Chris's thoughts
Google moving to paid shopping results
Today is an important day for the Google shopping results.
Organic listings are beginning to be phased out starting with a change to the search results page, where the previous two sets of shopping results become just one set of paid results.
Previously there were organic and paid listings as you can see. However, this will start to change to just paid listings from today, meaning companies that have relied on organic shopping results revenue will be forced to think about paid options.
There are complications for existing paid shopping campaigns, which will need to have their shopping feeds updating to the new format before March if not already done. The specifications can be found here.
It is clear that with the success of the shopping results, Google want to ensure they are profiting from this useful feature, but there is another reason behind the change.
With the free shopping results, there is little encouragement for a company to keep their product feed up to date and accurate. The shopping results often suffer poor relevancy as visitors click to find the product no longer in stock, etc.
The move to pure paid results should tackle this issue as advertisers cannot afford to lose potential customers on a cost per click model.
