🔍 No more commissions on Buy on Google sales

Jul 24, 2020

Good morning, search marketers, how's this for a new approach?

First, Google opened up Shopping to free listings. Now it's ditching the cost-per-sale Shopping Actions program and will forgo commissions when users checkout from Shopping listings via Buy on Google. Not only that, merchants will be able to use Shopify and PayPal for Buy on Google payments.

This is another very big change to Google's approach to product search and commerce. Clearly, it sees bigger upside in opening its services up to a much larger universe of sellers and products. Presumably bigger selection and smoother checkout will attract more users — and incentivize sellers to spend more on ads.

And speaking of ads, Google is starting to show more attributes in Shopping ads, so check to make sure your feeds are well optimized.

E-commerce has been a bright spot during the pandemic. Yet many more SMBs are in precarious positions. As of July 10, Yelp said that of the roughly 26,000 restaurants listed as closed in March, 60% were now permanently closed. SMBs spend billions on marketing and advertising and if hundreds of thousands of those businesses disappear, it will further affect the entire digital marketing ecosystem, writes Greg Sterling. Businesses that adapt and pivot are more likely to survive, surveys show.

Catch Google's Martin Splitt on the final day of our live SEO for Developers session today at 1:00 p.m. ET. He'll be talking about what you should and shouldn't be worried about when it comes to JavaScript and Google indexing. Sign up here to join live and get your questions answered.

Ginny Marvin,
Editor-In-Chief

Search Shorts

Google Search Console coverage report weirdness & Apple search ranking factors

Apple ranking factors. Apple updated its help document on Applebot, which includes a list of Apple Search's ranking factors. It is hard to know how this is used since Apple Siri uses Google for web results, but it is interesting nevertheless.

Improve Google indexing. From John Mueller of Google, "the best way to improve indexing is to create great – unique & compelling – content that users have been seeking out, and which users recommend to others. Search engines don't index everything just because it's online."

Search Console coverage report. While the Google Search Console coverage report is still a bit out of date, Google is working on it, there was a weird message about indexing issues that happened yesterday. That was a delayed message as well and a mistake according to Google.

AMP plugin for WordPress. The first v2.0 beta pre-release of the official AMP plugin for WordPress is now available for testing!

Tips for turning your PPC campaigns into winners

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