The UK Beta of Froogle displays the 'natural' results with the sellers own copy, price and pack shot which is more than you can show on Adwords. It shows the Adwords on the right hand side as usual but I doubt many searchers user will notice or bother with them if they get matched results on the natural search. Makes you wonder what the point of Adwords is once Froogle takes off as the search of choice for online shoppers and Google search is only used by those looking for info.
Froogle listing seems to be free at this stage but that is sure to change very soon.
Anyone else thinking along the same lines.
Is Froogle going to destroy Adwords?
Realgames, as I not a part of the Froogle team, I can't remember the exact date that Froogle launched in the US - but I believe that it was nearly two years ago. December 2002, as I recall.
In that time the AdWords program (which I am a part of) has continued to flourish and grow. I have not the slightest concern that 'Froogle will destroy AdWords'.
Froogle listing seems to be free at this stage but that is sure to change very soon.
As I said, I am not a part of the Froogle team - but is sure has been free for a long time here in the US!
AWA
In that time the AdWords program (which I am a part of) has continued to flourish and grow. I have not the slightest concern that 'Froogle will destroy AdWords'.
AWA - In my opinion the product specific price comparison search models will dominate the search market within 5 years. Adwords is ingenius in its time but its commercial success is derived from the fact that Google had already established a search engine with a virtual monopoly. Adwords could never have worked if it had not been on the back of the hugely successful Google search engine. When I started selling online in 1998 it was easy to get the top position for my products on natural searches on all major search engines. Now it is impossible so I pay quite a bit for online PPC. But from the shoppers point of view the PPC model is flawed. It is also deeply flawed from the small advertisers point of view because it is impossible to get Adwords to recognise your real CTR for niche keywords as they will never get to 1000 impressions. It is very flawed from the way it is open to manipulation and fraud (especially via the ads displayed on non-google sites). The cleanest model is the product specific listings whereby the search engine gets paid a % of actual conversions. I buy everything online and more and more I am using price comparison sites rather than Google to find e-tailers. I think this will be the trend and the commercial brains at Google know it which is why they are working on the Froogle 'baby'. Look back in a few years time and see if I am right.
PPC model is flawedit's less flawed than the pay per conversion model which would result in retailers offering endless amounts of product listings (since there would be no advertising costs/risks associated for them), and most of these products nobody would ever buy... it would simply become impossible for a search engine to determine what sells and what not.
