Using Google Base

Did you know that clicks from organic search results are not the most valuable?

While many web site owners are concerned mostly with getting to the top of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) for their keywords, not as many are clamoring to get the best Pay Per Click (PPC) positioning or even product search positioning and that leaves me scratching my head.

Why?

Do store owners feel that it’s too hard?
Is there a perception that it’s too expensive?

Maybe they don’t realize that those shopping search engines are delivering customers that are LOOKING TO BUY!  These are not tire kickers, they are not researchers, they are buyers.

In the past month I’ve been looking at my conversion rates, and my conversion rate for a click from a shopping search or product search site is better than those from my standard PPC ads and my general traffic.  (Here, I’m measuring conversion rate as tracking that click into the site as a visitor, tracking that visitor on my site for 7 days with a cookie and using sales/visits to get the conversion rate.) 

Once you get your first feed into Google, you can tweak that same product feed template to feed into all of the other shopping search engines.  And you should.

So far, Google Base (Froogle) has been my best converting property, but I’m also getting good conversion out of the other shopping search engines and those have only been live for a few weeks - I haven’t even started optimizing them yet.