Brian,

Thanks for posting this!

It makes no sense to me unless something is coming that will complete the puzzle. However, I’m not so certain. I think Google Checkout may have a lot with to do with this change.

Keep up the good work!
John

It seems to me that they will transition froogle to google base based on the hints within her answers to you but you are right it doesn’t make sense which shows they still dont have a clear strategy what to do with froogle and even how to monetize it which is truly unbelievable considering their place in the market

Tony - well, now that the results aren’t at all normalized, don’t they have a way to monetize Froogle? When no one can figure out what’s what in the basic Froogle listings, aren’t they just going to click on the AdWords listings on the side of the page. Those ads are now much more relevant than the basic Froogle listings.

Brian,
They can’t monetize froogle when they don’t charge for inventory feed submittals or clicks within that service and it has been like that for years now so I would imagine the same fate for their GBase service, in other words disorganized and without any significant market traction for the foreseable future. Obniously very little internal resources have been focused in these areas though that may change. But they are a general search engine and thats what they do well, they are not a retail engine.

Ok, short term, I have a feeling AdWords is doing very well for Froogle - especially now that the listings aren’t normalized.

Long term, I think they should go for a CPA based monetization model and take a very small cut of the transaction. They are already testing out CPA based ads and everyone realizes that CPA based advertising is extremely attractive.

Froogle/GB will not have the problems that the established shopping comparison engines (which use a ppc based model) have in implementing something like this. From my recent Pronto piece for SearchDay, one sr. exec at a shopping comparison engine explained:
“No doubt that a pure CPA system is easier for merchants to administer, but there are big drawbacks for the market-maker in terms more complicated merchant integration which could slowdown adoption and hinder comprehensiveness of coverage. Also, because the CPA information typically lags and isn’t “real-time” (i.e. needs to be consolidated offline and take into account returns and such), it makes it harder for the market-maker to manage/optimize bids effectively upstream in the keyword markets, hampering traffic acquisition efforts.”

And then you have Google Checkout - which if adopted along with Google Analytics - completes the circle for an ecommerce transaction.

Google has said it wants to provide a better solution for its merchants and a “more integrated shopping experience on Google.com.” Well, if they have a way to monetize the transaction - a CPA based model where they could take a small cut, Google Checkout where they get a small cut, etc. - there’s more incentive to push the Froogle/GB listings to the top of the Google.com results.

CPA is a dream for advertisers/merchants but not too compelling for publishers cause publishers have to assume additional risk in merchant’s ability to convert to a sale. Then there is also the fact online purchases happen over a certain period of time from the 1st time the offer was seen and viewed, so what if one publisher has basically advertised the product multiple times but the buyer in the end buys via a link from another publisher’s site due to the convenience of being there, we know who will get the commission but there is no way to track such and make it a fair system under CPA, it would be a nightmare and publishers just dont get excited over this. The whole point is, these issues make it very difficult to build out distribution like Adsense enjoys right now strictly on CPA basis and Google will not run CPAs on search cause its too risky in comparison to CPC, perhaps on some products where they figure they get a better yield on CPA than CPC but there are not too many situations like that.

Good Point Tony, and here is a link to a study about such loss of “assist” clicks.
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/060802-110359

Hi, if you want to learn whats up with froogle/google base try uploading some bulk listings, I’m ecstatic to have 80% show up anywhere and I only tried about 180 at a time others are listing thousands of legitimate listings only to have 10% show up. This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of bugs. FeeBay is relatively safe for at least a year. Some of my listings made it to the first page of a froogle search, no hits of any sort.

John - the only items I was able to find for Fiberopticsurplus/Double Diamond Co were Wave2Wave Fiber Optic Patch Cables. Seems odd.

I’ve had great success with bulk uploads to Google Base / Froogle. Takes some serious effort, but good rankings are possible. Feel free to send me a portion of you GB feed, and I’ll see if I can help out. Alternatively, ChannelAdvisor, Marketworks, Performics, Mercent, Marchex, Red Zone Global, Merchant Advantage, Andale, ChannelIntelligence, etc. have solutions that might be able to help you.

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