Weekly Product Watch: Google Adds Free Retail Listings for SMBs, and More

A roundup of marketing product updates from Google, Microsoft, RollWorks, CHEQ, Tealium, Informatica, Magnolia, Placer.ai, Kibo, RRD, and Viant Adelphic.

Google Adds Free Retail Listings to Its Search Engine for SMBs

Google, the search engine giant, recently announced that they will offer free listings on the Google Shopping tab for the U.S. markets. This update has resulted in an uptick in clicks and impressions, which has impacted the user engagement for merchants, noted Bill Ready, president, commerce, Google in a blog. He added that sellers with small and medium-sized businesses will benefit from these free listings update on Google.

“Free listings on Google Search are a big step forward in democratizing access to digital commerce, benefitting shoppers and merchants with more choices across the board,” Ready said.

Microsoft Introduces a Free Search & Social Campaign Management Platform for SMBs

Microsoft’s Digital Marketing Center has been leading a pilot across organic social media and ads to help small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). The platform has been designed to manage digital ad campaigns across Microsoft, Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Being a fully AI-powered platform, SMBs can amplify and set up ad campaigns for free, while using ad keyword, audience targeting, and bidding features. The beta version will be available in U.S. markets only. “Digital Marketing Center provides you with a central platform to efficiently manage your online presence and marketing activities across paid search advertising, paid social advertising, and organic social media management. It is currently free to use. You pay only for search and social ads and manage your social presence at no cost,” the Microsoft Advertising product team wrote in a blog.

RollWorks Announces Sales Insights, an ABM Platform to Drive Marketing & Sales Alignment

RollWorks, an account-based platform for B2B companies, has launched a new product called the Sales Insights. This new platform analyzes the spikes in account-based activities, such as website engagement and advertising click signals, which raises alerts directly on Salesforce via daily emails to sellers.

Speaking to Toolbox Robin Bordoli, president, RollWorks.added, “With Sales Insights extending the RollWorks Account-based Platform we’re helping marketers and sellers’ row powerfully together in the right direction, by giving sellers timely, relevant, and actionable information for more efficient sales outreach to the accounts that matter.”

CHEQ Releases Ad Fraud Prevention Platform

CHEQ, a cybersecurity company focused on ad fraud prevention, has been exploring ad verification solutions that go beyond impression-based programmatic advertising. It recently launched CHEQ for PPC, a solution that blocks invalid ad clicks across all PPC platforms.

“With $144 billion spent annually on global PPC campaigns, online fraudsters will always see this huge ad-spend as a key target. Consequently, we have seen significant growth in click fraud with marketers experiencing sophisticated attacks on their budgets with nearly one in five clicks proving non-human and/or fraudulent. Our goal is clear – to help restore confidence in advertising, save wasted ad dollars and lower CPA’s for campaigns,” said CHEQ founder and CEO, Guy Tytunovich.

Tealium Launches New Machine Learning Solution to Decode CX Data

Tealium, a customer data platform (CDP) provider, unveiled a new solution, the Tealium Predict Machine Learning. This product comes with built-in machine learning technology and seamlessly pairs with Tealium AudienceStream CDP. The Tealium Predict ML allows marketing teams to act earlier on their data, such as identify buyers who are most likely to make a purchase or most likely to churn.

“While more organizations are realizing the value of data collection and insight activation each day, they’re also realizing these projects can be extremely resource-intensive without the right solutions in place,” said Mike Anderson, founder, and CTO at Tealium. “By offering a flexible machine learning product that’s integrated right into our CDP solution, we’re taking the complexity and burden out of the data collection equation, leveling the playing field for our customers and allowing them to really focus on how to activate the value of their data.”

