SEOinPhiladelphia

A few weeks ago, Scot Wingo and Mark Vandegrift from  ChannelAdvsior presented an interesting webinar, called “How to counter the severe drop in traffic to GPS”.  Google Product Search, or GPS, is a shopping vertical still underestimated by many small and medium  ecommerce sites. It’s free and it can improve your product visibility in the search engines dramatically. By optimizing product feeds for a large ecommerce or a start-up,  I’ve  found that return on investment from Google Product is higher than the ROI from traditional SEO -because  it’s relatively easier and faster to rank for broad terms in the Google Products index than in the main Google’s web index.

Example of Google's Search Result Page with Google Products /Shopping Listings

Additionally, optimization of product feeds for broad, popular terms (i.e. “laptops”) is a great strategy to support your PPC campaigns (when CPC (Cost per Click) is too expensive). Google Product Search is also a great way to gain a competitive advantage (even over a “bigger” competitor).

ChannelAdvisor has created a table showing the top trafficked comparison search engines (comScore data May 2009).  As you can see below, the Google Product Search vertical was the 4th largest  CSE site in May 2009, and the only one which allows merchants to list their products for free (Yahoo! Shopping, Shopzilla.ocm,Shopping.com operate on a Cost per Click basis)

Traffic in May 2009 (comScore)

Google Search Product doesn’t just drive traffic to your site, but also delivers customers who are ready to spend money on your products. The below pie chart illustrates comparison shopping sales of ChannelAdvisor  clients.

Where ChannelAdvisor customers are seeing sales distributed on comparison shopping engines.

Drop in Traffic from Google Product Search

In the USA in mid June 2009 , online marketers, agencies, and website owners noticed a significant drop (30%-40%) in traffic from Google’s shopping vertical (unfortunately I was not able to find the graph presented during the webinair). Interestingly enough, a few weeks earlier, a very similar drop was noticed by merchants in the UK (I can confirm this first hand, in June I was still working for a UK retailer who experienced the drop in traffic from the Google Product Search vertical.)

One of the causes of the drop in traffic from Google Product Search can be attributed to Google’s change to their search result pages. As early as February 2009, I had been noticing that more and more of the  GPS universal search results have been directing users  to  an additional Google page, as opposed to the  merchant’s product pages.  This was especially the case for broad/head terms.

For example if you had typed in ‘portable dvd player’ into Google in 2008, you would be presented with the below results:

Google Product Search: Direct Links to Product Pages in SERPs

The above three product search results in GPS’s “onebox” linked directly to the merchants’ product pages.

No direct links to merchants' product pages

However starting in 2009, more and more of Google’s search result pages for the  most popular queries have stopped “linking” directly to online stores.  As you can see, the name of the merchants are replaced with “x stores“. If a user decides to click on one of the three GPS links he or she is presented with:

The layout and elements of the page are similar to a typical comparison search engine i.e shopping.com

Taking away these direct links to the merchants’ product pages from the search result pages had a significant impact  on traffic  from Google Product Search.  While most of the  medium to long tail keywords return GPS results with direct links , the majority  of Google’s results for head (broader and popular)  queries  feature an additional page.

From Google’s point of view, such a shift makes perfect sense, since a user spends more time on Google ‘s “property”.

Reviewing Google Product Search strategy for small and medium  ecommerce

The ChannelAdvsior’s webinar did not offer a silver bullet strategy to counter this drop in traffic from GPS, however  there  are some good points of which  any ecommerce site should take notice.

• If you have experienced a drop in traffic from Google Product Search do not be discouraged.  This  organic search vertical still  presents a great opportunity to deliver qualified consumer  to your site at exceptional ROI.  The principle of optimizing product feeds stays the same, focus on improving quality by:
  • describing your products in a meaningful way (chosen keywords backed by research, focused on accurate and unique product identifiers i.e UPC)
  • paying attention to the  required and optional  attributes, these change from time to time. Any changes are announced on the official Google Product Search blog.
  • keeping an eye on how your competitors are using attributes in their xml feeds -  I believe this great tool is the only one which lets you look up anybody’s feed
  • keeping your product feed “fresh” and sending it to Google regularly – set up scheduler so Google crawls your product feed regularly and you don’t have to worry about timely submissions.
• Try to think of ways to encourage your customers to leave reviews and ratings on your products i.e quick surveys on the receipt page, after sale feedback requests. Some of the most popular sources for reviews are : Google Checkout Reviews, Shopzilla.com, epinions.com , pricegrabber.com, reviewstream.com , merchant-reviews.com or readprint.com
• If you haven’t done  it yet, add campaign variable tags to the URLs in your feed and track  the performance of your feed in Google Product Search
• Diversify  your comparison search engine strategy, do not rely on just one site as the main source of conversion. Google likes to test and change things around and this can have a negative impact on your bottom line (Bing CPA model limits risk and is great for testing, try Amazon Product Ads- not a typical CSE type of site but recommended for  high conversion)