Brief:

• TechStyle Fashion Group, the parent company of Fabletics, SavageXfenty and Justfab, piloted shoppable ads on Google Images by working with social commerce platform Curalate, per an announcement. Curalate worked with Google during the early testing of the ad format that features shoppable lifestyle imagery.
• Lifestyle content on ecommerce sites boosts conversion rates by almost 140% and keeps people browsing as much as 250% longer, Curalate found. Unlike traditional photos of products on a neutral background, lifestyle content shows products in the context of everyday wear, such as street apparel being worn in an urban setting as a complete outfit.​
• Curalate's software dashboard lets brands tag their lifestyle images to create shoppable ads with visual cues to indicate to consumers which products are available to browse. Shoppable images can be syndicated to Google and brought to life when a consumer interacts with the ad while using Google Images, per the announcement.

Insight:

TechStyle collaborated with Curalate to pilot shoppable ads on Google Images, the section of the search giant's website and app that indexes pictures. Google introduced the ad format in March and said it had begun testing the format on a small percentage of traffic with select retailers in various search categories. The idea is to give consumers a chance to immediately buy the products they see in their search queries, shrinking the sales funnel for brands and retailers.

TechStyle also tested Google's new Discovery ads, which aim to reach users when they're most open to finding new and unexpected products and services. The ad format was one of TechStyle's fastest-growing new media channels and generated lower cost-per-leads than social media or search, chief media officer Laura Joukovski said in a presentation at Google's annual Marketing Live event last week. Google will make Discovery ads available to advertisers globally this year.

As Google faces slowing ad growth amid a maturing digital ad market, the company is working to make its ad formats more transactional for brands and retailers. Social media companies like Facebook, Pinterest and Snap are adopting similar strategies as they face a stronger rivalry with Amazon. The e-commerce giant has a fast-growing digital ad business and is the first place more than half of online shoppers visit when starting a product search.