Can Google edge in on Amazon's holiday sales?

Can Google Inc. edge in on Amazon’s holiday sales? The answer likely lies in mobile sales. Sales data from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday showed that Google’s visual shopping ads, known as Product Listing Ads (PLA), led to almost 24.3 percent more sales than last year, according to Re/code, citing data from e-commerce research firm ChannelAdvisor. By comparison, Amazon saw 24.1 percent sales growth during the same period.

“It’s easy to paint the doomsday scenario for Google,” Scot Wingo, ChannelAdvisor’s executive chairman, said per the report. “But the interesting part of this is it shows Google still has a dog in the fight. It’s not game over.”

PLAs are the pictorial ads listed on the top of a Google search when users type a product name into the search bar. The Mountain View-based company launched the service in 2010. Now, retailers spend more ad dollars on PLAs than Adwords, the company’s text ads. While the cost per click on a PLA is lower than a text ad, the PLA rates should go up as they gain popularity, the report said.

 But Google will need to put more effort into mobile shopping if it wants to make any gains on Amazon’s sales. ChannelAdvisor observed only 2.19 percent of people who viewed a retailer’s mobile website completed a purchase over the holiday shopping weekend, compared to 6.39 percent on desktop computers. The good news is that Google is beta testing a “Buy” button that will reduce the friction between search and sale on mobile devices. The button will allow users to buy directly from a search advertisement.

So, how important is mobile? Almost 37 percent of online sales came from mobile on Thanksgiving, 33 percent from mobile on Black Friday and 28 percent of online sales were made from smart devices on Cyber Monday, according to numbers out from Adobe’s Digital Index. For some retailers, mobile has become critical. Walmart.com said that during the five days from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, nearly half of online orders were placed using mobile devices, double what the retailer saw just last year, according to TechCrunch.

Meanwhile, Amazon was very vague about its holiday weekend sales numbers and provided no metrics. “We’re excited that millions of customers will be opening new Amazon devices this holiday season,” Dave Limp, senior vice president of Amazon Devices, said in a press release. “This has already been the biggest holiday shopping season for Amazon devices, and we’re energized by the year-over-year growth for all of our product categories.”

http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2015/12/02/can-google-edge-in-on-amazons-holiday-sales.html