$1M from Google Base? Really?
I’ve had a few people question if we really did $1M in sales from a Google Base feed. Yes, we did indeed get over $1M in sales from our Base feed in 2006. What might be even more impressive is that Base resulted in over 100,000 visitors during that same timespan to one site, and those converted to sales at above a 5% rate. In the power tool industry, that’s pretty high. I don’t have those same figures easily attainable for the other site, though.
I don’t know about you, but a free traffic source that sends almost 10k unique visitors per month seems like a really good thing to participate in. You’re talking 275+ visitors per day for zero physical dollars, just some time spent creating a feed. While that does have a cost involved, it keeps on giving long after the development has been done. Sure, you may need to tweak things a bit at some point, but it’s not totally necessary to spend a lot of time every day or even every week optimizing your feed.
Compare that to SEO if you would. At this time, if you aren’t continually building links in competitive spaces you’ll fall behind. SEO is a hands-on, continual type of work. Feed optimization, since most people haven’t started that, is pretty much a one time per month at the most type of a deal. No links necessary, just type some keywords in the listing and get sales in the bank.
Have I mentioned I love Base?
(Background sounds in the podcast are thanks to my 4 year old son)
Comment by Garrett | January 25th, 2007
Brian,
What if you don’t actually “sell” the products on your site. Say, you’ve got a wealth of content about many widgets and monetize visitors via CPM & contextual ads….do you think there’s still significant opportunity w/ Base?
By not actually being a “retailer,” it looks like I’d lose a ton of opportunity b/c I can’t feed the products into Froogle. Just curious if you think the “non-shopping” links pulled from Base would be significant enough to chase? I’ve done a variety of test queries on Google and it looks like the Froogle listings catch the majority of the exposure.
Thanks.
Comment by Brian Mark | January 25th, 2007
Right now it’s local, images, news and products get the most onebox listings. I’ll be doing a full review of everything that can be optimized at a point shortly down the road based on the post at Google Blogoscoped a while back on the OneBox Musuem, so keep reading and hopefully you’ll see something you can use.
Comment by my-shopping-experience | April 3rd, 2007
Congratolations Mark!
i try it too, but it s not very easy, it is no luck, it is hard and difficult work, so you are very talented for this kind of work. In Germany or other countries is it very difficult to be successful.
Marco from digitalsoul/berlin/germany