Don’t put all your eggs in the Google Shopping Basket

by Brian Smith, on July 1st, 2009


If you’re submitting an optimized data feed to Google Shopping, you can get an amazing amount of traffic and sales.  But just as organic placement can fluctuate because of algorithmic changes, your product listings on Google Shopping might fluctuate because of similar algorithmic changes or placement tests.  The old standard of Onebox results showing up below the sponsored ads and above the organic listings is not a guarantee anymore. You might find the Onebox listings in a different form, halfway down the page, or even in the AdWords listings [Any product results showing up in AdWords listings are called Product Ads. These are not related to Onebox listings in any way.] (will share screenshots of these variations soon).

With all these tests that Google is running, your traffic will most likely go up and down and up and down and up and down.  Frustrating when you’re a marketer trying to meet your numbers.  That’s why you can’t put all your eggs in one basket – be it Google Shopping, NexTag, Shopzilla, Amazon Product Ads, or PriceGrabber.

Brian Mark of Toolbarn had a great slide in a SES presentation years ago that showed how he used the shopping engines to make up for a decline in traffic/sales after a site change knocked all his listings out of Google’s organic results.  If he didn’t have the shopping engine listings, he would have been in serious trouble.  In the same vein, as Google Shopping will continue to play around with its listings, merchants should think about listing on other top shopping engines.  Yes, Google Shopping might be at the top of the list in terms of traffic and revenue (and of course, ROI), but NexTag, PriceGrabber, Shopzilla, and Shopping.com can provide a steady stream of traffic and revenue in the face of uncertainty from Google Shopping.

I’ll release some recent SingleFeed numbers discussing aggregate  traffic/revenue #s for the shopping engines soon, but let’s just say that listing on additional top engines can significantly boost results.  Yes, you’ll have to think about PPC costs and not all products will work on all shopping engines, but if you’re smart about your data feed marketing efforts (reporting/analytics!, you can succeed

Tags: Google Product Search/Google Base, PriceGrabber, Shopping Engines, Shopping.com, Shopzilla


Tom Wilson said

Hi Brian,

This is affecting a lot of users and i’ve see the exact same although had to test it out to get more info.

The users are discussing this in the forum.

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/base/thread?tid=05da2eaebf5bf77d&hl=en&fid=05da2eaebf5bf77d00046dbec97aa6a5

I’ve also upload some screenshots of what i’ve seen.

July 2nd, 2009 at 8:23 pm |

John Trovi said

Hi Brian,

Do you think another comparison engine could potentially list items in Google Shopping? A feed could be made listing the lowest priced item and the comparson engine’s landing page would be comprised of price comparisons.

July 7th, 2009 at 12:11 am |

Adam said

Hey Brian,

You’re so right. Sometimes Google organic rankings can suddenly change and dramatically reduce traffic to your site. I’ve seen it several times before and Price Engines like NexTag can help keep traffic from taking too far of a dive.

You also mention that not all products will work on all shopping engines. Have you ever encountered a situation where the feeds being sent to the Price Engines stop containing certain products but the Price Engines continue to show those products and clicks continue to result? How do you get these products off? Why does this happen?

Your help would be appreciated.

July 7th, 2009 at 7:19 pm |