How To Use Google to Sell Downloadable Goods, Part 5: Google AdWords

This is the 5th and final installment in our series on How To Use Google to Sell Downloadable Goods. In the previous post, we discussed using Google Base to publish your items in Google's shopping catalog. This installment will cover the basics of using Google AdWords to sell your downloadable products. At PayLoadz, we use Google AdWords to drive new user signup for our services, sellers on our service use AdWords to increase sales of their goods.

Google AdWords is possibly the most technically simplistic of all Google tools to use, but the most complex when it comes to mastery in relation to achieving an effective campaign. Because there is so much involved with managing an AdWords account, I will make the goal of this post to convince you to simply get started using Google AdWords. The only way any of these tools are going to help you, is if you just get started and see what happens. It doesn't have to be perfect, so do just sit there, go and sign up for a Google AdWords account now!

For those of you that do not know, Google AdWords are those text areas to the top and to the right of your Google search results. They are paid placements that can cost mere pennies to have displayed. That is key. You set the amount you want to spend to have your ad displayed. It actually doesn't cost you a thing to have your ad displayed, they only charge you when your ad is clicked- as little as 10 cents I believe. Even if you ad is not clicked, it is still shown and that alone is pretty good exposure.

The true power of AdWords is that you have motivated buyers actively looking for a specific result in terms of a product to purchase. It is not the organic search traffic or link traffic that you have to convince they want to buy your item. In most cases, they already do want to purchase your item, they just need to be taken to your purchase page. AdWords does this. There is not a single successful publisher of digital goods that I am aware of that does not utilize AdWords to some degree.

As mentioned previously, I'm not going to go into extensive detail on managing individual campaigns. If you are completely lost, I will just give you some tips for keywords. Open a text file and enter one keyword or phrase per line, like the following:

ebook
philosophy
eastern religion
zen
...etc.

Do that until you have 10 or so keywords, be specific as possible. Once that is done, create every combination you can think of from your keywords above. One combination example for ebook, will be as follows:

ebook philosophy
ebook eastern religion
ebook zen
ebook zen philosophy
...etc.

Duplicate that process for each keyword. You should be able to come up with 100 or so keywords and phrases when all is done. Btw, there are programs (even free ones) out there that can help you with this process. Don't worry about those to start just yet, focus on creating your first ad and then revisit later.

After you have created your ad(s) and Google AdWords, set it and walk away for a week. Be sure to set a daily budget you can live with, else you may come back to a big $ surprise. After the week, you will be able to see the keyword performance in your AdWords account. That will allow you to see the effectiveness of each phrase. During this process, focus on creating additional keywords and phrases closely related to the best performing keywords in your account. Rinse and repeat. Eventually over time, you will have hundreds of effective keywords for your products. Creating additional ads with variations on text is also important as well during this process.

The point is, you need to be using AdWords. The risk is low since you can set your own budgets and the reward is high through driving motivated traffic to your site. Give it a try!

Cheers,
Shannon

How To Use Google to Sell Downloadable Goods, Part 4: Google Base

This is the 4th installment in our series on How To Use Google to Sell Downloadable Goods. In the previous post, we discussed using Google Checkout to offer your customers another way to pay for your digital items. This installment will cover the basics of using Google Base to sell your eproducts. At PayLoadz, we use the Google Base system to publish out sellers' products that are listed in the PayLoadz eStore.

Google Base is something of a hybrid between a comparison shopping site (think pricegrabber.com) and a community bulletin board (think craigslist.org). Google has a comparison site called Froogle that was intended to let large merchants list their products in Google system and provide a way to comparison shop. The Froogle listing process is now being replaced by Google Base which basically lets anyone post almost any type of content. It is very similar to CraigsList in this respect. I'm not crazy about the name Google Base as it does not convey any type of imagery regarding shopping or a bulletin site whatsoever, but that's a different story.

The reason to use Google Base is simple. Online, your web pages compete with millions of others for customer views. By listing your item in Google Base, you instantly narrow the competition you face by several orders of magnitude. For instance, if we are a customer and are looking for a particular Sony digital camera, we might search for "buy sony dsc-t10" in Google. The search results will pull from millions of pages that the seller's all compete for rank. Some of the pages will actually be ecommerce sites, but some will just be information sites. However, you may notice that before all of the search results, you see a "Product search results for buy sony dsc-t10". This is being pulled from the Google Base listings. People will be inclined to click this link as it provides them with an easy way to see prices and availability from various sites that have the camera we are looking for. You can have your digital goods listed here as well. This is a powerful marketing opportunity to take advantage of. Best of all, it is currently free to list your products there.

