April 29, 2025 • 28 mins
4 - Google just dropped major Google Merchant Center updates—are you ready?
In this episode, we break down what these changes mean for eCommerce brands, especially when it comes to email marketing, audience segmentation, and growing your owned channels.
Joining us is Tanya Chandik, an eCommerce Strategist who’s seen firsthand how platforms evolve.
Tune in to learn how to turn these updates into a competitive edge and avoid costly mistakes.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:57):
Hello. Hello everyone and welcome back to Email Einsteinthe podcast by flowium. We are your hosts, Vera and
Andre Andrey. Say hi. Andtoday we are joined by a very special guest
from our team as well. Today we will be diving into thelatest and greatest updates of Google Merchant center
(01:20):
and what it means for all of us in e commerce world. Andjoining us today is our amazing strategist from Flowium, Tanya. And
aside from being a top notch marketer and an awesome colleague,she also now holds a very important title, the owner
of the cutest pet in Flowium. Yes, we literally did havethis little contest last week and her
(01:44):
amazing friendship won that title.
So say hi, Tanya. We're so happy to have you today on this onthis podcast of ours. Yeah, thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here. I
almost want to pull one of them onto the screen. Let's do
this. Oh my goodness. Which one isit? Lola.
(02:09):
I was voting for you, Lola. My vote is
with you with her yoga poses. She's
the sweetest. Okay guys, if you're stilllistening to us but not watching our
us on YouTube, well, you've gotta stop to do whatever you do and justlike go and watch us on YouTube because then you're gonna have a little sneak
(02:32):
peek of Tanya's pets. Okay.
Awesome. In the last few days like we startseeing the questions from customers about this new merchant
like merch. Google Merchant center update. Tobe honest, I know so little about this. I read the blog
(02:52):
post you wrote. Thank you very much for that. Sorry, my voice todayis I'm a little bit sick. But I would like to learn. I
want to take this time to learn from you. I want to know about allthe pros and cons, what's the benefit of it? But
let's start first from what is Google MerchantCenter? Tanya? Yeah, so Google Merchant center is just a
(03:15):
platform that essentially powers your how your Products show up acrossGoogle's organic and paid services. So thinking
search, shopping, maps, et cetera. So it'swhere brands can manage their product, their product data, promotions
and store details to improve visibility on Google. So forexample, when you go to search for
(03:38):
sunglasses on Google and then you see at thetop of the search results a bunch of, you know, product
photos with links to websites, that is,that is derived from, you know, Google's
ecosystem essentially. And. Yeah,
but isn't it, I'm just curious. I mean we'll be talkingabout email marketing and Merchant center is a new release.
(04:05):
But I always thought that top feature is sponsoredthat you have to pay money to be there on top. Isn't it
true? Yeah. So you can run paid
search ads to, you know, boostyour product listings. I would have to look a bit more into
(04:25):
that to.
But there's paid and organic. Okay, so
they have organic. I thought they just haveonly the paid one. Okay, yeah. So
Tanya, let's talk a bit more about this update,specifically email update that they just launched.
(04:47):
What is this thing that everyone talks about? Giveus the gist and how will it affect us as email
marketers? Oh, okay. So Google
is now allowing brands to essentially use their marketing emailsas fuel for organic search visibility. So if you're
opted in, which you will be by default, Google can take keypromo messaging from your emails, for example, like discounts or shipping
(05:15):
offers, and display them directly into search andshopping results. So it's essentially turning your email into a
free ad. That's the nutshell.
But that's a really cool concept because correct me if I'm wrong, forme as a customer to see this advertisement, I
don't even have to necessarily be on your list. Right.
(05:39):
I don't even have to be subscribed. Okay, that's cool. So basically wecan use that email both for our internal email marketing
purposes but also as an external promotion which to us this wasn'tobviously available before. That's cool. But
you know what, I know it's a little bit too technical and we're still newto all of this, but does your email needs
(06:03):
to be like properly format to display? Because I know somebrands use one image email. They like
have a. I don't think they will display that. Like they need todisplay the product. I actually I did some, I did some
search on that. Like I did some like digging and yes Andrew, you arecorrect. Like image only emails is not it for
(06:26):
this like new update. So there are like certain things that you have to have.
You have to have like patterns, headers that are preferably plain text.
You do have to absolutely use the alt text. I know it's like agood thing for us to, to use even like before this was introduced,
but now it's even more important. But what is also crucial moving forwardand I'm sure Tanya will talk about it later as well. Like for example, if
(06:49):
it's like a sales email or promotional email, you have to have in text allof the details of your like promotion. The, the, the, the start of the
promotion, the end of the promotion, like what emails are or like what productsare in sale. So you like have to explicitly say it
in words for Google Merchant center to pull it. Am I rightTanya? Or how, how. Absolutely. So best practices
(07:13):
would essentially include clear promodetails. So dis, discount amount, terms, conditions and end
date. That's extremely important. We have to use subject lines withcontext. So avoiding vague language like
something special here versus get 20% offincluding key text outside of images so Google can read it. So
(07:36):
Vera, you just kind of touched on that and then addingexpiration dates and like I mentioned earlier, so
essentially being really clear on the nose. And, and thento avoid any promos being
placed out of context, let's say in the future.
