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We get asked all the time, “How do I find my products on Google Shopping?” Well its not difficult to determine at all. Simply visit www.google.com/products and then type in “site:”  but leave off the quotes, and add your domain or store url.

Example- site:www.mydomain.com

You can also try another example if you are feeling adventurous…

If you know your Google Base ID, aka Google Merchant Center account number (found at the upper left of your Google Merchant Center account). Once you copy this number, add it to the following string “http://www.google.com/products?authorid=”

Related to my last post about Using Google Product Extension Ads, I’ve already been asked several times what feed goes where and what ads belong to what Google services.  Brian Smith, who writes ComparisonEngines.com wrote a good post explaining The Importance of the Google Merchant Center Data Feed which I recommend you read for further clarification.

Below is a real life example of a Google search results page for the keyword “dog training collar”.

The Google Product Search listings come from your data feed that is submitted to your Google Merchant Center account (formerly called Google Base). There is no fee associated with clicks on these links (or the underlying shopping pages).

The Google Affiliate Network listings come from you guessed it, the Google Affiliate Network (formerly Performics). Merchants cannot control these ads, as Google is the publisher and is earning a fee from the advertiser.

The Google Product Extension ads (as covered in my previous post) are created by connecting your AdWords account with your Google Merchant Center account.

If you’re still confused, comment below and I’ll help answer your question.

Many merchants have asked how they establish seller ratings for the listings on Google Product Search so I thought I’d take a moment to explain.

Merchant seller ratings on Google Product Search are collected from numerous sources including Epinions, Google Checkout, Mr. Rebates, Pricegrabber, ResellerRatings, Bizrate/Shopzilla, and a few others. These sites collect ratings via post order surveys, or email follow ups, or open contribution by shoppers.  Take note that some of the other shopping engines ratings will be shared with Google so it makes sense to implement the post checkout pop up surveys. If you offer Google Checkout then you’re in luck because becuase Google will send out an email to customers automatically to share their rate their experience.

Based on our experience, there is no setting that can be configured, or request that can be made to get your reviews populated. It just takes time for Google to collect and gather reviews from these 3rd party sources and then display them. Even if Google has several ratings collected, that may not be enough to get them displayed right away and you’ll have to wait until mass updates are made to their system.  This is from Google Checkout Merchant Help section about ratings and reviews, “Google Checkout reviews are also displayed on Google Product Search results. Please note, reviews displayed here aren’t added in real-time. As a result, you may notice a delay between receiving a new review and its addition to your rating in Google Product Search results.” I also found another help article mentioning “New reviews can take up to ten days to appear in Product Search.”

If you log into your Google Merchant Center today, you’ll see an alert at the top of your dashboard stating: “Best practices for the holiday season. Learn more…”, which points to their latest blog post. Heed this advice. These recommendations give clues as to what Google is focusing on now and in the future. The first recommendation is to inlclude the largest and highest quality image availabe, at least 300 x 300 pixels. This is sort of a no-brainer – without good images, you can’t expect good performance from ANY shopping engine, Google Product Search (GPS) or otherwise. At some point GPS may focus more on images, allowing users to enlarge images, compare images, or view multiple images for the same product.

The second and third recommendations are related to good old fashioned brick and mortar stores. If you sell your wares both online and in stores, you have to get in on this if you’re not already. Google has a separate service, called Google Local Business Center, that seamlessly ties into Google Product Search. Here’s how: Google Local Business Center asks, among other things, that you specify what geographical region your store serves. GPS users within that area will then be able to see that they can buy that item from you the old-fashioned way – by getting up and driving, bicyling, or walking to your store. Here’s an example. When I search for “Nike Plus” (a great Apple Ipod gizmo for runners), I find a number of stores with offers. The first listing is a “compare prices” listing that tells me there are 6 stores that sell the item, and it also tells me there are 6 nearby stores selling the item. Clicking through to the compare prices page, I see the six stores. One of the listings, Best Buy, indicates that there are 6 Best Buy stores nearby that sell the item. Right from this page Google allows me to pull up Google maps, with markers for each of the Best Buy stores in my area!

So if you have a brick and mortar presence, use Google Local Business Center and Google Product Search to let shoppers know that they can get instant shopping gratification by buying locally, from you.

We’ll post a few more last minute holiday optimization tips over the next couple weeks.

From time to time we find merchant’s trying to include phrases that are not allowed by Google Product Search’s Content Policies. The one offense we see most often has to do with merchants trying to include “Free Shipping” or similar phrases in their product titles, descriptions, or custom attribute fields. Google’s Policies state “Do not include promotional or boilerplate text in your product data feed. All text should directly describe the product you are submitting. Text relating to shipping or store policies should not be included.” which is somewhat difficult to interpret. Merchants are only trying to include valid product information to please the shopper. We recommend that you avoid using the following in your feed’s titles and descriptions:

• Free Shipping, Free Gift, or other word with “Free” attached, 100% Satisfaction, 30 Day Money Back, Guarantee, etc.
• Excessive capitalization of words, unless it is proper brand spelling. Example – LEGO Building Blocks is correct, but KELLOG EGGO WAFFLES is not.
• Excessive punctuation characters or exclamation points and random symbols.
• Gimmicky words and superlatives such as  Best, Greatest, #1, or other subjective claims.
• Repetition of words

So be careful with the words being included in your products on Google Product Search or your products may be removed for violation of these guidelines.

