Google Products - No more Free clicks

Google Shopping was the biggest free comparison shopping engine, Google has decided to kill free clicks program, no surprise there we expected this would come sooner or later.

Google announced today that it has begun testing and rolling out Google Shopping, which is designed to give shoppers more up-to-date information about prices and discounts, and give merchants more control over where their products appear, says Sameer Samat, vice president of product management, Google Shopping.

Google Shopping will be built on Google’s Product Listing Ads. “Ranking in Google Shopping will be based on a combination of relevance and bid price—just like Product Listing Ads today,” he says.

Instead of bidding on keywords for paid search ads, merchants buying Product Listing Ads bid on the amount they will pay if their product listings in search results attract clicks or result in sales. Product Listing Ads can include a product’s price, an image and the name of the retailer selling it.

No more free clicks from Google, 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.

Our integrated Interprise Suite shopping feed service OneStopFeed will continue to feed these engines regularly until we hear about the new merchant program.

You can read more about this on
Internet Retailer website.
Search Engine Land
Google Shopping, How much does it cost? 


Why The New Google Shopping Sucks for Ecommerce Merchants - SearchEngineWatch.com

• The new Google Shopping creates a rift to PPC management firms and merchants who are accustomed to using Google AdWords – bidding at the keyword level and creating product text ads for certain ad groups. The new Google Shopping will not work like that. Why?
• Merchants and Agencies will be required to use a merchant’s Google Product Search data feed to submit to the new Google Shopping. Most merchants and PPC agencies don’t have experience with data feeds.
• Bidding is product based, not keyword based. You can only submit your feed and bid via attributes in the feed in Google’s Product Listing Ads interface.
  
• Some small merchants won’t adapt fast enough to take advantage of the program and will lose out on traffic and sales.
  
• The potential for more sales is there, but at what cost? The new Google Shopping will require a high level of technical management with the data feed and constant optimization of the product bids in the campaign. This time and money suck will put a strain on merchants

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