Okay, cool. And like for brands, why, why should theylike be excited about it at all? Like what's the, what's the whole deal with
(08:03):
it? Like, what are the other benefits of this, ofthis new update for us as brands? Yeah, absolutely.
So this update essentially blurs the line between email andSEO. So by sending key promotions, launches to
Google, you're essentially turning your email content into a tool fororganic acquisition. So now email is not just
(08:26):
about retention, it's about acquisition, which is absolutely huge.
And yeah, I would say that that is the biggestdriver. So we're essentially supercharging your
SEO by using marketing content thatotherwise would have just been limited to your email list.
(08:47):
Yeah, that's, that's really cool. So I see, Isee there's a bunch of like benefits. But are there in cons
for this? Like why, let's say why should all our clientsnot use this? Like should we just turn it off by
default for all our clients or there are some consto this. Yeah, so I, I, before getting
(09:11):
into the pros and the cons, I think it's really importantto go, I guess myths and facts. So
essentially with this update, if you will be opted inautomatically by default and you can opt out, but essentially
Google is not going to see every email that you send out. Soyou can be a bit more strategic in terms of which emails that you're sending.
(09:35):
So in terms of things being taken out of context, youcan make that strategic decision because the email needs to be
sent manuallyto to Google. So if the email is not sent to Google and
the homepage doesn't display the promotion for example, thenGoogle has no way to find out or use that promo. So if you're doing
(09:58):
an email exclusive promo and you don't want that visible toGoogle, if you're not sending to Google, it won't see anything. Even if
Google can pull promo details from emails, it's also safer topublish the promo on your the promo visibly on your website
to improve that consistency. So just going over quickpros and cons. So pros
(10:21):
free organic exposure beyond your list increase reach withoutad spend A new SEO lever using email content
to rank in Google and this is especially powerful forpromos, sale events and product launches. Guys, let's already start
thinking Black Friday. And then some ofthe consultants would be Google might show old
(10:44):
promos if you don't include clear end dates.
Messaging can be pulled out of context especially if you're usingheavy image heavy emails, loss of visual branding.
So text content will get prioritized for exampleand then you have to manage, you know, your content hygiene. So
accurate links, updated promos, you don't want people clicking through to a brokenlink. So yeah, just on that note to
(11:12):
reiterate kind of like the points that we've already touched on on so duesincluding clear promo details, amount terms, end date, using text
outside of images link to crawlable pages. So public pagesyou can't link to something behind let's say a paywall using subject
lines with context don'twould be relying on image based content. So really heavy image
(11:35):
based emails skipping on expiration details and like Imentioned using gated or login only links. But yeah, to
sum up, definitely there are thepros and the cons. But when you leverage strategic
thinking in terms of what emails do get sent to Google and what emailsdon't, then the pros way outweigh the
(11:59):
cons. So you just need to be a little bit more cognizant of thoseimportant details. So.
Sorry, correct me if I'm wrong Tanya. Like I read it and again I haven'tlike played with it yet. All of this and that I'm going to share
is like purely like research based. So I read that there are liketwo ways of doing that. So you can either send
(12:23):
an email manually to like a certain email address or you canallow it to pull like automatically. Is that correct? Or
you can only do it manually. Yes. So you need to,
you need to send to marketing emailto googlemail.com. oh wait, no. Is that right?
(12:44):
Yes, that's right. Yeah. Obviously wecan link I guess the proper email in the description,
but yeah, so Google can't just see all ofyour emails and pull automatically. I mean potentially you can have it
pull automatically if you send Google through a flow, forexample, they will get all of those emails in the flow. The
(13:07):
emails that you want Google to see to be sentto marketing email to Google. Okay, so
okay, yeah, that makes sense because a lot of brands thatwe work with and Tanya, I'm sure you have like similar strategies as well. It
may be a bit challenging in terms of like privacy or like strategic concerns becausewe do have some brands who have very like cool strategies for
(13:30):
VIP only. So or like email exclusive promise or something.
So I would see how that might become an issue ifwe are not like thinking strategically about it. So I would still want to keep
some promotions for like email only because essentially we do want toown that contact. Right? We do want to provide the exclusive value through
emails. But I like how you can actually pick what exactly you're sendingto that Google thingy. So I see it like
(13:58):
theoretically keep flow separate, let's say talkabout campaigns. So you send a campaign on regular basis and when
you want to include certain campaign in the, ina Google Merchant center, you just add that segment to your
next campaign, like to include that email andI mean hopefully it will be included. Do people need to create
(14:21):
some account on Google because I'm not familiar with thisat all. Or they just send it to that email and that's it. Or do they
need to create something on Google site?
