UK Clothing Retailer Sees Boost in Google Shopping Ads with AI-Written Copy
UK clothing retailer Matalan and agency Havas Media UK found that AI-generated Google Shopping ads outperformed human-written ones, with up to a 16% increase in search impressions for men’s suits. The AI utilized, including ChatGPT-4, optimized product descriptions with keyword-heavy sentences that were more favorable to Google's algorithms, enhancing product visibility and impressions significantly. Sounds like a case of AI gaming another AI, but powerful results nonetheless.
Turns out, AI applications aren’t just useful for cutting marketing production costs. U.K. clothing retailer Matalan has found they can also be used to drive website traffic by juicing the placement of Google Shopping ads.
The retail brand and its media agency Havas Media U.K., placed AI-written copy in product descriptions on Google Shopping ads for men’s suits in the spring, and saw that search impressions increased by up to 16% compared to human-penned copy. The reason for the increase? Google’s ranking algorithms preferred the keyword-heavy sentences penned by ChatGPT over more descriptive copy written by people.
The tactic was considered so promising that Matalan has begun piloting it on other product categories, including children’s shoes, homewares and womenswear. ”We find Google Shopping to be one of the best ways to drive our online performance and ensure that our products are reaching customers,” said Ali Jones, Matalan’s chief customer and omnichannel officer, in an email.
The product descriptions were used in Google Shopping ads — promoted search results that show up in the Google Shopping tab. Lucy Barnes, general manager at Havas Media Manchester, told Digiday that channel was currently the largest source of search traffic to Matalan’s website, though she didn’t say what proportion of its overall traffic Google Shopping accounted for.
“Google Shopping is huge for us and is our biggest driver of performance, so any kind of effectiveness, any kind of efficiencies or increased results that we can get within the search engine results page is brilliant,“ she said.
Matalan has experimented with AI copy previously, using the Gemini and PaLM 2 models to write product descriptions on its own site. For Matalan’s Google Shopping ads, Havas Media deployed a solution that relies upon ChatGPT-4.
The media agency compared impressions driven by AI-augmented product ads for 1,100 items in Matalan’s men’s suits range, with 3,000 other menswear items with product ads written by people. The test ran for 31 days between March and April, a time when the brand didn’t have other promotional spend already planned. Although Matalan releases new collections each year, demand for suits remains generally consistent (as Jones describes it as a “strong volume” vertical with “less volatility” than other product categories), making it a suitable category to use as a sample.
Full story at Digiday.
