Similar to other platforms, including Facebook and TikTok, Google has created new advertising and ecommerce tools targeted at small- and medium-sized businesses. One feature to be added soon is in-store sales measurement and smart bidding, which uses machine learning to optimize bids based on specific KPIs. Advertisers will be able to upload first-party sales data to assist in targeting people who would be most likely to make purchases.

The platform is also adding functionality that will show online shoppers where and when they can get items that are out of stock. And businesses will be able to add specific information in Google search and on their profile pages, including whether takeout, curbside pickup, in-store shopping and no-contact delivery is offered.

The home furnishings retailer is deploying a range of platform solutions from Google Cloud as it looks to further personalize the shopping experience for customers, enhance fulfillment capacity, and optimize merchandise planning and demand forecasting. The company will implement Google Cloud technologies including BigQuery, Spanner, Google Compute Engine, and Google Kubernetes Engine, to establish a singular view of customer data across its portfolio of brands. Deloitte will serve as strategic transformation services partner. 

Bed Bath & Beyond will utilize Google Cloud BigQuery to grow its machine learning and analytics capabilities, in an initiative designed to enhance the ability to project future sales trends and, based on those projections, make instant, customer-centric decisions with real-time data. As a result, the company hopes to better serve the market with improved demand prediction and optimized inventory and merchandise planning. 

In addition, Bed Bath & Beyond wants to create a highly personalized, “omni-always” shopping experience with a more agile and predictive e-commerce platform. To that end, it will deploy Google Cloud AI solutions to support the entire shopping experience, from search navigation and checkout to delivery or pickup. The rollout is designed to provide enhanced fulfillment capabilities at a massive scale to optimize every aspect of the business, from demand forecasting to supply chain/logistics and the customer experience. 

Google today launched Chrome 85 for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS. Chrome 85 brings tab management changes, 10% faster page loads, PDF improvements, and a slew of developer features. You can update to the latest version now using Chrome’s built-in updater or download it directly from google.com/chrome.

Google is proposing a separate solution: trust tokens. They’re “smart” iterations of cookies that will validate your access to a specific website without tracking you once you leave that page. This way, you get to keep your website-specific data–passwords, usernames, and preferences–without having your privacy encroached upon.

The real catch for trust tokens is that they don’t actually identify you the way that cookies do, and while some of the side effects of trust tokens may resemble cookie use–e.g., advertisers knowing you clicked on their ad–tokens are a decidedly less personal, more private way to access web content.

Funding Choices, Google’s consent management tool for publishers using Google ad servers, can now handle CCPA requests, Google announced Thursday. It’s integration with IAB Europe’s Transparency and Consent Framework is also moving forward.

Publishers can enable Funding Choices to collect opt-out requests from California residents and comply with CCPA. It is integrated with Ad Manager for desktop and mobile web visits.
“Funding Choices detects when a user from California visits a website, shows a CCPA message that allows the user to opt out of the sale of their personal information, and communicates the user’s choices with the publisher’s advertising partners,” wrote Vegard Johnsen, senior product manager for ads privacy and safety at Google in a blog post Thursday.