Yeah, so the setting up a Google Merchant center,depending on what your setup is, could be a bit more of a technical
conversation. But essentially yes, you need to set up your domain.
(14:44):
You need to set up all of your, youknow, all of your website and all of that to point to Google Merchant
Center. It's fairly simple. Especially with Shopify,there are areas in the back end that you can just
plug and play, which is really nice. I remember the days where you actually had topull the tags and go into the code of your website. But for
(15:08):
example, on Shopify it's done pretty intuitively. But yes, you do needto set it up. You can't just send to marketing email to google
gmail.com. You probably miss those days. I know you like to play with a
cold. Yeah, you know what with those things I don't
miss it because it was very stressful.
(15:28):
But you can even now upload just like the list, theCSV list with all of your products and products details to
this like Google merchant account or whatever. Like I wastrying to learn how it works. So yeah it's pretty,
pretty straightforward. The good thing about. Sorry just to on that
(15:48):
note, I mean the good thing with Shopify, not to turn this into a whole Shopifydiscussion with data feeds they can pull in your products
dynamically. But yeah, that's a whole other technical conversation so it kind of savesyou some time there. Which is why Andre point I do not miss
the old days of stressing with the code and datafeeds not populating and all of that fun stuff.
(16:41):
I'm just curious about like analytics. Do you knowanything? Let's say we send the email, send the campaign
from Klaviyo. It will got populated inGoogle. Let's say they get 50,000 revenue in Klaviyo.
It should be kind of Klaviyo Google Attribution. But howthe attribution will work and how people will see the analytics of
(17:05):
their campaign.
(17:42):
You know that is a great question that I will probably need to diga bit deeper in with Google Analytics specifically.
I know in Merchant center the analytics areslightly basic but
I was playing with this feature with my own e commerce site overthe weekend and sent out some launch emails with
(18:06):
promos and I did see a48.8% increase in clicks over the past
seven days. If that was attributed to my email,hard to say. But I will, I will definitely do part two for
that question so I can dig into that a bit further to see ifGoogle Analytics tracks that attribution. What is, what is your
(18:29):
E commerce storage? Tell everybody you just got us curious.
Okay, it's, it's interesting. SoI essentially sell a software that creates custom
made garments instantly. So this ismainly for the sewing community and my target audience
specifically are those who makecostumes for artistic athletics. So dance,
(18:56):
gymnastics, synchronized swimming, figure skating. SoEssentially what the user does is they can put in
their, their measurements of their client and thenout pops a custom sewing pattern that's made to measure
so they can create custom made garments in secondswhen previously. This process
(19:18):
takes at least five hours, a ton of math and a lot offit issues. So it's essentially a software geared to
the sewing community. The link is the name isMy slope. So M I, S, L, O, P, E.
And yeah, it's very niche. It's very niche, but it solves a very,also a very niche problem. But yeah,
(19:42):
that is, that's biz. Thank you for sharing. Awesome. So
guys and girls who are listening, go to my slob. My slope.
Okay. Yeah, my slope dot com. No, can you spell itagain? Because I misspelled M M Y or. M I
M I, M I S O. Oh my gosh. M I, S,L, O P, E. Listen, it's not going to make sense unless
(20:07):
you are. If you, unless you sew, you sewin design. No, but you can, you
can follow Tanya's email strategy and like seehow, how she's doing. So you can spy on her. Oh yeah,
absolutely. My welcome flow is pretty fire. Do you work with
this, the stirrup brand? Like we just got the brand who islike actually on the dancing? No, gymnastic
(20:34):
clothing brand. We just got the new project. Oh no.
You should be part of that team or at least an advisor.
Well, yeah, I'm definitely. Check that out. I'm going to send someslacks after we hop off the call.
Excellent. Cool. Tanya, what were you doing with your
(20:55):
emails differently this weekend when you were playing with themcompared to what you were doing before? Considering all of this
new Google Merchant center updates.
Yeah, absolutely. So first thing I did wasI added the Gmail email.
The Gmail email, the Google Merchant email into mylist. But word of caution, you do need to
(21:23):
ensure that if you don't want it going through yourflows, you have to make sure you put some filters and exclusions.
