Following on from its initial launch in the U.S. in April, Google have announced that Google Shopping campaigns will be made available globally for free from the middle of October 2020.
Earlier this year, Google decided to open up Google Shopping to free listings to merchants within the United States. This started within the Google Shopping tab before expanding to the main search results section and, following on from its success, the search engine giant has announced that it now plans to extensively roll this out worldwide for free in the coming weeks.
The announcement. Google said “today we announced that we’re bringing free listings to the Shopping tab in countries across Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Just as we don’t charge sites to be part of the Google Search index, listings for participating retailers are eligible to appear in these results at no cost to them. Paid listings will continue to appear in ad slots and will operate in the same way as Shopping ads do today.”
Not sure how to take advantage? All you need to do is upload your product feeds to your Google Merchant Center account, before selecting to opt-into the Surfaces on Google program. This will ensure that your products appear successfully within Google’s results across organic search, the Shopping tab, and Google Images once a product relevant search has been carried out.
What are the benefits? Simply put, their decision to open Google Shopping for free globally is likely to have a huge impact, as it opens up this popular feature to all merchants will only help to enhance Google’s appeal to both sellers and consumers. As you would expect, if sellers want to achieve a prominent high level of visibility within the Google Shopping results they can, although they will need to continue to pay for the privilege.
It has been estimated that Google will already make around $39.58 billion in ad revenue in 2020, which is through their Google Ads and Google Shopping services, which you can learn more about here;
For an SEO agency such as ourselves, this decision provides us with an extra layer of online marketing potential, ensuring that clients with a lower budget will now be able to reach a wider audience without having to shed out hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds in the process. This will, subsequently, see a higher number of merchants signing up to Google Shopping and, as a direct result, see Google’s income rise even further, as companies that may have never thought of spending money on Google Shopping may be tempted to do so further down the line to help increase their visibility even further.