Informatica ® Updates its Intelligent Data Platform ™ to Boost Consumer Privacy Compliance

Informatica, an enterprise cloud data management platform, updated its Intelligent Data Platformâ„¢ and released a privacy analytics dashboard to reduce the cost of compliance with laws like the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

“In today’s era of Data 4.0, and as businesses navigate an increasingly complex landscape, digital transformation must be data-led,” said Amit Walia, CEO of Informatica. “Today’s release empowers data leaders to create more value and improve operational efficiency, all while ensuring business continuity. By introducing more automation and intelligence capabilities – powered by CLAIRE – businesses can accelerate ROI, decrease risk and improve productivity across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.”

Magnolia Marketplace Offers a Fully Customized Digital Experience (DX) Stack

Magnolia, a content management system (CMS) provider, announced the launch of its marketplace solution that will help customers build a fully tailored DX stack. The Magnolia Marketplace will include a range of marketing, commerce, and analytics extensions.

Tim Brown, CEO at Magnolia said, “The Marketplace is the central source for customers looking for additional solutions to enhance their marketing stacks and accelerate integration to third party services. With Marketplace, customers can now easily extend and expand our platform’s functionality, maximizing their technology investment and creating better digital experiences.”

Placer.ai Releases The Square, a Free Tool to Provide Accessible Insights to Retailers

Placer.ai, a location analytics and foot traffic data provider, launched its new community hub, The Square. It is an online dashboard that offers quick insights into the offline retail economy and its recovery from the pandemic.

“The uncertainty throughout the pandemic has only shown how vital access to accurate data is as a resource to empower better decision making for any business. We saw the huge effect that our Covid-19 Retail Impact Tracker had and decided to offer even more free functionality in our new community hub,” said Placer.ai’s co-founder and CEO, Noam Ben Zvi. “The Square is another opportunity for us to demonstrate the unique power location data has to drive better, smarter business decisions. This is something that is more crucial considering the wider economic uncertainty we’re all navigating.”

Kibo Unveils AdLink to Personalize Onsite Experience

Kibo, a cloud commerce solution provider, launched AdLink, a new audience creation tool that allows marketers to personalize the onsite experience for traffic from paid media campaigns. The new tools powers retailers to break down traditional silos between marketing and advertising and connects the pre-and post-click onsite experiences for their consumers.

“We’re excited to deliver personalization technologies that create a seamless and holistic customer experience, connecting advertising and marketing,” said Ram Venkataraman, chief product, and technology officer at Kibo. “With personalization from Monetate, Kibo can help retailers scale easily and improve return on ad spend.”

RRD Launches a New Innovation Platform to Accelerate Digital Transformation for Enterprises

R.R. Donnelley & Sons Company (RRD), a marketing and business communications provider, launched an innovation platform, called The_Loft@RRD. The platform allows enterprises to accelerate their digital transformation and achieve innovation at scale.

“As technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data analytics redefine customer expectations and become more affordable, creating a competitive advantage is becoming more challenging,” said Kiran Shankar, President, RRD Global Outsourcing (GO). “By combining technologies and expertise in new and unique ways through collaborative problem-solving, The_Loft@RRD aligns creative solutions with business goals to redefine the way companies deliver value to customers.”

Viant’s Adelphic Partners With AdsWizz to Offer More Audio Streaming Inventory

Viant, a people-based advertising technology company, announced a partnership for its flagship subscription-based self-service platform, Adelphic with AdsWizz. With this new partnership, buyers will be able to access a range of audio and podcast marketplaces, such as Pandora, SoundCloud, iHeartMedia, PodcastOne, and so on.

“By 2024, digital audio listeners are predicted to surpass 222 million, a 5.35% increase from 2020. As podcasts and digital audio become one of the fastest-growing mediums, programmatic audio must be part of a campaign’s overall omnichannel strategy,” said Alex Perrin, vice president of programmatic strategy at Viant’s Adelphic. “With access to audio inventory that is non-skippable, brand-safe and not impacted by ad blockers, Adelphic can measure the impact of programmatic audio as part of the larger digital buy and reach targeted audiences in a more relevant and engaging way.”