Use This Colossal Shift in Ecommerce Organic Search Results To Your Advantage

The search landscape is changing for ecommerce brands. 

Digital marketing and advertising friends, we’ve noticed the organic search impact on a recent search result page change and wanted to share our point of view about how brands can use it to their advantage in Q4 2017 and into 2018.

Thanks to a now widely available Adwords update, ecommerce brands can now take advantage of having two ads above the organic listings in search results. 

Over 40% of shopping related searches on Google are for broad terms like ‘women's athletic clothing’ or ‘living room furniture’. For these less defined searches, what we've often shown are specific product ads -- say, a teal sofa -- and that may not be the most useful experience for the person who isn't sure what they want to buy. Showcase Shopping ads help people further explore and discover what they want to buy and where they want to buy it. For example, if a shopper searches ‘summer dresses,’ ASOS, a global apparel retailer, can now showcase its collection of dresses in a visually rich experience. 

This update was intended to announce the beta program of the new showcase shopping. Here we are nearly one year later and the new ads were subtly rolled out for all advertisers within the new Adwords interface update. The new ad type impacts most high search volume keywords that have commercial intent.

So what Does this Mean for Ecommerce Brands and Advertisers?

Essentially, a new type of product listing ads (PLA) will be displayed for broad (high search volume) searches as well now. This also includes high search volume brand name searches.

For an example, here is a search for the keyword 'Jansport'.

As you can see, Jansport have their showcase shopping ad and their text ad displaying above their organic listing. 

The tradeoff for having the new type of product listing ad beginning to display for high search volume branded queries is that now the brand’s organic listing will fall below the fold on some devices. This means that searchers will need to scroll in order to click the brand’s organic listing.

And here is where it starts to get real.

Did you know that most searchers don’t realize product listing ads are actually ads?

It’s true!

In late 2016, the Pepperjam usability lab conducted a study about how searchers perceive product listing ads. Our findings concluded that most mobile searchers are drawn into click PLAs when they display in search results because they include a picture and most searchers do not seem to notice that they are clicking on a “sponsored” ad. You can read the full results of our PLA study here.

So what Does this Mean for Ecommerce Brands Focused on Organic Search Growth?

If you are an ecommerce brand reporting weak organic year over year traffic numbers particularly on your own homepage, this is most likely the reason why. 

Before panic ensues, and you begin to think SEO is a dying art, let’s focus on the things we can control and use the changing search behavior to our advantage.

Find out how by reading the rest of this post here: https://www.pepperjam.com/blog/observing-a-colossal-shift-in-ecommerce-organic-search-results