Whenever something new happens, naturally all of the blogs pick up on it and start talking about it. One of the recent hot topics was around the wider roll out of Google product ads available in the US to showcase specific products within the advertising spots on Google.com.
The product ads are still in BETA, and will only be available to US advertisers and only on US (.com) search results.
What will they look like?
See the image below for a representation of a product listing ad on the search term “airflow collectibles”.
How will rank be determined?
The product listing ads are shown based on Google base data, which is also used to populate the Google shopping results. The rank at which your product will show vs. a competitors will be based upon two things:
1) The volume and quality of the information you provide through your Google base file.
2) The amount of commission you’re willing to pay out to Google based on each conversion.
So in essence all being equal in terms of the payout amount then the advertiser that provides the best level of data to Google via the base upload will rank first (as it is with the current shopping results) but if an advertiser can afford to give out more commission then the likelihood is they would win any rank race.
How is it charged?
I guess you have to credit Google in some respects, they do still provide a lot of great tools and services for free, but my god do they drive revenue from any advertising opportunity out there!
They are selling this to advertisers on the basis of paying only for what you make. Also known as CPA (or cost per action) the idea is you’ll pay Google some commission for every successful sale that the product listings generate.
Sounds great in theory right, totally risk free way of advertising?
Here are the issues in my eyes
The tracking will be based on the Google cookie, similar to the one used for Adwords. Now anybody who has run Adwords campaigns will vouch for the inaccuracies of these cookies.
You see the problem is these cookies run for 30 days, and they track multiple conversions to a single cookie. So, for example lets say 1 of your regular customers clicks on this advert and then goes on to purchase 10 times in the month, on 9 of those occasions they navigated directly to you and weren’t influenced at all by the original product ad on the first purchase. You’re liable to for paying Google commission on all of those sales because they will have tracked them back and associated them to the original click through.
At least with adwords your reporting was just useless….now that useless reporting is going to start costing you serious cash.
So before you jump in thinking its risk free, just ask yourself how accurate you think a 30 day, recurring cookie is at tracking your sales.
I know from experience that we would see discrepancies in the region of over £700k per month between Google tracking and our own internal tracking.