Search engine soup: Northern Tool fits Froogle into Google marketing mix
Google’s new shopping search engine, Froogle, has been up for about 18 months, but it wasn’t promoted while Google worked to refine its new offering. Froogle, which accepts direct product data feeds into its index at no charge, still isn’t getting heavy promotion. But in April, Google moved the link to Froogle from its advanced search function to its home page. It also started running a short list of top Froogle results identified as product links at the top of its regular search results. That’s when Northern Tool & Equipment Catalog Co. saw its web sales off Froogle triple within a month, says e-commerce manager Nate Miller.
Miller tells Internet Retailer Northern Tool started submitting its data feed to Froogle early last year after discovering it on Google`s web site. Northern Tool uses Performics Data Feed technology that converts feeds from marketers to meet the requirements of different search engines and shopping aggregators, which means the marketer doesn`t need to build a separate automated feed for each search engine on its own. "It’s free to submit it to Froogle, and we already had this feed built, so we said, let’s just submit it and see what’s out there," says Miller.
Northern Tool’s first conversions off Froogle were in May of last year. For the next three months, conversions off Froogle totaled $40, then started moving into the low thousands of dollars. This March, sales off Froogle links were in the $5,000 range, then they tripled in April. That’s when Google started adding the top-ranking Froogle product results to the top of Google search results pages, right under the sponsosred links. Miller says that correlates directly with April being its biggest month with Froogle. "In May, to date we have surpassed April – it could be double what April was," he says.
Though pleased with those results, Miller calls them "bittersweet." Just prior to when Google started running top Froogle product results over its regular results in April, Northern Tool had spent effort and resources optimizing its product pages to Google’s engine so they’d rank at or near the top of Google results in natural search. "Then in April we see they are running three product links (from Froogle) on top of that," Miller says. "Now it’s just one more thing I’ve got to optimize for. Because I might be number one under electric drills, for example, in the natural search results on Google, but I could be number seven in Froogle, so I don’t get listed at the top of the page in those top three results from Froogle that are on Google."
Miller indicates it’s also not clear yet whether Froogle is producing incremental sales or drawing off sales that might otherwise come in over other links, paid or unpaid. "I’ve still got great placement in Google, but now I’ve got to worry about Google Ad Words, Google natural search and now Froogle, and balance all of that," he says. "Froogle is an opportunity, but it’s also another complexity in the Google landscape. How these all relate to each other is the next level of search engine management."
Back...