Also in terms of exclusions,Google, the Google Email can only open email. So if you have
any, let's say parameters for your send, that will excludethose who haven't clicked and you want to send to Google, you have to be
(21:48):
cognizant of that. But essentially, yeah, I had all of the termsand conditions of the launch and the promo that I was running written in
text and it was the perfect opportunity because I wasdoing a launch and a promo at the same time. So essentially I just
plugged in, plugged in the email and wait to Seewhat happens. We did make some sales so it was a. It was a great
(22:11):
launch. These keep us supposed to. You probably
will be testing more because from all our kind of clients andexperiments you're probably the first one we are doing this on. So I would be
interested in that higher click through rate. A higher click through ratesto the keeping because of the merchant center or you just did the
great email and it was campaign with a higherclick through rate in general. So the click through rate pretty much
(22:38):
was the same. That wouldn't have impacted itbut what would have impacted the success of my
launch weekend essentially is just more traffic clickingthrough to the website. So essentially I just acquired more
leads during my last weekend. Yeahanalytics remains KPIs remained pretty standard
(23:02):
par for the course but greater lead acquisition. But listen Ecommerce is all about numbers so with more traffic comes more
opportunity for conversion comes more profit so.
Well I'm curious since I mean mostly we useKlaviyo but Probably in other ESPs you can add the
utms as well. So when you send that email and sayGoogle decided to show it in their merchant center all
(23:29):
links do they keep the same utms or theykind of kind of clear them up and there's no utms
because if they use the same utms you are able to see the higher traffic.
Oh that that's an interesting question becauseyeah that would. Be.
(23:51):
That is something I would need to look into. But that is
if you have you said you saw higher traffic toyour site to see from what sources you've got maybe
merchant center have their dedicated UTM oryou can add a source in Google Analytics.
(24:13):
Yeah so I didn't dive into Google Analytics. I just lookedat the seven day average compared to the previous period
basic. So I did see an increase there. So yeah, you'll haveto stick around for a part two when I actually go dig deeper into
Google Analytics. I haven't haven't gotten gottenmy feet too wet this weekend. My
(24:37):
Flowium clients come first so I'llI'll have to keep you posted on that when I dive deeper into
the the numbers on the weekend. Have you talked to your Flowium
clients about it yet? Have you introduced this concept tothem? What is the sentiment?
We talked briefly with one of my clients when the launch wasinitially rolled out. I do have a client call in about an
(25:06):
hour so I will have to follow up on that question aswell where we'll be discussing it in greater depth. But
I gave them the overview last week and they seemed excited soyeah, this is definitely an exciting, an exciting update.
It's essentially like getting a whole new team as part of yourmarketing department for free. So that is just, you know, no
(25:29):
one, no one can say no to that. Right. What's your
advice for all of us who are just going to present this concept tothe clients? Like, why should they be excited about it?
Yeah, absolutely. I would say that the main takeaway is that,you know, email not only is a channel for retention,
(25:49):
it can now be a channel for acquisition, which isabsolutely huge because acquisition is the name of the game. In
addition to that, just to be really clear with how it works, sodispelling any myths, like I mentioned earlier, it's not
that Google can read everything that's going on and we need to panic.
It really is something that we can use strategically. Sothat is another fun tool that we put in our toolbox
(26:16):
and discuss with our clients when we're building out our strategies for the quarter.
Awesome. And I assume that this, this feature is availableonly for merchant brands, somebody who sell physical goods online
because like at Flowium we also run some kind of promotions orlike giveaways. It will probably not work for us.
It's because we are like B2B. That's a good question because it
(26:40):
also displays across maps. But so it could beused for a physical location with that, with that theory in mind.
And listen, my product. Oh really it can be used for physical
location. I mean listen from, from the
literature it mentioned. Hold on, let me justpull up my maps. I have bunch
Andr (27:03):
of service businesses like local service businesses that I currently like consulting on the side
and this is like game changer would be for them because they,I mean local businesses, they do have like some promos
either it's like cleaning H vac systemor so Interesting. I need to like research more about
(27:27):
this. So I'm just looking at a notes here.
Google Maps for local businesses promoting in store eventsor offers Google search results when users search for the brand
or related offers. The Google Shopping tab and other Googleservices where merchant centered data is used. So
essentially what I gather is ifyou could promote could be used but we might need
(27:54):
to, you know, clarify those details a bit more to getthe best answer. But yeah, and listen, I sell a digital product
and I'm able to leverage this. It's a digital product but it still hasa product page, product description, all of those good things. But did you
try to use your keywords and search it andfind it your kind of organic listing on the Google merchant center.
Tanya (28:19):
Oh, good question. Like I mentioned, I haven't. I haven't gotten a chance to. Yeah, yeah, because
into the KPIs and the results, I need to do alittle Google audit as well. Haven't. Haven't done that in a
while as well. But I will definitely keep you posted on that question. Perfect.
Yeah. Let's continue conversation
(28:43):
on Slack and we need to kind of dig deeper here andexplore it. I think it's a great opportunity for all our clients.
