Google Product Search Verses Google Adwords
Anyone setting up an ecommerce website knows that one of the most important thing you need for a flourishing website is to draw customers to your site. However, if you are new and even if you are not, it’s not always simple to get your site noticed. There are thousands of website selling exactly what you are selling and they are all contending for your customers. Often there are bigger and more recognized sites and they seem to draw most of the traffic while leaving smaller sites to fight over the scraps. So how do you attract consumers to your site?
The most evident method is to use a Pay Per Click campaign. This is an advertisement method where you promote your products through an advertisement company such as Google. Your adverts are placed on their search results and on pages of their numerous partners. You only get to pay when someone clicks on your advert. You only get charged an amount based on the maximum amount you are prepared to pay per click. This could differ from 1p to a very large amount of money. However bidding very low amounts of money could direct to little or no clicks and too high could result in a fast depletion of your funds.
Secondly, the other method is used the Google Merchant Centre (Google Product Search). This is free and merely requires you to send a list of your products to Google as an XML or CSV file. The format of the feed is given on the Google site. Your items are then listed in the Google product list for 30 days. When people search for these products on Google, they are frequently presented with 3 search results in a little box in the search result page. If they are not contented with those results they can then click on the more options link that will open the full Google products page. These show all related products listed on Google products and they can select the websites they wish to visit.
Now, both advertisement modes will generate traffic but what are the advantages and disadvantages of these advertisement modes:
Advantage Of AdWords
- Can generate almost limitless traffic, depends on how much you are prepared to pay
- Operates worldwide so you can aim any geographical area in the world
- Charge is controllable, both daily maximum spend and cost per click
- Permits for very targeted advertisement using Keywords
- You can track conversion ratio of your campaign
- It’s a lot cheaper than most advertisement methods online
- Tons of guides and suggestions online
- You can stop anytime, you are not tied-in.
- Places big companies and small companies on a level playing field
- Very good in building up a client base
Advantages Of Google Products Search
- It is totally free
- Takes maybe 2 hrs to set up and after that updating the feed it takes only a few minutes and on some sites it’s done mechanically
- All your products are uploaded directly
- Usually visitors tend to be people actually interested in buying your stuff as they would have navigated a few pages before getting to your site
- Can make reasonably high traffic if you have a really good feed and your website has good feedbacks or reviews
- Feed program is frequently built-in with most ecommerce programs nowadays so you don’t need to write it yourself
Disadvantages Of AdWords
- Can be luxurious in the long run
- Designed to be effectual if you are willing to spend a bit of money. If you decrease your cost per click or daily budget below a point, it seems Google just switches it off and you get maybe a couple of clicks only
- Very uneconomical for small value products as your margin is quickly eaten away
- While it is often targeted but there are always instances that it’s not well targeted and your adverts keep getting advertised to people who are not actually interested in what you sell.
- Needs regular manual maintenance and monitoring, occasionally you can be stung
- Difficult to promote every single item if you have thousands of items on your site as each advert is prepared manually
Disadvantages Of Google Products Search
- Traffic tends to be a much lower than AdWords
- Getting noticed is very difficult as competition is quite hard
- Admin page is very basic, you have to download a csv file to have exact and clear idea of which item was clicked on a particular day.
- You cannot adapt the chart time interval on the traffic charts
However if you want a rapid flow of traffic or want to build a Customer base quickly then you need AdWords, if you want to build a steady and firm business over time then Google products will do. The more likely state is that you will want to use both of them and just control the AdWords cost.
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