See How Google's New Shopping Ads Are Crushing Amazon's Search Listings
We told you recently that Google CEO Larry Page was "excited" about the performance of his new "product listing ads" in Google Shopping, the search giant's new paid format for e-commerce companies.
And we told you that even though the new format is just a few months old, it already appears to be shifting significant dollars in its favor.
We also said this was a volley in Google's war against Amazon.
Here's a screen grab of what that war looks like in practice. Bear in mind that Amazon's product pages get great organic search results for people looking for stuff to buy. Indeed, a lot of people go straight to Amazon to search for products rather than bother with Google.
Google is trying to change all that, and its new shopping ads are placed in such a way as to push down Amazon's natural search results beneath sponsored results (which Google gets money for) and its own, more prominently displayed Google Shopping results (which Google also gets paid for.
The result is that Amazon's natural results are almost invisible on the screen, even though they're comparatively high in the ranking for natural search results.
Here's a search for "laptops" (click to enlarge):
Note that Amazon has not bought sponsored results of any kind for its laptop product pages.
But what about the Kindle, which Amazon does support with paid ads on Google? Here's a search for that brand:
Amazon is only the top result because it paid Google to be there. Google's shopping results dominate the page — and show Staples' Kindle as cheaper than Amazon's!
Amazon's natural search result for "Kindle" comes just about last, visually on the page.
Ouch!
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