How is Google Shopping working out for you guys?

It was working well for us until around Oct 20.

[spica42]

We used to rely on Google base traffic and after Google stopped the program, we were in serious trouble.

Sales were way down in August when Google ramped up Google Shopping so we enrolled and set aside a budget to join the problem. This helped us recover a little of our sales.

However, since last week, our sales plunged again even though we increase our budget for Google shopping, we are no longer getting results. Anyone else have problems with Google Shopping in Oct?

Our feed doesn't seem to have problems and we are getting clicks; just not converting after Oct 20.

[KnottyJudi]

We are seeing the same thing... I've also checked with other site owners and they are all experiencing lower orders/conversions more so in the past week -- even those NOT in Google Shopping.

[spica42]

Don't know if we should be glad to hear that... The drop is 30% to 50% over here. Maybe it's the elections?

[KnottyJudi]

It is probably a combo of a bunch of things (now we have Hurricane Sandy added to the mix) not the least being the economy is taking a toll. Our site and the business I talked to are in the $5-10 impulse buy range. When folks feel they can't spend that much -- that means there is serious belt tightening going on. Many are looking to the Holidays to help boost their EOY bottom line..

[Marshall]

Not really seeing any change, other than now I am paying for it. Many sites are still falsely promoting their products, e.g. claiming Free Shipping only to go to the site and find out "on purchases of $99 or more." I would think to make G Shopping more reputable, they would clean up their act, something I thought they were suppose to do last year. Obviously I was wrong and all that matters is $$$.

Marshall

[Derwaish]

Facing same problem, there is no error shown in account but products are not showing in searches. Tried a lot to contact with Google but no response.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Google profits were up sharply from their net properties, not including adsense, which wouldn't be the case if it was a consumer spending related problem I don't think.

[Bewenched]

Ditto here guys. Upped our bids and budget and still conversions are WAY down.

One thing I have noticed for a lot of search in google is that a lot of times items in google shopping aren't showing up in the main feed and thus people aren't seeing those first three that used to show up.

We're seeing the same thing with competitors showing free shipping to google but it's not free on their site once you get there. Also showing people claiming it is in stock when in fact it is not.

We went through all the trouble to calculate shipping as well as REAL LIVE INVENTORY... we also update nightly to ensure it's all correct and it seems we're being punished for it.

If conversions dont turn around I think I'll turn my marketing money over to the other shopping sites out there. Googles results suck anyway.

[Rugles]

Having issue here as well.

All our products were in G Shoppping at the begining of the week, we were getting the paid traffic. Everything looked fine.
Then 3 days later most of the product are out of the feed. We did not change a thing. Complete mystery.

[spica42]

Our products are in the feed, and people are clicking. It's just that the conversions are exceptionally low for the past week.

[Bewenched]

Well this might be the issue.

We introduced a new destination called Shopping that replaces the Product Search and Product Ads destinations for feeds targeting the US.

Wednesday, October 31, 2012 | 8:42 AM

Labels: alert

We introduced a new destination called Shopping that replaces the Product Search and Product Ads destinations for feeds targeting the US. Learn more.

[merchant-center-announcements.blogspot.com...]

[Tonearm]

Is there a way to subscribe to a thread without posting? Sorry.

[dickbaker]

I"m having a hell of a time with Google Shopping. I set up an Adwords campaign ("Adwords Product Campaign") for my products from Google Merchant Center. All of the products in the Merchant Center are ones that I've run Adwords ads for previously.

The Merchant Center thinks that these products violate Adwords weapons policies (they don't), and so they're disapproved for Product Ads. Because they're disapproved, my Adwords "Adwords Product Campaign" with the Merchant Center products isn't being displayed. They were showing up in September, and I was paying on average 13 cents a click. Then they stopped showing them completely.

Well, I have another Adwords campaign for some very expensive scopes, and I have to bid $1 or more to get on the first page. Even at that, I don't get many clicks on these Adwords ads, but I do get clicks from the search network, which includes Google Shopping, but instead of paying the 13 cents a click I was paying in September for listings in Google Shopping, I'm paying the $1 a click from the expensive scopes Adwords campaign.

