After Google’s latest advances on Natural Search (SEO) and Local Search, Google comes up with yet another major and important change. It is called Google Product Ads.
Google Product Ads will not only make search ads visual but will also employ Cost Per Acquisition (or CPA) Model which effectively makes the advertising on Google risk free.
Currently ecommerce ads can only be shown as text on the search network. Normally, it would work fine for service oriented ads but for products it poses few challenges:
- The text written (or ad copy) needs to be written in way that incites clicks from the searcher.
- Clicks obtained this way are mostly satisfying the searcher need to see the product.
- An advertiser still needs to pay for each click whether or not that click ends up in the sale.
- Complexity is added to the model if the product range is enormous or product line is seasonal for example, a fashion product website.
The new model being introduced by the Google would address all those concerns. First of all, the advertisers don’t need to worry about the keyword research, bidding strategies, uploading the product details and images etc. Google would obtain all this information from Google Merchant account.
Secondly, product images would be shown upfront and therefore a lot of ‘just looking’ clicks would be reduced. More importantly, conversion rates as well as click through rates would increased as sites will only attract the searchers who liked the look of the product at first place. You would have a thought that’s quite a positive change but it gets even better, the billing model gets changed from Pay Per Click (PPC) to Cost Per Acquisition (or CPA). This means that you are only paying for what sells on the website.
It seems very promising for Ecommerce owners. However, ecommerce store owners should at least do the following in order to take advantage of this opportunity:
- Configure Google Analytics’ Ecommerce Module to track all the transactions along with their associated traffic source and visitors etc.
- Add products with images, prices and reviews to Google Merchant Account. It would be better to set-up an automatic update via RSS to automatically update the Merchant Account when a new product is added, updated or removed.
