The Google Marketplace, “Buy with Google“

The Google Marketplace has finally landed Down Under. A little ahead of my scheduling to be honest. What does this mean for retailers? Well, customers can now buy directly from Google, avoiding your website altogether. While this sounds like terrible news, there are things you can take advantage of.

What I learned

• It’ll be easier to find things to buy in Google
• If you buy ads on Amazon, buy them on Google
• How do you maintain customer relations?
• Your site needs to be structured properly to take advantage
• You need a strong brand

Transcript

Hey, welcome back Rankers. Well, it`s happened. The Google Marketplace is here. We said it was coming. Didn`t realise it was going to be that quick, but yeah, it started last week. So what does this mean? Well basically, Google is now offering a buy-from-Google, so that means that rather than going to your website as the retailer, I`ll be able to conveniently buy your products via Google and not have to go to your website at all.

Now similarities, obviously, to Amazon. The whole shopping experience on Google now, that seems to be one of the cool focuses of it, is the Google shopping products and the whole Google shopping experience in the product listing ads and those sorts of areas where it used to be, but now it`s getting a much, much bigger focus. We`re getting much more focused on the whole shopping experience. We think this has got a lot to do with maybe some of the quality changes that we`re seeing in Google. When you`re trying to find deep research topics, it doesn`t seem as easy any more. It`s very easy to find things to buy in Google. That`s good for retailers. That`s great for retailers.

So the thing is like any other marketplace, like we`ve been saying, you`ve got to look at Google the same way. So if you`re spending money on ads on Google, Amazon, then you might be … you should be looking at that on Google, on Google Amazon. Did I say Google Amazon? If you`re doing ads on Amazon, you should be doing ads on Google if you are a retailer. Basically, a lot of questions coming from this. Isn`t there going to be a fight for price to the bottom because Google`s saying they`re going to allow you to find the best price easier with some of the things that they`re doing? What does this mean for you and you keeping the relationship with that customer if they`re not coming to your site now? And is your site set up properly to take advantage of all the structured data benefits that come … Well, not structured data benefits, but the customer benefits that could come from having the correct structured data set up?

All of these important things, if you haven`t done them, you really need to be looking at them right now if you`re a retailer, because your competitors are. So what`s happening and what we`re seeing now is that Google Shopping for the right products goes gangbusters and our clients are certainly getting huge returns from some of those AI products. If, as we know, Google retains most of the traffic at Google, it doesn`t actually send it to other people`s websites but keeps it at Google, then that`s a sizable chunk of traffic. So even if you have looked at your own impressions and you see many things you might get searched for but you don`t get the clicks, where are those people going? Well now some of them are probably just not going to leave Google and they`re going to buy stuff from Google.

So how does it work? Basically, people with Google Pay, it makes it really easy. If you`ve got a Google account, you can set up Google Pay, so whenever I`m on Google and I see a product that I want, basically, I can just buy with Google using my Google Pay account because I`m already logged in. So it`s a play against Amazon, not available in Australia. We`re only talking the US. I think it was trialled in France earlier in the year. But basically get your shopping campaigns in order. Get your structured data in order across your site. Make sure you`re ready for Google to crawl and understand your pricing, your in-stock, your out of stock, everything that it needs to know because if you don`t, you`re going to be left behind. And one of the most important things, in all of this, is make sure you have a strong brand, because if Google`s not sending that traffic to your site, how are they going to remember you? You`ve got to make sure that people can know, well, they can find your brand on whatever platform that they are on.

And don`t worry too much at the moment about getting them back to your website. Just make sure you`re selling product because they know your brand and they can find you on whatever marketplace you`re on. And if they want to go to your website, they can do that as well.

Hopefully that`s helpful and we`ll see you next week. Thanks very much. Bye.

Jim

Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.