Showcase Shopping: dead but not dead

...but mostly dead

Google announced that Showcase Shopping ad groups will be removed as of April 1st, 2021 and will stop serving ads. However, Showcase layouts will now be served out of standard product ad groups.

Image courtesy of Kirk Williams

So then:

• is Showcase Shopping dead?
• what does this mean for you?
• and – my favorite part – why did this happen?

In this fascinating story, timing is everything. This was not an overnight change but has been underway for months. But it wasn’t communicated very effectively and, surprise surprise, it all happened because of Smart Shopping Campaigns ??

Let’s have a look.

Farewell Showcase Shopping, we hardly knew ye…

Showcase was introduced to offer a new way of nurturing broad, non-brand searches. The concept was genius: these high-funnel users are not ready to get a product impression yet, because they are way too early in their shopping journey and are researching, browsing, or “just looking”. So let’s give them a visual, engaging format that really showcases a collection of products. 

In many retail verticals, this format caught on quite successfully and performed really rather nicely, capturing up to a third of impressions. It was a win for merchants (a better way to address the upper funnel), for end users (a great sensory shopping experience), and for Google (generating new inventory/monetizing more queries). This last part is important: Showcase impressions are generally viewed as incremental to PLA impressions instead of cannibalistic, because Google serves the ads on queries that are too broad to effectively serve standard PLAs.

But the format had a fatal flaw: asset management.

Unlike standard PLAs that are feed-generated, Showcase ads required some tender loving care. The core assets were cover images, categorical landing pages, and description lines that are hard to automate. This required manual implementation effort from advertisers, but also allowed a certain freedom or control in strategy and creatives.

Our company kick-started an innovation project codenamed #black-widow (all of our innovations are named after Marvel characters to give a certain heroic flavor), which was intended to be an asset manager for Showcase ads. Until we heard Google already had an asset manager planned.

So let’s talk through how Showcase went from a popular and effective ad format with a promising asset manager in the pipeline to a feature now poised on the edge of deprecation. Because something like that doesn’t happen by accident.

Et tu, SSC? 

Google began pivoting heavily toward a new, fully-automated approach to campaign management: Smart Shopping Campaigns. Google has strong financial incentives to drive adoption of this campaign type, but it has sometimes met with friction on the market. That’s why one of their strategies to drive adoption of SSC is that it should, whenever possible, slightly out-feature Standard Shopping. 

This presented a dilemma: Showcase ads, due to the manual configuration needed, were only possible in Standard Shopping – becoming effectively a USP of Standard campaigns and a reason not to adopt SSC. For Google, that’s the wrong balance.

Building an asset manager for the format would only make it – and therefore Standard Shopping – more attractive.

Here you can see an image from Frederick Vallaeys of how a new Showcase format would have looked. As you can see with my red X notations, Google nixed two elements before going live. These two things have something in common: both need inputs from the advertiser, i.e. not fully automated. This format was expected to go live in August 2020.

That tension around full automation is why Google hastily scrapped this approach and rebuilt the format to serve as an SSC-friendly merchant carousel. This new layout had lower asset requirements and could be fully automated out of the feed. 

The trouble there is that Standard Shopping and Smart Shopping should appear on the same SERPs as each other – yet each has a different definition of what a Showcase ad is. So how is it possible to serve your lovingly-curated categorical Showcase ad groups next to a fully-automated SSC merchant carousel?

It’s not.

That’s why timing is so important here. It’s a bit tough to find official communication on this topic (long exhausted sigh), but from what I can see, Google rolled out the Showcase ads in SSC – and therefore the new format – in the first week of November 2020, four months after the aborted launch.

So what did, does, and will this mean for you?

The Walking Dead

It is not 100% clear to me – please let me know if you have more insights or I’ve got something wrong here – but I guess Showcase ad groups became mostly irrelevant in November already. They were still functionally required for Standard Shopping to serve Showcase, but the assets were probably not used anymore (or not all of them anyway). That’s why I like to compare these ad groups to zombies. They’re still alive, but they’re also dead.

This suggests to me that some of the performance changes or volatility resulting from this change probably already occurred. For the moment, you should stop investing effort in these ad groups – that effort is not future proof.

What will happen in April?

• For advertisers not already using Showcase ad groups, you could see new volume if these ads are served dynamically out of your product ad groups
• Does anyone know if there’s an opt in/opt out logic here?
• For advertisers with Showcase ad groups, you will see that volume shift over to your standard product ad groups
• This could also be reflected as changes in your search term report (more broad terms)
• I also wonder if, due to increased adoption, there will be changes in the costs here?
• Speaking of costs, this new format is not immersive: the clicks go to the merchant, which means CPC instead of CPE can be supported
• I’ve also heard that double impressions might be possible (on the carousel and the landing page?) which if true would impact the CTR. I’m not quite sure this makes sense in the new format, it might be legacy information.

One more thing about the zombie topic: I did see the above screenshot from Dan Perach with text assets that differ from how a merchant carousel “ought” to look. But it’s hard to make definitive statements because Google has presumably been testing the layout a lot and how it will ultimately look is certainly a moving target. It’s also possible they’ll keep text assets and look for dynamic ways of sourcing it.

What’s also interesting is that Google’s announcement of these changes mentions layouts (plural!) which suggests the merchant carousel is definitely not the last we’ll see here.

So is Showcase Shopping actually dead? 

Dead as we know it, I guess. But Google still appears to be actively roadmapping Showcase so I would say it is alive but just absorbed or integrated.

Final thought, how I feel about this whole thing: kinda sad to be honest.

I saw a deck my colleague Clemens Staudinger put together for a client pitching a really smart & strategic use of Showcase, but I had to tell him to stop while he was ahead. And that didn't feel right. Or when I talked with Dan Perach lately and he showed the incredible creativity and effort he has brought to Showcase – well, no more. It was a format that was controllable, effective and, yes, a bit tedious but also really fascinating. And now it strikes me as yet another sacrifice on the altar of Smart Shopping.

What’s your take? Let me know in the comments.