The Google Shopping feature is a free way to get exposure for the products in your shopping cart. Many of our clients set up Google Shopping (AKA Froogle) but are sometimes unhappy about the relatively low number of clicks it brings in, compared to SEO and PPC. However, they also notice that clicks from Google Shopping convert at a much higher rate.

Why do clicks from Google Shopping (or many other shopping engines) convert better? Basically, the customer is pre-screened. When a product is uploaded via the Google Base feed (now via google.com/merchants) it includes information including an image, price, title, and brief description. Therefore, a potential customer who sees your product in Google Shopping is probably comparing what you sell with results from other vendors, and making a choice, then clicking through to your store. In this way, the shopper is “pre qualified,” and will end up landing on the page for the product that he/she has already selected. This pre-qualification, along with the trust afforded to Google by the customer, means that a click from the Shopping results is more likely to result in a sale.

Another reason that clicks convert better is that not every impression results in a click. A normal visitor to your site, whether acquired via natural search or PPC, will go through an entire shopping process on your site, visiting multiple pages. This visitor has a very high probability (90% or more) of leaving your site without taking any action. Shopping tools and price comparison services like Google Shopping, Shopzilla, PriceGrabber, and Shopping.com allow the consumer to find items and make comparisons. If you have a shopping feed with Google, you can actually find out the number of impressions (views) a product got vs. the number of clicks that came to your site. If you have a high number of impressions but few clicks, you may want to adjust your images, description, or price to attract more buyers.

An even better reason to get on the Google Shopping feed is that the natural search results in Google will often show 3 matching product results for certain queries. Even though these results appear to be shown in a randomized fashion (sometimes your product will show, sometimes someone else’s) this still can represent a significant opportunity for exposure. For e-commerce merchants waiting on better SEO results, a presence in the shopping results and among natural searches can be quite profitable. Even better, having a higher number of available products (and part numbers) gives you a better chance of being found by customers who are shopping for specific items. Having lots of items on the feed also increases the collective number of clicks on multiple items which would otherwise have a low daily search volume.

Finally, it is hard to underestimate the value of “free” traffic, and having a shopping feed is no exception. Most shopping cart software packages have a tool that will distill product listings into the format required by Google. If not, a programmer can be called upon to extract the proper information. Many other shopping feeds will charge by the click, and still represent a good value. Once a feed is in place, it needs to be renewed every month, and if your product list hasn’t changed, you can upload the same feed every time. In an era when ecommerce companies can’t afford to leave money on the table, Google Shopping traffic may not always deliver spectacular results, but several of our clients can attest that the added boost in sales makes for a nice extra revenue stream.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010 at 8:30 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

About the Author: Patrick Hare has been managing online and offline marketing projects since 1999. From 2005 to present, he has been with Scottsdale Arizona's Web.com Search Agency (formerly Submitawebsite). Patrick provides Search Engine Optimization and Marketing advice to in-house customers and Web.com Jacksonville’s web design group.