With the onset of summer, many Americans may be getting ready for the season with a little online shopping. Now, Google is offering marketers an updated tool to help optimize their sites so consumers find what they’re looking for, fast.
Google Commerce Search 2.0 is said to offer a better shopping experience by "bringing user-friendly search capabilities of Google.com" to individual websites. Google’s senior production manager Nitin Mangtani explains that the tool assists consumers with their queries in real time as they type, and it guarantees search results delivered in less than a second.
The tool also makes marketers lives simpler with a new merchandising dashboard. The dashboard offers site administrators control over the ranking rules and appearance of search results, as well as an option for time-based offers so retailers can set date ranges for targeted promotions.
This is just the latest in a number of features Google is launching that may give marketers even more reason to make it their go-to search engine. The company recently unveiled an AdWords "Analyze Competition" feature. This gives advertisers the ability to gauge their performance levels with analysis of clicks, click-through rates and average positioning. Then, Google makes suggestions about how marketers can use this data to optimize their campaigns and come out on top of searches.
With shopper- and marketer-friendly tools like these, it’s easy to see why Google is considered the top search engine to catch consumers’ eyes. A report from eMarketer predicts Google will take in more than $8.1 billion in paid search advertising in 2010, and these marketing dollars may be well spent as the latest comScore data shows Google accounted for 10.2 billion U.S. searches in the month of May alone.