If you can make sense out of all that, you're a whole lot smarter than me.

[Bewenched]

If the results aren't going to show up along with main search results there's really no point in advertising there for us, it just promotes competitor click fraud. I'm afraid we're going to be looking at Bing Shopping to spend our advertising money with.

[minnapple]

Has anyone having problems with disapproved products, used the "New test data feed" option, before uploading?

It would be helpful if Google would report on disapproved products at the "New test data feed" and allow you to download a clean list to upload.

I have a client that has one product catergory that includes many attributes that conventional adwords has rejected and I am little nervous about uploading that product category into the product listings after what I have read here.

[Rugles]

Now everything is back to normal for us.

We did not change one single thing. So whatever was causing the problem was at Google's end.

[Panthro]

Is there a way to subscribe to a thread without posting? Sorry.

Not that I know. It's one of those things I hope gets added with the IMN acquisition.

[webdevfv]

We were doing well on the Shopping free clicks and then also added a shopping adwords campaign which also did very well and was excellent converter at a low CPA.

Since last few weeks whole thing has gone to pot. Had to restart the whole thing linking Merchant Center to Adwords (again - but this time from GMC to AdW).

Got 5 campaigns running now and 1 gets a few clicks while the others don't even hit impressions. Asked Google what was wrong and they said up the bids to £1.50 - £2.00 per click. About a 7 fold increase! These kids think it grows on trees.

Can't afford to throw money away at Google. So will now go elsewhere.

Dickbaker "If you can make sense out of all that, you're a whole lot smarter than me."

I can make sense of it. They are putting the price up. Simples!

Will it be cost effective? No. Do they care. No.

Funny thing is, if they get too greedy they will be left with just amazon and ebay listings and will be digging their own grave with regards comprehensive shopping results.

I don't believe that a £1.99 ebay/amazon listing is paying a CPC of between £1.50-£2.00. Google must be giving them massive discounts. So unless I pay what that ebay listing is paying I'm out! Got that Google? Looks like you've just killed your comprehensive shopping search stone dead.

[spica42]

We were doing well on the Shopping free clicks and then also added a shopping adwords campaign which also did very well and was excellent converter at a low CPA.

Since last few weeks whole thing has gone to pot. Had to restart the whole thing linking Merchant Center to Adwords (again - but this time from GMC to AdW).

Got 5 campaigns running now and 1 gets a few clicks while the others don't even hit impressions. Asked Google what was wrong and they said up the bids to £1.50 - £2.00 per click. About a 7 fold increase! These kids think it grows on trees.

Exactly our problem. And for the first time in years, we are moving to Amazon.. I hope it works out well over there.

[KnottyJudi]

Our shopping clicks flat-linned -- turned out it was due to a change made to our account by our Google Rep!

PLAs currently **do not work** with their Conversion Optimizer setup -- so you'll want to be sure you are not doing that. When I e-mailed about the situation I was typed to as though I should have known better (Why didn't our Google rep know better?). I made the mistake of trusting our rep!

When I pointed out that our Google rep made the change -- not us -- that comment was ignored in lieu of offering screen shots showing the account was working again. Duh! I knew that -- I reverted the changes myself.

Our rep did call and profusely apologized for his lack of knowledge... But that doesn't make up for the sales lost.

[dickbaker]

A huge problem for me right now is that Merchant Center has disapproved about 70% of my products, so I can't get my best-selling items listed.

I sell optical accessories for guns (scopes, rangefinders, etc), so disapprovals always been a problem that I had to email them about, but now it's worse. I have products that are approved, and nearly identical products disapproved. A green model XYZ is approved, but the brown XYZ is disapproved. It makes no sense.

I've emailed the Merchant Center team many times, and get canned replies. They're not going to do anything.

Yesterday I signed up with Shopping.com so I can get listed on Bing's shopping network. The products I sell are listed already by other retailers, so apparently Shopping.com/Bing's computers can tell that a green XYZ is the same as a brown XYZ.