Thank you so much, Dania. It was fun learning it from one ofthe first explorers of this topic. Thank you so much, Daniel. Yeah, my
pleasure. Thank you. Take care, you guys. Thank you. Bye.
Andriy (29:02):
See ya.
Hello. Hello everyone and welcome back to Email Einsteinthe podcast by flowium. We are your hosts, Vera and
Andre Andrey. Say hi. Andtoday we are joined by a very special guest
from our team as well. Today we will be diving into thelatest and greatest updates of Google Merchant center
(01:20):
and what it means for all of us in e commerce world. Andjoining us today is our amazing strategist from Flowium, Tanya. And
aside from being a top notch marketer and an awesome colleague,she also now holds a very important title, the owner
of the cutest pet in Flowium. Yes, we literally did havethis little contest last week and her
(01:44):
amazing friendship won that title.
So say hi, Tanya. We're so happy to have you today on this onthis podcast of ours. Yeah, thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here. I
almost want to pull one of them onto the screen. Let's do
this. Oh my goodness. Which one isit? Lola.
(02:09):
I was voting for you, Lola. My vote is
with you with her yoga poses. She's
the sweetest. Okay guys, if you're stilllistening to us but not watching our
us on YouTube, well, you've gotta stop to do whatever you do and justlike go and watch us on YouTube because then you're gonna have a little sneak
(02:32):
peek of Tanya's pets. Okay.
Awesome. In the last few days like we startseeing the questions from customers about this new merchant
like merch. Google Merchant center update. Tobe honest, I know so little about this. I read the blog
(02:52):
post you wrote. Thank you very much for that. Sorry, my voice todayis I'm a little bit sick. But I would like to learn. I
want to take this time to learn from you. I want to know about allthe pros and cons, what's the benefit of it? But
let's start first from what is Google MerchantCenter? Tanya? Yeah, so Google Merchant center is just a
(03:15):
platform that essentially powers your how your Products show up acrossGoogle's organic and paid services. So thinking
search, shopping, maps, et cetera. So it'swhere brands can manage their product, their product data, promotions
and store details to improve visibility on Google. So forexample, when you go to search for
(03:38):
sunglasses on Google and then you see at thetop of the search results a bunch of, you know, product
photos with links to websites, that is,that is derived from, you know, Google's
ecosystem essentially. And. Yeah,
but isn't it, I'm just curious. I mean we'll be talkingabout email marketing and Merchant center is a new release.
(04:05):
But I always thought that top feature is sponsoredthat you have to pay money to be there on top. Isn't it
true? Yeah. So you can run paid
search ads to, you know, boostyour product listings. I would have to look a bit more into
(04:25):
that to.
But there's paid and organic. Okay, so
they have organic. I thought they just haveonly the paid one. Okay, yeah. So
Tanya, let's talk a bit more about this update,specifically email update that they just launched.
(04:47):
What is this thing that everyone talks about? Giveus the gist and how will it affect us as email
marketers? Oh, okay. So Google
is now allowing brands to essentially use their marketing emailsas fuel for organic search visibility. So if you're
opted in, which you will be by default, Google can take keypromo messaging from your emails, for example, like discounts or shipping
(05:15):
offers, and display them directly into search andshopping results. So it's essentially turning your email into a
free ad. That's the nutshell.
But that's a really cool concept because correct me if I'm wrong, forme as a customer to see this advertisement, I
don't even have to necessarily be on your list. Right.
(05:39):
I don't even have to be subscribed. Okay, that's cool. So basically wecan use that email both for our internal email marketing
purposes but also as an external promotion which to us this wasn'tobviously available before. That's cool. But
you know what, I know it's a little bit too technical and we're still newto all of this, but does your email needs
(06:03):
to be like properly format to display? Because I know somebrands use one image email. They like
have a. I don't think they will display that. Like they need todisplay the product. I actually I did some, I did some
search on that. Like I did some like digging and yes Andrew, you arecorrect. Like image only emails is not it for
(06:26):
this like new update. So there are like certain things that you have to have.
You have to have like patterns, headers that are preferably plain text.
You do have to absolutely use the alt text. I know it's like agood thing for us to, to use even like before this was introduced,
but now it's even more important. But what is also crucial moving forwardand I'm sure Tanya will talk about it later as well. Like for example, if
(06:49):
it's like a sales email or promotional email, you have to have in text allof the details of your like promotion. The, the, the, the start of the
promotion, the end of the promotion, like what emails are or like what productsare in sale. So you like have to explicitly say it
in words for Google Merchant center to pull it. Am I rightTanya? Or how, how. Absolutely. So best practices
(07:13):
would essentially include clear promodetails. So dis, discount amount, terms, conditions and end
date. That's extremely important. We have to use subject lines withcontext. So avoiding vague language like
something special here versus get 20% offincluding key text outside of images so Google can read it. So
(07:36):
Vera, you just kind of touched on that and then addingexpiration dates and like I mentioned earlier, so
essentially being really clear on the nose. And, and thento avoid any promos being
placed out of context, let's say in the future.
