Google got taken to court for giving Google Shopping search engine results preference over alternative Comparison Shopping Services (CSS) and the unlikely winner is Pricesearcher. In order for products to appear in the carousel at the top of search results you and your ad agency will need a robust partner.
Google’s problem is that they want to display the best and most relevant products to consumers. They naturally think that Google Shopping is a pretty good way to do this but other Comparison Shopping Services were miffed at being excluded and took Google to court.
Inevitably as soon as the ruling came out, a ton of SEO and Paid Search Agencies appear to have opened up fake Comparison Shopping Services in an effort to get them into the carousel at the top of search results. Often the comparison shopping sites would only have a handful of the agency’s clients on it so if consumers landed on them they’d be pretty useless as a destination site. Rumour has it that some agencies were even swapping feeds or loading up products from retailers and brands that weren’t even clients in order to bolster their fake comparison shopping engine sites.
Google may have lost the freedom to exclusively display Google Shopping results in court, but Google being Google aren’t going to sit back and let substandard Comparison Shopping Sites get a share of their real estate at the top of shopping results. This has all led to Google putting some strict requirements in place in order to qualify for the Google CSS carousel placement. From the 31st of January 2019, for Google to add a Comparison Shopping Service website the service must show offers from 50 distinct merchant domains for every country that they target with Shopping ads and have at least 100 clients in their home country. These must be merchants that deliver products to the respective country, meaning consumers in the country can buy from them. Additionally, the CSS website must offer sorting or filtering options for product search results by price and at least one other dimension relevant for consumers (for example, brand, merchant, delivery time).
The new requirements for Google CSS partners will eliminate many sites who simply won’t have results from 50 merchants and that’s 50 merchants in every individual country that they want a client’s adverts to appear in. The result of all this upheaval is that agencies managing paid search for their clients have a problem. If they don’t have a Comparison Shopping Services website they they need to find one to partner with which has led many to Pricesearchers door.
Pricesearcher started as a UK site but have spun up sites across Europe and are ready for performance marketing agencies to partner with them. Even if a brand’s products aren’t already on Pricesearcher, they can be added in minutes enabling the agency to promote them on Google.
Pricesearcher are offering a self-managed service for agencies so they can focus on ensuring their clients can access the CSS carousel and spending discount with the comfort of being backed by the UK’s largest product search engine and a safe, neutral and impartial partner.
The Pricesearcher solution is a win win for everyone apart from surprisingly the spammy price comparison sites that hoped to gain an advantage – Google get a quality partner in Pricesearcher who are a true price comparison site, agencies get to earn commissions from their clients as normal and clients get their products promoted. The biggest winner of all is Pricesearcher as, if you click on the product in one of their ads you go straight to the brand or retailer’s website but if you click on the ‘By Pricesearcher’ link then you get taken to similar products on the Pricesearcher website.
If you are a retailer, regardless of size, you can can access CSS via Pricesearcher’s agency partner network. If you are an agencies you can can access CSS via Pricesearcher and the initial step will be to contact them at [email protected].
