Traffic Insights From Google Shopping Search Partners

On the 9th of September, Google announced it was testing Google Shopping for selected partners running AdSense for Shopping, which include e-commerce sites like Walmart.com. I carried out some research across accounts in our agency to see what the impact has been since this announcement.

The Impact So Far

Even though Google did state this would be a slow rollout to partner sites, I was expecting to see a bigger impact than we are seeing at the moment for most of our accounts.

Below, you can see impressions for the UK and USA for a client that sells fancy dress items (aka costume items).

As of September 14th, impressions did start to increase for the USA shopping campaigns. Pre-announcement, they had hovered at around 10,000 impressions while the testing was still pretty small-scale.

Impressions in the UK have also increased, but they are showing on a much smaller scale than in the U.S.

I also checked into some shopping campaigns running in Australia where there are still equally low volumes of impressions, on par with what we’re seeing in the UK. This is a similar story for quite a few of the accounts that I checked.

One outlier that I came across can be seen below for a cosmetics company running in the U.S.

As of October 20th, the company saw its Search Partner impressions shoot up past those coming in from search! The actual clicks that came in were minimal, however, which indicates perhaps the partner site:

• Didn’t have ads showing in a very prominent position
• Wasn’t showing the most relevant products for the search terms

We also know from Google search that partner sites tend to have a much lower click-through rate, so we’ll need to wait for the volume of impressions to increase before we can make a call on performance here.

What To Do Next

Segment by search network (including search partners) and keep an eye on the data for yourself. As more search partners get added, this traffic will grow — and you’ll want to make sure you are aware of how this is impacting your campaigns.

It would be interesting to hear if people are seeing any different results yet and if anyone has seen a good conversion rate coming in from Google Shopping search partners.

Though it’s not been explicitly stated, performance on search partners usually bears no impact on Google Search quality score, so one would presume that this is the same when it comes to Google Shopping.

If you’re not seeing a good click-through-rate yet, hold on there for some more data to come through and make an assessment once you actually start spending more money on the partner network.

If you want to set up Google Shopping for search partners on your site, you can fill out the form here, and you will be contacted when it starts to include more advertisers.