Google’s shopping search engine Froogle has been around for 18 months or so, but not too many folks really knew about it until Google added Froogle listings to its search results pages and began promoting Froogle on Google more this spring. Froogle is a shopping search engine which accepts shopping site product feeds into its search index for no fee. While still not the premier shopping search engine, Froogle has shown great promise and being a Google property, is bound to jump to the top of the shopping pile within the next year.
InternetRetailer.com recently did an interesting case study on the results of Northern Tool and their Froogle marketing plan. Northern Tool uses shopping feeds to list their products in various shopping search engines, most of which charge a per click fee for listings. However, they began their Froogle campaign when Froogle was still not well known, Northern Tool & Equipment Catalog Co.’s e-commerce manager Nate Miller admits “It’s free to submit it to Froogle, and we already had this feed built, so we said, let’s just submit it and see what’s out there.”
When the Northern Tool first started giving Froogle data on their products and prices, the Froogle shopping search engine wound up delivering all of $40 in revenue for the first quarter. However, when Froogle was listed on the Google homepage, that revenue jumped to $5,000 in a month, and then tripled a month later. The Northern Tools Froogle Case Study is an excellent read for any Internet marketer or for e-commerce site management.
Froogle grows with Mother’s Day Shopping
The number of unique visitors to Froogle grew by 80% over the week before Mother’s Day. Froogle jumped 80 percent in traffic to 613,000 unique visitors, from 340,000 visitors during the previous week. In March, Google decided to add Froogle results to their search engine result pages which may have increased that branding and usage of Froogle this Spring.
The top growth percentage of online shopping search engines and directories are as follows:
AOL Shoppping 91%
Froogle (Google) 80%
MSN Shopping 35%
MySimon 14%
Quixtar 8%
