead of the busy holiday shopping season, Google is souping up its retail ads with new loyalty features.
The new features include a way for retail brands to offer personalized pricing and shipping perks to members of their brand loyalty programs on both free and paid shopping listings on Google, while also helping brands target lapsed customers.
That includes rolling out a “loyalty mode” within Google Ads’s retention goal feature, which creates bidding strategies designed to target loyal customers. If a brand sees higher lifetime values (LTV) from its existing loyalty program members than from new ones, it may choose to set lower target ROAS for higher LTV customers, Jyotika Prasad, the company’s senior director of retail ads, explained.
In the US, the company has also rolled out personalized annotations on Performance Max Shopping campaigns that emphasize exclusive deals, which can also be used to incentivize lapsed customers to come back, Prasad noted.
In a blog post about the new features, Google said that Sephora’s use of personalized annotations drove a 20% increase in click-through rate in ads served to loyal customers. The new tools incorporate Google’s Customer Match and first-party data to help with targeting.
“Loyalty is a foundational feature,” Prasad told Marketing Brew. “The core of this is really [having] a personalized loyalty experience versus [showing] the same experience to all your customers.”
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Shop till you drop? In June 2024, Google began to offer retail advertisers the ability to display “personalized price and shipping creatives on Google based on a shopper’s affiliation with a retailer.” At the time, it also updated its “deals destination” feature to show shoppers offers in a carousel and enabled price alerts that monitor the price of products and notify users when a price drops.
The company plans to share more about its plans to target retail advertisers at its Think Retail event in September.
Other companies are also leaning into the opportunity that comes from retailers looking to target consumers across the internet. In April of last year, Chase Bank rolled out its retail media network, Chase Media Solutions, and this month, Best Buy introduced a third-party marketplace to complement its own growing retail media network. The Home Depot debuted its retail media network in 2018, later overhauling it with a rebrand to Orange Apron Media in April 2024, a change aimed at helping it stand out in the competitive retail media landscape.