Google Product Search is getting a new name, Google Shopping, and a new business model where only merchants that pay will be listed. It’s the first time Google will decommission a search product that previously listed companies for free. The company says the change will improve the searcher experience, but it will also likely raise new worries that Google may further cut free listings elsewhere.
“This is about delivering the best answers for people searching for products and helping connect merchants with the right customers,” said Sameer Samat, vice president of product management for Google Shopping, when explaining that by moving to an all-paid model, Google believes it will have better and more trustworthy data that will improve the shopping search experience for its users.
Perhaps this will be so; perhaps not. We’ll only have a better idea when the transformation is complete. The process begins now with experiments, launches more fully in the summer and will take through the fall to finish in the
Next year, the change to paid inclusion will happen outside the
Starting Now: Experiments
Beginning today, Google will run a variety of experiments on Google.com, for
a small percentage of searchers at first, that merge listings from Google
Product Listing Ads and Google Product Search together. To understand better,
consider this “before” example:The screenshot also shows the “free” listings that Google provides, those that come from Google crawling the web, as well as those from Google Product Search. The listings from Google Product Search come from Google’s web crawl as well as from data feeds that merchants send to Google.
In contrast, below is an example of how one of the new experiments may look:
Rather than the Product Listing Ads and Google Product Search results being separate, both will be combined into a single Google Shopping box. Here’s another example, with a close-up on the Google Shopping box:
Goodbye
Google Product Search & Free Listings
As said earlier, Google Product Search currently gets its listings from
Google crawling the web or by retailers submitting product data and feeds
through the Google Merchant Center.
There has been no charge for either. Indeed, Google has never charged for being
in its shopping search engine since it began
back in December 2002 and was called Froogle.That’s ending. There’s no firm date on exactly when the free ride will be over, other than it should happen by the fall of this year.
Merchants may continue to be listed within Google’s free web search results. That’s not changing. But those wanting to appear in a dedicated shopping search engine — and in the Google Shopping boxes that will appear as part of Google’s regular results — will need to pay.
Hello Google Shopping & Paid Inclusion
The forthcoming Google Shopping will operate on what’s been known in the
search industry as a paid inclusion model. That’s where companies pay to be
listed but payment doesn’t guarantee that they’ll rank well for any particular
terms.In particular, Google says advertisers will provide data feeds or create product listings through Google AdWords, in campaigns that are set to run on Google Shopping. It will work very similarly to how Product Listing Ads work now. Merchants won’t bid on particular keywords but rather bid how much they’re willing to pay, if their listings appear and get clicks or produce sales. Getting a top ranking will depend on a combination of perceived relevance and bid price.
As part of the changes, Google Shopping will incorporate Google Trusted Stores badges into the listings, for those merchants who participate in the program. Google has already been testing the use of these within AdWords.
Google also says the new Google Shopping listings will be able to show if merchants have any special deals or offers — these can also be sent within the merchant’s data feed.
Product Listing Ads as a product will be phased out when Google Shopping takes over, but Google says using the PLA system now is the best way for merchants to prepare for the Google Shopping change. That’s why Google is offering two incentives to get merchants going with them now, if they’re not already:
- All merchants that create
Product Listings Ads by August 15 will receive 10% credit for their total
PLA spend through the end of the year
- Existing Google Product
Search merchants will get a $100 AdWords credit if they fill out a form
before August 15
Didn’t Google Hate Paid Inclusion?
The paid inclusion model will be familiar to many merchants, who know it’s
commonly used with other shopping search engines. But it’s new to Google. In
fact, it’s a model that Google once fought against, even to the degree of
characterizing it as evil. Those days are over. Google Shopping will becomes
the fourth “vertical” or topically-focused search engine from Google to use
paid inclusion.Once Deemed Evil, Google Now Embraces “Paid Inclusion” is my column from yesterday at our sister site
I bolded the key part. Eight years ago, Google viewed paid inclusion in general as some type of evil the company should avoid and in particular something that could cause shopping search to have poor relevancy or be biased.
What happened to cause such a change?
