Coming off the crazy holiday season and the New Year’s hoopla this year, Google is back at it and coming in hot with some updates and changes to kick off 2020!

Over the last two weeks, Google Ads has been notifying its advertisers about an upcoming change to standard shopping campaigns, in which they will now be eligible to reach users on Gmail. That’s right, standard shopping ads can now be served up within Gmail!

While details of the change are still coming, we wanted to give you a first look into what we know now and how you should proceed until additional information is made available by the Googs.

• When is the change coming? Standard Shopping campaigns will be eligible to serve ads in Gmail, starting the week of March 4, 2020. If you’ve been around for a Google Ads rollout, then you already know that it can take a few weeks before you see the change in your specific account.
• What is exactly is changing? According to Google Ads, this update is eligible for Standard Shopping campaigns only, and includes both Product Shopping ads and Showcase Shopping ads. This update doesn’t apply to the newer Smart Shopping Campaigns, as historically those were the only campaigns that would show ads on Gmail.
• How do I opt-in? To see if your Standard Shopping campaigns will automatically start serving within Gmail, your campaigns need to be opted-in to run on “Youtube, Gmail and Discover”. Head over to your Campaign Settings tab to see if you have already opted in, and if not, feel free to check that box.
• What will reporting look like? At the moment, it doesn’t appear that there will be a separate report just for stats from Gmail. Instead, the stats will roll up under the Google Display Network but will be inclusive of YouTube and Discover feed results as well – so, there won’t be a way to break out stats by a specific property – only by network. To see stats by network, navigate to your Campaigns tab, click “Segment” and then click “Network”. This should parse out data by network for your campaigns and data rolled up under Google Display Network, which will be inclusive of the results when product ads were served in Gmail.
• Why the change? This change is a positive one and it will greatly expand where and how Shopping ads will show. The expansion is likely due to so many new retailers entering the space each year, as well as current advertisers – many of whom are shifting their more traditional search budget over into shopping campaigns based on its wild success.
• What’s next for Shopping Ads in Gmail? Knowing that our Shopping Ads can soon appear in Gmail is awesome, but how exactly does the targeting work? Is Google looking for relevant keywords within a user’s email and serving our product ads based on those? Or, are they still looking for users searching specific queries in Google but choosing to serve (or also serve) our product ad on Gmail now instead of just in Shopping results? While we don’t yet have the details on exactly how the targeting takes place – if advertisers see positive results, we’d expect Google to open this up a bit and give us more insight into how the targeting works and hopefully turn over some reigns to allow us to control if and when we serve an ad.

Excited for the change? We are too! Feel free to drop us a comment below and let us know what kind of results you’re seeing with the update. We’d love to chat.