In early April 2020, during the global quarantine, the Google Ads team announced the launch of free search results in Google Shopping.
This news was met with two reactions:
- Large online stores were "happy" in quotes, as this increases competition with small stores.
- Small stores were happy, as they were given a great chance to develop, namely, to get into one of the largest marketplaces in the world.
What did they get as a result?
A free block appeared on the commercial search results page shopping.google.com similar to the search results scheme.
"If there is paid and free placement in the regular search results, then there should be similar ones in Google Shopping" - this is the logic that the developers of the Google search engine laid down.
This search results were first noticed on April 24, 2020 in the USA, which looked like this:
Now every online store that is promoted in Google Shopping is already setting this up and there is nothing complicated about it.
How to get and analyze free traffic from Google Shopping?
- All free search operations are carried out through a valid Merchant Center, which is filled to the maximum, taking into account delivery, returns and exchanges;
- Merchant Center should not have any blocking at the account level;
- Only products that are in the Merchant Center will be shown;
- Products will be displayed in Google search and product sites, but not in the Display Network, this is the Google shopping tab and images.
In the Merchant Center, you can check the status - whether your product is shown in free search or not here:
How to evaluate traffic and impressions?
Google developers have added statistics on clicks from free search results to Merchant Center here:
Additionally, at the beginning of 2022, automatic tagging of free traffic was added to Google Merchant Center, which opens up the possibility of receiving data in Google Analytics. This can be connected in literally 1 click:
* Be careful, “srsltid” marks will start to be added to the URL, consult with an SEO specialist.
As a result, free traffic from Google Shopping to Google Analytics 4 - You can see in the following report (the channel is called “Organic Shopping”):
In general, there is free traffic, but we have not yet encountered projects with a large amount of such traffic. This is simply a gesture of loyalty from Google developers, but there is a point in placing in this program. Therefore, we recommend that you take these actions.
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