Okay, cool. And like for brands, why, why should theylike be excited about it at all? Like what's the, what's the whole deal with
(08:03):
it? Like, what are the other benefits of this, ofthis new update for us as brands? Yeah, absolutely.
So this update essentially blurs the line between email andSEO. So by sending key promotions, launches to
Google, you're essentially turning your email content into a tool fororganic acquisition. So now email is not just
(08:26):
about retention, it's about acquisition, which is absolutely huge.
And yeah, I would say that that is the biggestdriver. So we're essentially supercharging your
SEO by using marketing content thatotherwise would have just been limited to your email list.
(08:47):
Yeah, that's, that's really cool. So I see, Isee there's a bunch of like benefits. But are there in cons
for this? Like why, let's say why should all our clientsnot use this? Like should we just turn it off by
default for all our clients or there are some consto this. Yeah, so I, I, before getting
(09:11):
into the pros and the cons, I think it's really importantto go, I guess myths and facts. So
essentially with this update, if you will be opted inautomatically by default and you can opt out, but essentially
Google is not going to see every email that you send out. Soyou can be a bit more strategic in terms of which emails that you're sending.
(09:35):
So in terms of things being taken out of context, youcan make that strategic decision because the email needs to be
sent manuallyto to Google. So if the email is not sent to Google and
the homepage doesn't display the promotion for example, thenGoogle has no way to find out or use that promo. So if you're doing
(09:58):
an email exclusive promo and you don't want that visible toGoogle, if you're not sending to Google, it won't see anything. Even if
Google can pull promo details from emails, it's also safer topublish the promo on your the promo visibly on your website
to improve that consistency. So just going over quickpros and cons. So pros
(10:21):
free organic exposure beyond your list increase reach withoutad spend A new SEO lever using email content
to rank in Google and this is especially powerful forpromos, sale events and product launches. Guys, let's already start
thinking Black Friday. And then some ofthe consultants would be Google might show old
(10:44):
promos if you don't include clear end dates.
Messaging can be pulled out of context especially if you're usingheavy image heavy emails, loss of visual branding.
So text content will get prioritized for exampleand then you have to manage, you know, your content hygiene. So
accurate links, updated promos, you don't want people clicking through to a brokenlink. So yeah, just on that note to
(11:12):
reiterate kind of like the points that we've already touched on on so duesincluding clear promo details, amount terms, end date, using text
outside of images link to crawlable pages. So public pagesyou can't link to something behind let's say a paywall using subject
lines with context don'twould be relying on image based content. So really heavy image
(11:35):
based emails skipping on expiration details and like Imentioned using gated or login only links. But yeah, to
sum up, definitely there are thepros and the cons. But when you leverage strategic
thinking in terms of what emails do get sent to Google and what emailsdon't, then the pros way outweigh the
(11:59):
cons. So you just need to be a little bit more cognizant of thoseimportant details. So.
Sorry, correct me if I'm wrong Tanya. Like I read it and again I haven'tlike played with it yet. All of this and that I'm going to share
is like purely like research based. So I read that there are liketwo ways of doing that. So you can either send
(12:23):
an email manually to like a certain email address or you canallow it to pull like automatically. Is that correct? Or
you can only do it manually. Yes. So you need to,
you need to send to marketing emailto googlemail.com. oh wait, no. Is that right?
(12:44):
Yes, that's right. Yeah. Obviously wecan link I guess the proper email in the description,
but yeah, so Google can't just see all ofyour emails and pull automatically. I mean potentially you can have it
pull automatically if you send Google through a flow, forexample, they will get all of those emails in the flow. The
(13:07):
emails that you want Google to see to be sentto marketing email to Google. Okay, so
okay, yeah, that makes sense because a lot of brands thatwe work with and Tanya, I'm sure you have like similar strategies as well. It
may be a bit challenging in terms of like privacy or like strategic concerns becausewe do have some brands who have very like cool strategies for
(13:30):
VIP only. So or like email exclusive promise or something.
So I would see how that might become an issue ifwe are not like thinking strategically about it. So I would still want to keep
some promotions for like email only because essentially we do want toown that contact. Right? We do want to provide the exclusive value through
emails. But I like how you can actually pick what exactly you're sendingto that Google thingy. So I see it like
(13:58):
theoretically keep flow separate, let's say talkabout campaigns. So you send a campaign on regular basis and when
you want to include certain campaign in the, ina Google Merchant center, you just add that segment to your
next campaign, like to include that email andI mean hopefully it will be included. Do people need to create
(14:21):
some account on Google because I'm not familiar with thisat all. Or they just send it to that email and that's it. Or do they
need to create something on Google site?