Once everything is set up with Bing, I'll watch it and hopefully be able to drop Google.

[Bewenched]

@KnottyJudi,
I wonder if that is what happened with ours. We have/had a rep and when we noticed the issues I emailed him. Two days later I got a response, but from a totally different person.

I'm wondering if we should really think about using a different ad service.

[KnottyJudi]

@Bewenched... I would definitely check that out! To this day, the other reps responding to my requests for clarification still reply as though I made the changes that caused us to be excluded from Shopping!

As of today, we *still* have the yellow nag bar on the top of our PLA campaign that says "This campaign is eligible to use Conversion Optimizer"! If you use Conversion Optimizer you'll flat-line and be out of Shopping because it is not compatible -- at this point in time.

You would think if they know that they wouldn't flash that nag bar on PLA campaigns... I wonder how many others have followed through on that "hint" to only find it results in their PLAs showing "0 Clicks".

I've thought of using a different ad service too -- but we don't have a budget right now to turn those sales away *and* have addition budgets for other services.

The old between and rock and a hard place, huh? :(

[KnottyJudi]

@dickbaker,

We had the same thing -- items approved but just *one* color was disapproved (Is Coral Pink a violation?). I think the issue, for us is the word Tactical. We offer 275 Tactical Cord -- could the "T" word be a flag? But if so, why just Coral Pink? I've not received an answer to that as of yet -- will report back if I do...

We also had quite a few items noted as "not searchable". So I used this form asking what was up:

[support.google.com...]

and selected: Please send me an email detailing my feed's errors and instructions on how to fix them

Is this where you made your request? I received an personalized response over night that everything was fine with screenshots (had to follow up on the Coral Pink this morning) -- and the not searchables are searchable today.

[dickbaker]

KnottyJudi, that's the link for Merchant Center I've used.

I don't know if "tactical" would trigger a disapproval. I've tried playing with words and it works to a slight extent. But for the most part, any words I think might be "bad words" don't seem to have an effect. I thought having "rifle" in the description would result in disapproval, but it doesn't. Google seems to know the products.

I hope the following isn't being too specific for forum rules.

I've searched for various brands and models of rifle scopes, and only see a couple of listings at best, and these are ones where the site owner has used variations of words to trick Google's system into thinking they're not scopes. Otherwise, scopes seem to be "bad" products.

OTOH, magazines, which hold the cartridges ("bullets", for you non-gun type readers), are okay. So are rangefinders, which are used to measure the distance to the target for the purposes of adjusting for bullet drop. Laser sights, too, are okay, which is weird, since laser sights are primarily used for aiming at people.

But scopes, which can be used to aim at paper targets or game such as deer, (or, infrequently, people) are bad products.

[KnottyJudi]

@dickbaker...

I'm just as confused as you are -- that is the only thing I could think of. Must be they don't like pink. ;-) There doesn't seem to be a pattern nor, IMNSHO, is Google willing to address bugs or false-positives.

Because we can't post e-mail experts here suffice it to say I got a response to my inquiry that didn't answer my specific question. Basically they stated in a very large rambling paragraph that "due to proprietary technology they are unable to comment on specifics".

I *really* hate when I get responses that do not answer my specific question and just talk in circles. This also confirms to me that with Shopping, Panda, Penguin and any other furry little algos running around that they don't really seem to care if a false-positive effects us little guys negatively.

[dickbaker]

KnottyJudi, I've signed up with Shopping.com so I can be in Bing's shopping network. They haven't disapproved any of my products, and I'm getting clicks, so that right there is an improvement over Google.

[Bewenched]

You can get on Bing's network for free, listings taken time to get in there, but for now it's still free.

Funny thing about shopping.com ... I've signed up twice and I never get a response from them about our account setup. Wierd.

[webdevfv]

Bewenched - "You can get on Bing's network for free"

- how is this done?

[Bewenched]

@webdevfv, just sign up. It's still currently free.
bingads.microsoft.com

I think you can pay to be promoted higher and it does take longer for your products to be "added" but it's still free.

Shame that Google decided to start charging when the economy is so bad.