Big Google Shopping Announcement Video Transcription:
Thomas Green here with Ethical Marketing Service. Today I would like to share with you an announcement made by google regarding Google Shopping. In an attempt to assist struggling retail companies. Google is opening up Google Shopping to merchants who are not using Google Ads.
And in the US anyway, it’s now possible to sell for free on Google. You still need to sign up to merchant centre and have a product feed submitted. But it’s now possible to get on Google Shopping and not pay for ads. It is new, so I don’t have any performance to feed back on. But I will update you once we do.
If you have an existing merchant centre account and are advertising on Google Shopping. You can opt in by selecting “Growth” and then “Manage programs” in the navigation menu, you will also qualify for organic product listings.
Essentially how shopping is now going to operate is like Google search. So you will have the ads at the top and the natural listings underneath. What this means for existing advertisers is a considerable increase in competition. As there will be far more natural or free listings than there will ads and so there will be less slots available for advertisers meaning it will be more competitive.
So what can you do to make the most of this news?
It presents a big opportunity to businesses who get their first, because it will take a long time for most of the market to catch up to the news, so if you sell anything via a website, definitely take action on this because your potentially looking at free traffic where previously you would have paid.
For existing advertisers, you definitely want to opt in to the natural listings, but this means that Shopping performance may fluctuate, as this is a big change. Most of our clients are in the UK and this change hasn’t been rolled out yet, so you can use this time to get ready and prepare, your product feed will most likely need to be optimised, often it’s the case that advertisers create a feed and don’t look at it again, but if there are only a few slots available for advertisers, it’s going to need to be high quality and keyword rich for the purposes of relevance.
If your campaigns have been performing well. You may also want to increase the budget now whilst there is less competition to make the most of this time. As once this news gets around, you can bet more and more products will be added to google shopping and competition will be much higher than it was before.
Google has said it intends to roll out these changes worldwide by the end of the year. Also intend to partner up with PayPal so businesses can link those accounts together for the purpose of quicker onboarding.