November 12, 2009
By the ZippyCart Shopping Carts Content Team
Google Adwords has announced that they are starting to expand their product listings ads beta program to more merchants. The majority of ecommerce sites typically use some sort of pay per click marketing in their overall advertising plan. Now online retailers can become more efficient and move beyond the click based pricing model to a cost per action pricing model. This means that online retailers can now set up all of their products in the Google Merchant Center account and only pay a fee when someone buys something from their shopping cart. Consumers will start to see these product listings ads more frequently as we move into the peak of the holiday shopping season. This announcement comes at a perfect time when some online retailers are struggling and looking to gain any advantage that will help them sell more products during the holiday season.
This new model is just a continuance of Google pushing deeper into the advertising space after their acquisition of Performics which is now known as the Google Affiliate Network. Not only does Google dominate the world of click based advertising but they want to slowly take over the cost per action based product market. The recent change from Froogle to what is now known as Google Product Search is yet another sign of this shift in their advertising strategy for merchants. Online retailers are going to be very impressed with how easy it is to use the product to drive more sales. The Product Listing Ads requires no keywords or additional ad text to get started. Whenever someone enters a search query on Google that is relevant to an item in your account, Google will automatically show your products if they are the most relevant. These ads will include your website along with the associated image, price and product name. Almost every online retailer should consider this as part of their sales strategy for this up coming holiday shopping season.
Nick was born and raised in California, but has been working the dot com scene in Seattle for many years. He co-founded ZippyCart back in 2009, and now works here full-time. Nick wears many hats at ZippyCart, including producing content for our Ecommerce News blog. Nick loves photography and the outdoors, so when not working on ZippyCart you can find him out and about in Seattle.
