Google Product Search Users Expressing Frustration Over Drop off

By Tinuiti Team

Apr 01 2011

In doing further research on the issue of a Google end of quarter traffic drop off it didn’t come as a major surprise that other online retailers were exhibiting traffic drop offs as well.

What was surprising was that some of the drop offs reduced traffic up to up to 90% of what merchants were previously seeing.

Further, the specific date of March 16th is cited frequently as the date in which this happened, which is consistent with some of ours clients have seen as well.

The chart, pulled from Google analytics below is an example of such a drop off:

Below are comments from various users in the Google Merchant Center forum also expressing their frustrations:

stevie-r-g

Level 1
3/26/11

My traffic has been completely dead, pretty well zero clicks from 16th to 23rd March

chris4497

Level 1
3/26/11

I have a client who’s experienced the same issue. Prior to March 14th/15th his products were ranking consistently highly (is a registered UK Pharmacy). I checked the feed on March 16th and all medicines had been marked as “Disapproved”.

clarismore

Level 1
3/28/11

Well at least I’m not alone in this, I thought I may have done something wrong, would seem not. My products stopped being shown in the lists on the 16th March too

Naomi DBL

Level 1
11:36 AM

I incurred the same issue, March 16th, clicks dropped to about 5 a day.

So if you’re experiencing a drop off, you can at least be sure that you’re not forever alone–and you should also be comforted to know that based in the past we’ve seen traffic levels rebound once the quarter ends (now), if not already.

Again we’ll be releasing a study of our merchants in the upcoming weeks documenting what we’ve seen in terms of drop offs and rebounds toward the end of the quarter.

Source of thread: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/base/thread?tid=460725752c816f4d&fid=460725752c816f4d00049f8caeabf442&hl=en