Online retail is an ever growing industry. A recent report showed that online sales in December 2011 were up by 16% from last year with over £7.9 billion spent online. As the internet evolves, there are more and more opportunities for internet retailers to get more visitors to their website and sell more products online.
In November, I wrote an article about Google Product Listing Ads and how they could expand your current online marketing strategy and work alongside your AdWords campaign. At Fountain, we have already seen our clients having great success using Product Listing Ads with click-through rates and conversion rates higher than average. As with all PPC campaigns, you only pay when someone clicks on your product and the great thing about Product Listing Ads is that the user is taken straight to the product. Remember to make it easy for them to browse your other products though!
Google AdWords also gives you the opportunity to add customer feedback information to your Google Ads. The picture below shows the results when I search for ‘Trainers’ in Google. You can see that four out of the top five AdWords results have extended their ads with review information.
Alongside information from Google + being included in the Google results, search is now not only about who is ranking highest, but who has the best recommendations. While Google + still isn’t competing with the likes of Facebook and Twitter, it is slowly being integrated more and more into our search results and could be particularly beneficial for local searches.
Another offering from Google to help retailers sell more online is Google Shopping results. This section of Google search can be accessed from the menu down the left-hand side and shows relevant product listings when triggered by certain search terms. In addition, three products are shown in the main search results so the user doesn’t need to choose the Shopping search tool – this means that it is important to optimise your products correctly in order to appear. It is free to submit your products to appear in Google Shopping results through a Merchant Center account, if a little fiddly to set up. Once you have submitted a data feed of your products it requires very little maintenance to make sure you keep appearing and you can even set it up so that you can track in Analytics when visitors have come through the Shopping results rather than normal search.
Again, it is very easy to link up any reviews on your site with the Shopping results so that users can see how popular your product has been. Google + information is also shown in the shopping results so users can see who in their Circles has recommended certain products.
Google Product Listing Ads and Google Merchant Center are just two of the products offered by Google to help you get the most from their search engine. If you’re not taking advantage of them then you could be missing out on relevant and ready-to-buy visitors for your website.
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