You sell online and you notice your traffic dropping since mid-September. Not just a little, but noticeably. You check your webshop, you look at your product feed, and you find nothing. Nothing is broken either. Google has removed free product listings from Google Shopping from the search results throughout the European Economic Area, which is the EU plus Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein. The Netherlands is included in that.
What happened in mid-September
Until recently, when searching for a product, you would see a row of product photos with prices. Some of these were paid, some were free. Those free listings are gone, and so is the product carousel they were in.
That spot now features a block of comparison services. These are sites that list the offers from various stores side by side. As a result, your customer no longer clicks directly through to your webshop, but to an intermediary who may then forward them to you.
The change happened quickly. At the beginning of the week, the product results were still there; a few days later, they were gone.
Your ads just keep running
This is the difference you need to hold on to, because it determines what you should and should not do now.
What has disappeared are the listings that you didn't pay for. Your paid Shopping ads appear untouched. They still appear and they still cost per click.
If you see your revenue from Google declining, first check where that drop is located. If your paid traffic is dropping just as fast, something else is going on and this change has little to do with it.
Why Google does this
Not of its own accord. The European Commission determined in July that Google favored its own services in search results over those of others. That resulted in a fine of 460 million euros, plus the order to stop.
Removing the free product listings is the answer to that order. How long this will remain in this form, nobody knows. Google has not published anything about it itself.
Don't look at your feed right away
The first reflex when seeing a drop is to open the product feed, the file you use to submit your products to Google. Usually, that is the right reflex. Not this time.
Low or no impressions can mean four very different things, and in a report, they look identical. There is only one where you actually need to fix something, and that is the third one below. So don't go remodeling your feed to fix something that isn't broken.
- There is no campaign running at all for those products
- The campaign is stalled.
- There is genuinely something wrong with your feed, for example due to disapproved products.
- there is nothing wrong, but the free spot has not existed since mid-September
What you can do now
The timing is unfortunate, as the busiest weeks of the year are coming up. There are roughly three directions, and they are not mutually exclusive.
Check if your advertising budget is still accurate. Free traffic is disappearing, so the paid portion will proportionally increase. That is no reason to automatically spend more, but it is a reason to recalculate before the busy season starts.
Look at the comparison services. They are now getting the space that you are losing. About working via such a service did we write before, so that route is neither new nor complicated.
And make sure you aren't completely dependent on Google. Your newsletter, your returning customers, and the visibility of your own webshop are the channels that nobody can change halfway through September. That sounds like stating the obvious. It's just that this month, that door is blowing wide open at many webshops.
Do you have an online store and have you noticed your numbers fluctuating since mid-September? Let us take a look. We build webshops and are manage Google Ads campaigns, so we will see quite quickly if this is affecting you and what is still possible for Black Friday. One conversation is enough to know where you stand.
