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Why ‘good’ isn’t good enough in Google Shopping

Have you experienced high growth from your Google Shopping ads? You're not the only one. Columnist Andreas Reiffen looks at growth data for product listing ads and explains why even an 89% growth in revenue year over year may not be enough to outpace your competitors.

Andreas Reiffen on June 15, 2017 at 3:14 pm

Growing revenue in Google Shopping by 80 percent YoY sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? But what if I told you that, based on that growth percentage, you were actually losing ground to your competition?

Well, that is exactly the situation retailers using Google Shopping find themselves in today.

As an online retailer (especially if you operate in the US market), if clicks and associated revenues on your Google Shopping ads didn’t grow by at least 90 percent from 2015 to 2016, you’ve got a problem.

The reason for this is that over the past year, Google Shopping has seen a staggering amount of natural growth. Our internal benchmark data shows that from Q4 2015 to Q4 2016, Shopping’s share of paid SERP clicks grew from 51 percent to 71 percent. In addition, according to an Alphabet statement, aggregate paid clicks grew by 36 percent from Q4 2015 to Q4 2016.

When we combine these two natural growth factors, we find that natural Shopping growth — without your doing anything extra — was 89 percent (in clicks) over the course of 2016.

At first, you might think 89 percent growth without any work is a good thing. And it is. But if you can grow 89 percent without any effort, so can everyone else. Growing at the same rate as all of your competitors isn’t real growth; it’s maintaining the status quo.

In this article, we’ll examine where this tremendous growth in Shopping has come from and what retailers can do to grow their accounts beyond it.

[Read the full article on Search Engine Land.]

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Andreas Reiffen

Andreas Reiffen is an entrepreneur, marketing technologist and thought leader in data-driven advertising. Between 2006 and 2008 Andreas operated as a PPC super affiliate working for Zappos and other retailers. In 2008 he founded crealytics, the Berlin-based provider of camato, the leading Google Shopping Tool to automate PLA campaigns and improve performance. Several of the largest international Ecommerce retailers are using camato to manage Google Shopping in more than 100 markets across the globe, generating over $3B in revenues per year. camato has been shortlisted for numerous awards in 2016 including European Performance Marketing and Drum Search.