Google’s highly anticipated payment gateway wasn’t exactly the Paypal killer everyone thought was coming, but it’s still an interesting opportunity for search marketers. The question USWeb clients will have is whether or not the new gateway will increase their success in search engine marketing.

The answer is yes, but not for obvious reasons. First, when you look at the benefits of using Google analytics in conjunction with AdWords, you can imagine that better checkout integration is only going to enhance that further. Soon you should be able to plug Analytics, AdWords, and Checkout into each other and get a more complete picture. The more together your data, the better decisions you can make.

Also, Google is going to offer Checkout customers a special icon on their AdWords ads. This could lead to great trust from consumers that the site is secured from a known industry leader in technology, much like the Verisign logo. This could lead to higher click through rates, as well as higher conversion because the visitor knows they are being directed to a shopping site.

And the third way Google Checkout will help search engine marketing efforts is a small discount in fees for the checkout process. Google is incenting AdWords users with a great deal; the merchant will receive 10 times their monthly spend in AdWords in processing fees. So, a merchant who spends $1k in AdWords will now be able to have $10,000 in free payment processing. This can be a significant cost reduction for a business, and significantly impact their AdWords budget.

This is another very smart move from Google, and one that will likely be a win-win for both merchants and Google.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 8th, 2006 at 10:47 amand is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.