Is being in Google's product search a big deal for you?

Marketing
1

I’m planning to get a feed going with Google Product Search, and I’m wondering what other people’s experiences have been with this? Is it a big source of traffic and sales for you? A drop in the bucket? Not worth doing?

2

Hey Jason,

Google Product Search is free, so the benefit of listing your products on the program increases over time as long as you can keep your data feed up to date with Google’s 2 - 4 required tech spec changes each year.

It gives the biggest boost to large brands with thousands of products. Not only because they have a bigger selection, but Google understands these storefronts are retailers they can trust, one of the reasons why you’ll see Walmart, Target and Amazon competing for the top spots for the products they sell. The same goes for Best Buy in regards to electronics.

So if you have 100 products and a mediocre brand the benefit will reflect that, but all that being said it is still the largest comparison shopping engine in the US. Nextag, a paid shopping engine, is not even a close second in terms of traffic volume and revenue.

At the end of the day, whether you have 100 products or 100,000, you should get your products on Google Product Search simply because it’s free traffic.

Data feed best practices to play an important roll in the amount of traffic you’ll receive, so be sure you’re in the “send too much data” pool as opposed to being in the “send too little data” pool.

Their latest tech specs can be found here:

Upcoming Google Product Search Feed Specification and Policy Changes ~ Google Merchant Blog

Sometimes Google writes their technical requirements in a somewhat cryptic / robotic tongue so feel free to pose any follow up questions you have about the data feed or the Google Merchant Center and I’ll happily answer them - working with Google Product Search and other comparison shopping engines is what I do for a living.

3

Thanks for the thorough reply, Andrew. Right now I’m looking at 2 different ecommerce sites - one has hundreds of products, but the other one only has 3. Not sure the latter will be worth setup plus 2 or 3 schema changes a year (!).

4

Exactly, you hit it right on the money. Unless those 3 products are immensely popular it’s probably not worth your time.

6

I use to run an e-commerce website and pushed a feed to Google Product Search. It worked well for us.