Google Introduces Free Shopping Ads... kind of Big News

April 22, 2020 by Paul Byrne

Ecommerce

Zoy character with magnifying glass - searching

Google’s new program is even more attractive than the old one and is called Google Surfaces. I first heard about this on Alan Kent’s (Google’s ecommerce developer advocate) weekly YouTube office hours.

For Merchants who remember the good old days when Google shopping ads were free, they are back again. If you remember the seesaw from the old days, first, listings in Google Shopping were free, then, suddenly they weren’t.

Now, Google is taking a mixed approach similar to their organic search results. You will have organic product results appear next to paid product ads on the Shopping tab.

To participate in the program it is critical that you have the appropriate markup on your product pages. Google will crawl the pages and include them in the shopping results in the same way that organic search does. No feed needed.