Yeah, so the setting up a Google Merchant center,depending on what your setup is, could be a bit more of a technical
conversation. But essentially yes, you need to set up your domain.
(14:44):
You need to set up all of your, youknow, all of your website and all of that to point to Google Merchant
Center. It's fairly simple. Especially with Shopify,there are areas in the back end that you can just
plug and play, which is really nice. I remember the days where you actually had topull the tags and go into the code of your website. But for
(15:08):
example, on Shopify it's done pretty intuitively. But yes, you do needto set it up. You can't just send to marketing email to google
gmail.com. You probably miss those days. I know you like to play with a
cold. Yeah, you know what with those things I don't
miss it because it was very stressful.
(15:28):
But you can even now upload just like the list, theCSV list with all of your products and products details to
this like Google merchant account or whatever. Like I wastrying to learn how it works. So yeah it's pretty,
pretty straightforward. The good thing about. Sorry just to on that
(15:48):
note, I mean the good thing with Shopify, not to turn this into a whole Shopifydiscussion with data feeds they can pull in your products
dynamically. But yeah, that's a whole other technical conversation so it kind of savesyou some time there. Which is why Andre point I do not miss
the old days of stressing with the code and datafeeds not populating and all of that fun stuff.
(16:41):
I'm just curious about like analytics. Do you knowanything? Let's say we send the email, send the campaign
from Klaviyo. It will got populated inGoogle. Let's say they get 50,000 revenue in Klaviyo.
It should be kind of Klaviyo Google Attribution. But howthe attribution will work and how people will see the analytics of
(17:05):
their campaign.
(17:42):
You know that is a great question that I will probably need to diga bit deeper in with Google Analytics specifically.
I know in Merchant center the analytics areslightly basic but
I was playing with this feature with my own e commerce site overthe weekend and sent out some launch emails with
(18:06):
promos and I did see a48.8% increase in clicks over the past
seven days. If that was attributed to my email,hard to say. But I will, I will definitely do part two for
that question so I can dig into that a bit further to see ifGoogle Analytics tracks that attribution. What is, what is your
(18:29):
E commerce storage? Tell everybody you just got us curious.
Okay, it's, it's interesting. SoI essentially sell a software that creates custom
made garments instantly. So this ismainly for the sewing community and my target audience
specifically are those who makecostumes for artistic athletics. So dance,
(18:56):
gymnastics, synchronized swimming, figure skating. SoEssentially what the user does is they can put in
their, their measurements of their client and thenout pops a custom sewing pattern that's made to measure
so they can create custom made garments in secondswhen previously. This process
(19:18):
takes at least five hours, a ton of math and a lot offit issues. So it's essentially a software geared to
the sewing community. The link is the name isMy slope. So M I, S, L, O, P, E.
And yeah, it's very niche. It's very niche, but it solves a very,also a very niche problem. But yeah,
(19:42):
that is, that's biz. Thank you for sharing. Awesome. So
guys and girls who are listening, go to my slob. My slope.
Okay. Yeah, my slope dot com. No, can you spell itagain? Because I misspelled M M Y or. M I
M I, M I S O. Oh my gosh. M I, S,L, O P, E. Listen, it's not going to make sense unless
(20:07):
you are. If you, unless you sew, you sewin design. No, but you can, you
can follow Tanya's email strategy and like seehow, how she's doing. So you can spy on her. Oh yeah,
absolutely. My welcome flow is pretty fire. Do you work with
this, the stirrup brand? Like we just got the brand who islike actually on the dancing? No, gymnastic
(20:34):
clothing brand. We just got the new project. Oh no.
You should be part of that team or at least an advisor.
Well, yeah, I'm definitely. Check that out. I'm going to send someslacks after we hop off the call.
Excellent. Cool. Tanya, what were you doing with your
(20:55):
emails differently this weekend when you were playing with themcompared to what you were doing before? Considering all of this
new Google Merchant center updates.
Yeah, absolutely. So first thing I did wasI added the Gmail email.
The Gmail email, the Google Merchant email into mylist. But word of caution, you do need to
(21:23):
ensure that if you don't want it going through yourflows, you have to make sure you put some filters and exclusions.
