Recently Google made a bold decision to charge for product listings in shopping results. This move has been met with a distinct drop in shopping results in universal search integrations. New Searchmetrics research, based on search results from several million keywords analysed throughout 2012, highlights a 15% drop in shopping results from January 2012 to December. The most significant drop hit in October when Google initially made the transition from a free service to a paid-for system (e-commerce companies choosing not to switch to the paid model).
Essentially universal search is the display of added media which is presented alongside organic search results. As a whole the research shows that throughout 2012 a drop occurred in the fraction of keywords with at least one universal search integration. Overall the drop was around 11%. Image integration was unaffected for the most part and remained around the 30% mark. However video integration suffered, decreasing from 76% to 62%.
Aside from image and video integration the Searchmetrics research also investigated shopping integrations in regards to which brands seemed to dominate search results, ultimately showing Google to appear most frequently. Over 50% of shopping integration was accounted for by Google over the 2012 period, leaving closest competitor Amazon second with roughly 10% market share.
Video content remains the real loser in universal integration for 2012, although it still surfaces in a huge 62% of universal search results. What the Searchmetrics shopping research shows is that while Google dominates shopping and video integration YouTube enjoyed more than 75% of that market throughout 2012, and unsurprisingly YouTube increased its market share this summer. Contact Vino for more information regarding Google shopping changes (UK).
