Marketers outside the U.S. have continued to enjoy free shopping traffic from Google, despite the search giant’s big change to convert all results to paid listing ads in its home country. But that’s beginning to change for folks in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Brazil, Australia, Switzerland and the Czech Republic.

As Google announced late last year, the company began on February 13 to replace free listings on Google Shopping to Product Listing Ads in those 11 countries. To encourage advertisers to adopt the new product, Google is offering a credit to marketers in those countries who set up a PLA campaign before April 12.

Those who don’t begin to purchase the paid product will see their free product listings, and the traffic that they drove, disappear from results.

In the U.S., Google made this same switchover in mid-October and says it’s seen a lot of success. The PLAs are definitely getting praise (and budget) from some marketers, but others complain that small merchants are being shut out by bigger players.

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Google: AdWords | Google: Product Search

About The Author: Pamela Parker is a contributing editor for Search Engine Land and Executive Features Editor at Marketing Land. She’s a well-respected authority on digital marketing, having reported and written on the subject since 1998, including a stint as managing editor of ClickZ. She’s also worked to help monetize independent publishers’ sites at Federated Media Publishing. She blogs about media and marketing at The River and about cooking, gardening and parenthood at Free Range. She can be found on Twitter as @pamelaparker. See more articles by Pamela Parker

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