Google is rolling out product feed support for awareness and consideration Video campaign subtypes, the company announced Friday. The update, which rolls out over the coming weeks, enables brands to show browsable product images below their video ads for campaigns that have “Product and brand consideration” or “Brand awareness and reach” set as the goal.

Previously, Video action campaigns were the only campaign type that could be linked to product feeds from Google Merchant Center.

How it works. When a user is shown your video ad, the panel below the ad automatically expands to show your products. At this time, products only appear when the user’s mobile device is in portrait mode. Selecting an image takes the user to the product landing page, where they can continue the transaction. 

Advertisers must include at least four products in their Merchant Center product feed, with a 1:1 ratio image for each product to be shown (only the primary product image will be used). The Google Ads Help center has more detailed instructions on adding a product feed to your Video campaigns.

Why we care. Advertisers can now make any Video campaign more shoppable without having to create a separate TrueView for shopping campaign. “On average, advertisers that add product feeds to their Video action campaigns achieve over 60% more conversions at a lower cost,” Google said, citing its own internal data in which it compared 941 campaigns with product feeds to campaigns without them. While this new feature may help you achieve greater efficiency, it’s always important to test it out for yourself to assess how it may or may not benefit your overall strategy.

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For the past several days, 2 million or so of the domains hosted on SiteGround were potentially not being crawled and thus indexed by Google Search. There was some sort of “network issue between AWS Global Accelerator service and Google,” the company said and as of this morning, the issue was resolved.

When the issue began. Matt Tutt first reported about the issue this past Tuesday, November 9th. So the issue started sometime before November 9th, Matt suspects it started as early as Monday, November 8th.

Here is a screenshot showing how Google Search Console’s URL inspection tool was unable to access sites hosted on SiteGround. As you can see from the screenshot below, Google is reporting that it failed to crawl the page. Matt posted more debugging details on his post.

Confirmation. Then on November 10th, SiteGround confirmed the issue and said it is investigating. “We have escalated the issue to Google and we are working to troubleshoot and identify the cause of the problem,” the company said.

The issue. On November 11th, SiteGround confirmed the issue was between Amazon Web Services and Google. The company said “we traced it down to a network issue between AWS Global Accelerator service and Google. We’re collaborating with engineers from both teams to fix it.”

Resolved. Then a day later, on November 12th, SiteGround confirmed the issue was resolved and that it can take a bit more time for DNS to update but once the update is propagated properly, Google will once again be able to crawl sites hosted on SiteGround. The company said “We are glad to inform you that we have implemented a fix for the Google bot crawling issue experienced by some sites. Websites are already being crawled successfully. Please allow a few hours for the DNS changes to take effect.”

Google advice. John Mueller of Google posted some advice on Twitter on how Google deals with these outages. In short, don’t worry too much, the issues you may have experience from the outage will auto correct and “settle down.” There won’t be any “lasting effects” to the outage, John added. John posted several tweets, here is the first one if you want to click on it to read through the rest.

Why we care. If you are one of your clients are one of the two million domains hosted on SiteGround, you may have been impacted by this. That means any new or updated content or pages on your site was invisible to Google for most of the work week.

The issue is resolved and those pages should be crawled by Google going forward. But you may want to annotate your analytics and reporting if you were impacted by this crawling issue.

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Google logo schema now supports ImageObject type, in addition to the URL type, according to updated information on the help document. Google said this provides “new flexibility” to specify an organization logo using these schema markup.

What is new. The logo required properties use to just say it accepted the URL property, but now it says both URL or ImageObject. Here is a screenshot of this section of the help document:

ImageObject type gives you the ability to add additional data to an image, such as width and height, or the author or a caption. Whereas the URL type did not give you these added values.

Why we care. Google is giving us a bit more flexibility with implementing logo schema and structured data going forward. So if you are using these schema, you may decide that going forward that you want to use ImageObject type over URL type – or not.

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Marketing functions are at a turning point in their evolution. In the wake of recent challenges, CMOs and leaders face an imperative: reenvision operations and brand experiences to drive growth without more resources or taking more risk to move faster.

Consistency in providing an on-brand customer experience is critical to scale. Delivering consistent brand experiences (e.g., unchanging messaging, values, and language across channels and the customer lifecycle) drives engagement and growth. Consistent brand presentation can increase revenue by as much as 33%. Inconsistent and off-brand experiences do just the opposite: nearly three-fourths (73%) of consumers would go so far as to switch brands if they don’t receive a consistent experience.

