SEO Wash-up Monday 17th January 22

Google Update

Google Merchant Centre adds reporting for Google shopping deals badges – Google has added more reporting to the performance report in the Google Merchant Centre, to report on the new deal badges.

This year, Google will be building new ways for people to explore deals in Google shopping and improving reporting capabilities to help advertisers better understand the performance of deals. The products with a deals badge will now appear in a new feed in the Google shopping Tab “to help you connect with deal-seeking shoppers during the holidays.” Google searchers can find this feed when the “deals” menu is selected on Google shopping or with a new search experience that triggers for queries like “deals” or “black friday.” It will then show all products with a deal badge that are automatically eligible for inclusion and will be highlighted based on the attractiveness of the offer and discount.

Google also added more reporting for these deals. Advertisers will first see which of their products qualify for a deals badge (promotion, sale price, or price drop) right in the products tab within Google Merchant Centre. Within the Google Merchant Center dashboard below, users will be able see that the performance of products with a deals badge is now broken out with data on impressions, clicks and click-through rate, the company said. Advertisers can segment this data by promotion-type, product, brand and category. With this information, you’ll be able to understand your top performing promotions, the types of deals that are driving the most conversions, and the categories that are performing the best when on-sale.

New Google My Business Messaging Read Receipts Setting – Google has now added a read receipts setting to the Google My Business messaging platform. Now you can decide to show your customers who are messaging you via Google maps and search if you read their message or not through read receipts.

There is a new help document on this over here that says “after a recipient opens a new message, the sender gets a “Read” status under the message. This status appears for whoever sent the message in a conversation, either you or your customer. If you have messaging turned on, read receipts will automatically turn on. You can turn read receipts on or off in Google My Business.

To turn it on or off on your computer, simply sign in to your Google My Business and do the following;

• Click Messages and then Settings Settings.
• If you have multiple profiles, open the one you want to manage.
• Turn on or off Read receipts.

Google Ads Appeals Maximum Limits – Users can reach the maximum number of allowed appeals for your Google Ads. There has been chatter on social media about this where Google Ads has a maximum limit of appeals. Although it is unclear if this is a permanent limit or if there’s a cool-down period as Google has not yet responded to the question yet, but there does seem to be a limit and it is unclear how many appeals one can submit and how it is enforced.

Within the Google help docs, it says that if you submit the same appeal too many times, you may see the status ‘Exceeded appeal retry-limit’ in the Appeals History tab within Policy Manager. Google mentions that when you get that message about exceeding, then you have submitted the same appeal too many times, which you should contact customer support for assistance with filing a new appeal.