Google Shopping goes commercial

Google shopping results are the results that appear below the sponsored listings and above the natural results. Up to now, it’s been free to provide a file or feed to Google with information about your products, so that Google can display your products in this area. From now on, these results are another form of advertising, and merchants will pay for clicks.

So, what will the effect of this be? For the shopper, this area won’t really change much – there’s a little ‘sponsored’ notification, otherwise little change.

For the merchant, the cost means that everything needs to be optimised. Switched-on merchants have been optimising anyway, so will have a head start.

There are other changes that affect the feed, as well. Clothing products now have to have attributes that identify the colour, size, age group and gender – these used to be optional but are going to be required attributes. Where a product has colour variations, a different image has to be provided for each variant.

A lot of work then. If you have a lot of products, it’s going to be essential to have a built-in tool to export the product feed – our system, Platypus, will generate the feed for you in an optimised format. As well as this, you’ll need to track it with analytics, to monitor the results, ensure you have good quality images of the correct size, and ensure that you keep the feed up to date – it’s vital, for example, that stock information is correct.

If you’d like more information about ecommerce and Google Product Listing Ads – you know where to find us!