Reversing Its Stance
For one, Google’s official line seems to be that it hasn’t changed its mind
about anything. That’s because it’s changing the definition of what paid
inclusion is, to effectively claim that it’s not doing it. This is the
statement I was sent after my column appeared yesterday:The fact Google considered paid inclusion evil in the past is an embarrassment that some will have a good chuckle about. But companies do change stances. The bigger issue in all this is whether the shift is good for searchers and publishers.
Paid Relationships Can Be Good
When it comes to searchers, Google’s view is that by having a paid relationship,
it can better ensure the quality of what it lists in Google Shopping.“We believe a commercial relationship with partners is critical to ensuring we receive high quality product data, and with better data we can build better products,” Samat told me.
Today’s blog post from Google reflects the same view:
Potentially, those merchants risked being kicked out of Google Product Search. But being a free service, it possible the merchants might come back in another way. There was a low barrier to entry. That low barrier also means much more has to be policed.
When payment is involved, it’s harder to be abusive. Merchants risk losing their accounts, along with any trust built up to those accounts. In addition, when they’re paying by the click or by the sale, there’s more incentive to ensure listings are relevant.
But There Was No Other Way?
Still, this is an unprecedented move by Google. The company has
never eliminated a search product that had free listings and shifted to an
all-paid model.I couldn’t think of any examples of this in the past, and Google confirmed this was a first. At best, it offered that Boutiques.com — purchased in 2010 and integrated into Google Product Search in 2011 — had a similar pay-to-play model. But Boutiques.com wasn’t an existing service that was shifted from free to fee.
For a company with such a long history of trying to be inclusive, it’s shocking. It’s more so when Bing Shopping accepts free listings. Google couldn’t find a way to do what Microsoft does?
“We’ve looked at a number of different aspects to approach this, but we have to evolve our experience. We believe consumers have a higher expectation of shopping online,” Samat said.
Will It Stay Comprehensive?
One thing I’ve generally loved about Google Product Search is that if I
couldn’t find some odd product on Amazon (which tends to be
a pseudo-shopping search engine for me), Google seemed able to ferret it
out. But with the change to a paid inclusion model, will the ability to get
into the nooks and crannies of the retail web be lost?Google told me that it currently has tens of thousands of merchants listed in Google Product Search for free. I asked if the company had any idea how that might change when payment is required or if there would be an impact on comprehensiveness?
“We really want all kinds of merchants to participate,” Samat said. But he also said, ”It’s hard to speculate on how this will play out. Our objective here is to deliver a better experience. We are doing a number of things to help the users’ experience get better.”
Going Forward
In the end, Google is shifting to what’s been the industry standard when it
comes to shopping search, to have a paid inclusion program. The curious can
take a look here
at SingleFeed for a rundown on who offers paid plans or here
at CPC Strategy. Most shopping search engines do. Even Bing, which is listed as
being free, also does paid inclusion through a partnership with
Shopping.com, saying
that doing this will increase visibility.One thing about the change is that it will probably cause all the shopping search engines out there to better disclose the paid relationships they have. As I covered in my column yesterday, the FTC has seemed to ignore that some don’t have any disclosure at all, as required. Google’s move has the potential to raise the bar here, and that’s sorely needed.
For searchers, Google’s trying to find the balance between having incredibly comprehensive results and the noise that can harm relevancy when there’s too much junk and not enough signal, it seems. As I said, it remains to see if they’ll get that balance right.
For publishers, there’s a whole lot of worry here. If Google can turn one search product to an all-paid basis, nothing really prevents it from doing the same for others. Could Google News only carry listings from publishers that want to pay? Will Google Places, already just transformed into a part of the Google+ social network, be changed to a pay-or-don’t play yellow pages-style model?
Even web search could be threatened. All the arguments about wanting to get better data and filter out noise are just as applicable to web search. The main reassuring thing here is that there’s little likelihood that Google could get hundreds of millions of web sites to do paid inclusion at the risk of not being listed. Pure paid inclusion works better in the world of vertical search, where there are only thousands of companies you’re dealing with.
Meanwhile, with Google Play selling content, will Google eventually decide that Google Shopping should make the next logical step and provide transactions, the way that Amazon does? At some point, Google the search engine that is supposed to point to destinations may turn into too much of a destination itself.
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