With remote teams and customers engaging in more ways, CMOs can no longer ignore the impact of unwanted variability in the brand experience that their company delivers. But many CMOs feel out of control over all the many places that audiences engage with their brand, making it difficult to maintain a consistent experience.

Let’s look at the perennial challenge of living the brand—and the opportunity that awaits if CMOs rethink their approach to the brand experience.

Why meeting new demands requires a consistent brand experience

Consistency underpins the ability to meet new customer behaviors and demands. Most consumers (75%) now expect consistent experiences across multiple channels. But the focus on omnichannel and influx of new digital channels have opened up more opportunities for disconnected, off-brand content and communications. CMOs need to bridge these gaps to overcome conflicting interactions that slow down teams and erode the brand experience.

On top of customer demands, remote and hybrid work isn’t going away, and the shift to distributed teams makes it more challenging for brands to present a united front. According to IDC, “intelligent digital workspaces” that deliver a single integrated experience to employees—no matter the location—are becoming an expected way of working. With dispersed environments as the norm, CMOs need to find new ways to keep teams in sync so they aren’t weighed down trying to manage brand positioning across touchpoints.

Meeting these new realities starts with a new, scalable approach to the brand experience. By equipping teams to stay on-brand no matter the channel or context, CMOs can drive up customer and employee engagement while positioning the business for growth.

Driving consistent, scalable brand experiences with technology

Traditional approaches to improving the brand experience—like employee training, manual tools, and static guidelines—don’t sufficiently scale and contribute to digital overload among teams. CMOs and teams don’t need more systems to manage; they need ways to enhance existing content and communications that don’t require additional resources.

AI-powered solutions are now available that provide automated ways to keep teams on-brand. Yet surprisingly, Gartner reports only 17% of digital marketing leaders use AI and machine learning. For example, platform-agnostic tools like digital writing assistants and living style guides offer real-time guidance to teams around preferred language, brand names, terminology style, and even tone. By integrating into all the places employees and audiences already engage, these types of tools improve productivity while delivering higher-quality team and customer experiences.

At the same time, CMOs must avoid using automation in a way that impacts the human side of their brand. The focus should be on solutions that fit what IDC calls the “digital coworker”—technology that expands or enhances human capabilities, not detracts from them. The right solutions help teams augment their work across systems and strengthen their own abilities in the process, allowing CMOs to improve the brand experience in a more productive and human-centric way.

Case study: Building customer trust with a unified brand voice

Let’s look at a real-world example from HackerOne, the world’s most trusted hacker-powered security platform committed to mitigating cyber risk. HackerOne’s marketing team needed to present a unified brand voice across two very different but equally critical audiences: enterprise businesses and the hacker community. By deploying AI-powered writing assistance from Grammarly Business, the team can maintain a consistent brand identity and experience across every touchpoint—no matter the writer or channel.

With access to in-line writing suggestions, tone detection, and automated style guides, HackerOne’s entire team can easily follow brand language and guidelines, avoid confusing jargon, and balance the right voice and tone across audiences. The solution updates dynamically and integrates seamlessly into existing workflows, making it easy to push updates on branded terms and preferences to the entire company in minutes. As a result, HackerOne’s metrics show that communication as a whole improved by 66%—measured across quality pillars such as clarity, correctness, delivery, and engagement. 

“HackerOne’s brand must speak to two very distinct audiences: the security teams that benefit from our products and services and the hackers that make up our hacker community,” said Tim Matthews, CMO at HackerOne. “Real-time writing assistance from Grammarly Business lets us deliver higher-quality marketing content for our customers while bringing our brand voice to life consistently across channels. This reduces our time spent reviewing written work and managing our brand identity, improving productivity in a scalable way so we can focus on higher-order growth initiatives.”

The bottom line

As we look ahead, CMOs have a tremendous opportunity to reimagine the brand experience in a way that boosts both productivity and engagement. With a foundation of consistency across the board, they can ensure exceptional customer experiences, free up time to focus on growth, and build resilience that leads to long-term results.

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For more about the importance of a consistent brand experience in driving marketing outcomes, visit www.grammarly.com/business.

This article was written by Dorian Stone, Head of Organizations Revenue, Grammarly.

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