There are two ways to list your products in Google Base, by manually listing individual items using the web based form interface, and a bulk upload method via XML. Actually, there are three methods with the third being integrating your system with the Google Base API. This last option is the most technically complex but may be worth looking into down the road. If you only have a few items to list, then using the web based form input method is the easiest. If you have hundreds or thousands of items, then using the bulk upload method is the way to go. One thing to mention is that the listings only last for 30 days from the time you initially list them. We have automated the system to re-list our items using the Bulk Upload system and FTP file transfer. If you list via the web interface, you will have to do so again after 30 days. I won't get into the step-by-step instructions here on how to do either as they are both pretty straightforward and the Google Base site has detailed information on how to do each. My intention here is just to get you to use the service as a means to increase your product exposure. As an added bonus, if you sell using Google Checkout, then your Google Base listing will appear more prominently in the product search results. This will increase the click-through/purchase rate even more.

I hope this encourages you to use this powerful marketing tool offered by Google. There is no risk as the service is currently free. It just requires a bit of your time.

Be sure to subscribe to this blog using one of the options to the right to be notified when the next installment in this series covers using the Google Sitemap system to help sell your downloadable goods.

Cheers,
Shannon

How To Use Google to Sell Downloadable Goods, Part 3: Google Checkout

This is the 3rd installment in the series of How To Use Google to Sell Downloadable Goods. The previous post, discussed setting up and using Google Analytics in your website. This installment will cover the basics of using Google Checkout to sell your downloadable products.
I have actually already covered How To Sell Downloads with Google in a separate post related to using our PayLoadz Digital Good eCommerce service, so this post will cover some things not listed there.

Everyone loves teh Google. Whether that is a good or bad thing, it is hard to argue that they have hit some home runs in the past with their product offerings. Though, they have had some not-so-great efforts as well. Their ambition to tackle the online payment space was a particularly bold move, but one that was welcome by many merchants online who were faced with either complex integrations, or choosing from the small oligopoly of available providers like PayPal and their second tier competitors like 2Checkout or e-gold. Google has always claimed that they would never create a system that was intended to do battle with PayPal head to head, but a few months after launch, that is exactly what they seem to be doing. This has resulted in a promotion battle between the two companies by providing incentives to anyone that uses their services for the holiday season. Good time to be a seller online.

The fees for Google Checkout are roughly the same as many other services when they do have them in 2007. No fees for their current promotion through the holidays. The big advantage with Google in terms of their fees is that for every $1 you spend in AdWords advertising, you can process up to $10 in sales for free. For many sellers, this means they will never pay transaction fees for selling with Google Checkout. Here is GC's marketing pitch to get you to sign up.

Integrating Google Checkout is much like integrating PayPal in the most simple scenario. Create a product using a web based form method and you are generated some HTML code to use in your site. Great. For people selling a low volume of tangible goods, this is fine and should be added to their site without a doubt. However, for larger sellers, or for digital good sellers that require automated processing via backend scripts and communication between their servers and Google's, it is a bit more complex. Google does have a system similar to PayPal's IPN system which provides instant, server to server, notification of all payments and details. They call theirs a Callback page. The big difference between the two systems, is that they require you to use SSL on your page meaning you need access to a secure server. This is not as big of a deal as in times past since many hosting companies are providing secure storage to place their files in. The tough integration requirement is their requirement for your Callback page to use Basic HTTP Authentication to protect it. Google will pass the merchant_id and merchant_key value pair back to your Callback script and your server is required to use Basic HTTP Authentication to check the values passed and only allow access if they match. I am not 100% sure, but I am fairly certain that their system will still send over the information if you don't use HTTP auth. I just know their documentation says it is required, so if they find out, they may give you some grief on it.

THE GOOD:
Using their API, a seller can add information to the customer's Google Checkout account. The first thing they can add is tracking information. Pretty cool. We actually use their Add Tracking API call to add the download lookup page URL of our system (they list the normal shipping providers, so this is a cheap hack to make it work for our purposes).