Also in terms of exclusions,Google, the Google Email can only open email. So if you have
any, let's say parameters for your send, that will excludethose who haven't clicked and you want to send to Google, you have to be
(21:48):
cognizant of that. But essentially, yeah, I had all of the termsand conditions of the launch and the promo that I was running written in
text and it was the perfect opportunity because I wasdoing a launch and a promo at the same time. So essentially I just
plugged in, plugged in the email and wait to Seewhat happens. We did make some sales so it was a. It was a great
(22:11):
launch. These keep us supposed to. You probably
will be testing more because from all our kind of clients andexperiments you're probably the first one we are doing this on. So I would be
interested in that higher click through rate. A higher click through ratesto the keeping because of the merchant center or you just did the
great email and it was campaign with a higherclick through rate in general. So the click through rate pretty much
(22:38):
was the same. That wouldn't have impacted itbut what would have impacted the success of my
launch weekend essentially is just more traffic clickingthrough to the website. So essentially I just acquired more
leads during my last weekend. Yeahanalytics remains KPIs remained pretty standard
(23:02):
par for the course but greater lead acquisition. But listen Ecommerce is all about numbers so with more traffic comes more
opportunity for conversion comes more profit so.
Well I'm curious since I mean mostly we useKlaviyo but Probably in other ESPs you can add the
utms as well. So when you send that email and sayGoogle decided to show it in their merchant center all
(23:29):
links do they keep the same utms or theykind of kind of clear them up and there's no utms
because if they use the same utms you are able to see the higher traffic.
Oh that that's an interesting question becauseyeah that would. Be.
(23:51):
That is something I would need to look into. But that is
if you have you said you saw higher traffic toyour site to see from what sources you've got maybe
merchant center have their dedicated UTM oryou can add a source in Google Analytics.
(24:13):
Yeah so I didn't dive into Google Analytics. I just lookedat the seven day average compared to the previous period
basic. So I did see an increase there. So yeah, you'll haveto stick around for a part two when I actually go dig deeper into
Google Analytics. I haven't haven't gotten gottenmy feet too wet this weekend. My
(24:37):
Flowium clients come first so I'llI'll have to keep you posted on that when I dive deeper into
the the numbers on the weekend. Have you talked to your Flowium
clients about it yet? Have you introduced this concept tothem? What is the sentiment?
We talked briefly with one of my clients when the launch wasinitially rolled out. I do have a client call in about an
(25:06):
hour so I will have to follow up on that question aswell where we'll be discussing it in greater depth. But
I gave them the overview last week and they seemed excited soyeah, this is definitely an exciting, an exciting update.
It's essentially like getting a whole new team as part of yourmarketing department for free. So that is just, you know, no
(25:29):
one, no one can say no to that. Right. What's your
advice for all of us who are just going to present this concept tothe clients? Like, why should they be excited about it?
Yeah, absolutely. I would say that the main takeaway is that,you know, email not only is a channel for retention,
(25:49):
it can now be a channel for acquisition, which isabsolutely huge because acquisition is the name of the game. In
addition to that, just to be really clear with how it works, sodispelling any myths, like I mentioned earlier, it's not
that Google can read everything that's going on and we need to panic.
It really is something that we can use strategically. Sothat is another fun tool that we put in our toolbox
(26:16):
and discuss with our clients when we're building out our strategies for the quarter.
Awesome. And I assume that this, this feature is availableonly for merchant brands, somebody who sell physical goods online
because like at Flowium we also run some kind of promotions orlike giveaways. It will probably not work for us.
It's because we are like B2B. That's a good question because it
(26:40):
also displays across maps. But so it could beused for a physical location with that, with that theory in mind.
And listen, my product. Oh really it can be used for physical
location. I mean listen from, from the
literature it mentioned. Hold on, let me justpull up my maps. I have bunch
Andr (27:03):
of service businesses like local service businesses that I currently like consulting on the side
and this is like game changer would be for them because they,I mean local businesses, they do have like some promos
either it's like cleaning H vac systemor so Interesting. I need to like research more about
(27:27):
this. So I'm just looking at a notes here.
Google Maps for local businesses promoting in store eventsor offers Google search results when users search for the brand
or related offers. The Google Shopping tab and other Googleservices where merchant centered data is used. So
essentially what I gather is ifyou could promote could be used but we might need
(27:54):
to, you know, clarify those details a bit more to getthe best answer. But yeah, and listen, I sell a digital product
and I'm able to leverage this. It's a digital product but it still hasa product page, product description, all of those good things. But did you
try to use your keywords and search it andfind it your kind of organic listing on the Google merchant center.
Tanya (28:19):
Oh, good question. Like I mentioned, I haven't. I haven't gotten a chance to. Yeah, yeah, because
into the KPIs and the results, I need to do alittle Google audit as well. Haven't. Haven't done that in a
while as well. But I will definitely keep you posted on that question. Perfect.
Yeah. Let's continue conversation
(28:43):
on Slack and we need to kind of dig deeper here andexplore it. I think it's a great opportunity for all our clients.
Thank you so much, Dania. It was fun learning it from one ofthe first explorers of this topic. Thank you so much, Daniel. Yeah, my
pleasure. Thank you. Take care, you guys. Thank you. Bye.
Andriy (29:02):
See ya.
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