Google Shopping Continues to Prepare for Paid Inclusion

Google Shopping is changing and shifting in order to transition to their new 'paid inclusion' model. Perhaps most importantly is their new focus on supporting each merchant's transition. They've continued to publish video tutorials on their user interface and are releasing them onto the Google Business YouTube channel.

We've covered the changes that Google Shopping has been making in detail for the last few months so we will keep this one short.

If you're making this transition, and we highly recommend that you do, then Google's Business YouTube channel needs to be your next step. There are now 5 tutorial videos out and you can quickly find them all on this playlist.

Here's a post from Google's blog announcing that the shopping results will be ranked on a combination of relevance and bid price.

"We're continuing to actively release improvements to the product and we recently started ranking the results in Google Shopping based on a combination of relevance and bid price--just like Product Listing Ads are ranked. While products listed without a bid will continue to show until the final transition to a commercial model is complete in the fall, advertisers who are promoting their products with Product Listing Ads will have better positioning and increased traffic."

"Merchants who create Product Listing Ads will also have greater control over where their products appear in Google Shopping, due to the inclusion of bid as a factor in ranking. And in the future, they will have the opportunity to differentiate their businesses and market special offers, such as, 30% off all refracting telescopes."

You will need an AdWords account as well as a Merchant Center account in order to create Product Listing Ads. Here are all the details about how to