Another peice of information you can add to their receipt is a Seller's Note. You can basically enter anything you like. We use this section to add the actual download location link. The customer is sent the note via email as well when it is added to the order. Very cool.

In addition to the tracking and note, you can add a Seller's Transaction Id to their receipt page. This is a great way for a seller to add their own internal order id into the system. It makes customer support easier if they can provide you with that information.

The last cool feature has to do with seller's that use AdWords to market their products. If you accept Google Checkout on your site, your Google Adwords will have a little shopping cart icon in it. That will let shoppers know you accept Google Checkout and will likely lead to higher click-through ratios.

THE BAD:
First, there is no instant redirect after a customer makes payment. They get their payment confirmation page and they are stuck at Google after. It will be cool when they are able to be instantly redirected to a URL of the seller's choosing. This is a no-brainer feature that will surely be added soon.

Secondly, the payment is not processed in real time. When a customer clicks pay, it can take minute or hours for a payment to be charged and your Callback script to be activated. This has obvious problems especially with digital goods that promise immediate download. This, along with the point listed above are the main drawbacks for digital goods on Google. Tangible good sellers should not have much issue.

Thirdly, encrypted email addresses. Google provides a means for buyers to not provide their real email address to seller's during checkout. This means, if enabled, you get a fake Google Email address from the customer when they pay, like brainh-1322342hkjh@checkout.google.com. This creates an obvious problem when sending digital goods. So far, we have been getting bounces when sending to that email address from our Callback script, so we are not sure if that is a bug or not. This issue would be huge if not for the features listed above to send a note to the buyer via the API.

Finally, GC is only available to sellers based in the U.S.. They are obviously taking their rollout cautiously, but support for more countries will be required for it to be a real threat to anyone.
In conclusion, Google is out of the gate with a decent supplement to your existing payment solutions. I say supplement rather than alternative. I wouldn't go replacing your existing download fulfillment system with GC just yet, but there is not reason why you can offer both payment systems. We run the ability to checkout with Google or PayPal and let the customer decide. I'm sure they will address the above issues in upcoming releases that will make it a much better system.

Shannon

p.s.- eBay's policy to ban Google Checkout as a payment option in eBay is definitely going to hurt their adoption rate. It is really crazy that eBay just blatantly blocks the payment method. I'm sure legally they can, it is just that the move is so obvious a very hard defensive measure taken to protect PayPal's foothold on eBay. If they are doing it now, maybe they should have done it with BillPoint in years past. That may have prevented the PayPal purchase ;) Of course they couldn't, since people were already using PP and the seller backlash would have made that impossible. Since GC didn't have any foothold, they could just ban it out of the gate. It is a shame methinks.

p.p.s- Be sure to subscribe to this blog to get more information on selling your intangible goods online using one of the options to the right :)

How To Use Google to Sell Downloadable Goods, Part 2: Google Directory

In our previous post, we started a series that will cover the basics of Google's services that help website owners sell digitally delivered goods. This part will cover the Google Directory search.

The Google Directory Search is really based off of the dmoz.org Open Directory Project. Google itself does not manage the content listed in the directory, it is simply pulled in from the DMOZ. However, since Google provides a dedicated search for the directory and it can give high PageRank preference to sites listed there, it is important to have your site listed here. In the earlier days of Internet marketing, the DMOZ directory was a powerful tool in getting your site exposure.

Submitting your site to the DMOZ has never been the easiest of practices. The issue is that all submissions have to be approved manually by a category manager- usually a volunteer who may or may not have lost interest in their assigned task. This is why persistence pays off. If you do not hear about the approval status of your submission for an extended period of time, consider re-submitting your site under a similar category. Be careful with spamming the directory though, they will remove sites a lot quicker usually than it takes to list them.

Begin submitting your site to the Google Directory here:
http://dmoz.org/help/submit.html

In the next segment, we will cover promoting your site using Google Analytics

How To Use Google to Sell Downloadable Goods, Part 1

We are going to start a series of posts off in this post that will list and explain the different tools Google has available to website owners and how those tools can help your e-product business grow.

Here is a list of Google Services ranked in order of importance (in our opinion):
- Google AdWords
- Google SiteMap
- Google Base
- Google Checkout
- Google Analytics
- Google Directory (dmoz)

We will start from the bottom up and look at the Google Directory search in the next post...