Google Product Search has always had “out-of-the-box” support for a number of product attributes.  You can find the supported attribute list in their feed spec documentation.  While this list of supported attributes is robust (and has gotten more lengthy over the years), Google still allows merchants to submit “custom attributes” if they have additional, structured product data to provide.  For example, a power tool merchant may store information about the power of each of their handheld tools (ie: 12v, 14v, 18v).  In this case the retailer could submit these values to Google in a custom attribute field.  The benefit of doing this is still somewhat TBD and depends on the product category the merchant is participating in.  Sometimes Google could display your custom attribute as a filter, or they may index your attribute values so that they are search-able (ie:  if someone searched for “18v handheld drill” your listings would get a ranking boost)… but all of this is part of Google’s secret sauce, so merchants really just need to test various strategies.  Custom attributes are provided in the following format:  “c:attribute_name:attribute_type”.  Seven attribute types are supported and they include types like:  integer, datetime, string…  in the previous example, the power tool retailer could provide a field named:   “c:power:integer” and include values like “14″ or “18″ in that field.

Knowing all of the above, we learned something new about custom attributes recently.   If you include a custom attribute in your file with an attribute name that matches a supported attribute, then your feed will fail!  We aren’t sure if this occurs 100% of the time but it recently occurred for a SingleFeed customer and Google confirmed the problem.  As an example, if you include an attribute like “c:color:string”, your feed could fail.  This is because “color” is a supported Google attribute.  Whats even more perplexing is that, when feeds fail for this reason, there is no appropriate error messaging identifying the problem… the ambiguous “0 items of X items were inserted” message was given.  Obviously, in an ideal world, Google would recognize these custom attributes and simply treat them as supported attributes.  The second best scenario would be for them to return a feed processing error saying “you have custom attributes that should be regular attributes… please resubmit”.  Unfortunately, what’s currently occurring is the worst case scenario:  the feed fails with little to no feedback.  While this may be an edge case, we encountered it recently and so wanted to make sure you keep it in mind!

Back in late July, Google announced that they would be retiring the “one at a time” listing feature for Google Base listings and require items to be submitted via data feeds or an API. If you don’t know what API stands for then chances are it’s not for you. This is inherently going to cause a few issues for some merchants who have managed their small number of products using the one at a time feature. Their items will eventually expire and they’ll be forced to submit a feed. Don’t freak out because I said data feed. Data feeds don’t have to be scary like Al Pacino’s little friend in Scarface. Data feeds don’t have to be overwhelming either. Infact they can be very valuable to your ecommerce website and we suggest that you make the most of the other shopping engines and don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

If you need more information on building a data feed for just Google and you don’t have many products and zero budget for help then we recommend you look at the Google Base Help section http://base.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=2922. If you have lots of products, want to list on more than just Google Product Search, and get a whole lot more like categorization and performance tracking, then contact SingleFeed at info ‘at’ singlefeed.com to see how we can help.

What does it mean when you see “Published, Searchable Soon” in your Google Base account? 

This question crops up a lot… and for good reason. Your Google Base account doesn’t do a good job of telling you what’s going on here. When you see this message it means that your most recently uploaded Google Base feed is being indexed for search on Google Base. What it neglects to underscore is the fact that your previously uploaded (penultimate) feed IS still searchable on Google Base. So if you see “Published, Searchable soon”, your items (from the previously processed feed) are still live and searchable on Google Base. 

Sometimes merchants complain that their feed is in a perpetual state of “Published, searchable soon”. Their concern is that if their items are in this state constantly, they are never searchable on Base. If you see this message continually, i.e. for more than 24 hours at a time, it is likely because you upload your feed on a daily basis and: 

1) You have a very large feed (50,000+ items) and/or 

2) Google is experiencing slowdowns with feed processing. 

If you upload a feed on a daily basis, either of the above points could cause your Google Base account to perpetually display the “Published, Searchable Soon” message as Google’s feed processing overlaps into your upload schedule. Some merchants first reaction is to simply stop uploading their feed daily. This is not advisable for a couple of reasons. First, as mentioned previously, even with your current feed in this “Published, Searchable Soon” state, your previously uploaded feed is still searchable, so there’s no reason to stop delivering your feed daily. Second, by sending Google base your feed on a daily basis, you’re allowing Google to make sure your data is fresh. 

As a Google Product Search Approved Partner, SingleFeed recognizes that daily feed submission is optimal. 

I don’t usually regurgitate what others have said, but in this case, it seems needed. SingleFeed has supported the Product_Type field since well before it was required. And for some reason this is the field we get the most questions about. I like to describe the field as exactly what the product is. Google goes a little further, and I thought this might help merchants. From the Google Base Blog:
“The product_type attribute is used to categorize items so that we can match them to search results. Entering product types that are too general or that are incorrectly formatted causes our system to categorize your item incorrectly, and we won’t be able to connect your product with the right searchers. So when you enter the product_type attribute, you should think specific and relevant. For example, if you’re selling keyboards for computers, you should include “keyboards” as the product_type and not “computers.”

If your product doesn’t fit with the exact values on the example product_type page, you can include some variations; the most important thing is that the product_type be relevant and that it distinguish between an actual product and the accessory for the product. For example, for the above keyboard example, the product type “usb keyboard” is also acceptable. If you’re selling Ipod skins, the values “accessories” or “mp3 accessories” are fine.

One strategy for figuring out your product_type is to take the last breadcrumb from your categorization tree. So if your product page has the categorization Camping-Hiking > Sleeping Bags, it’s a pretty safe bet (although not a sure thing) that the product_type is sleeping bag.

If all else fails, try using this list provided by Google Base.

There seemed to be a lack of information and understanding about Google Base, so I wanted to share some of SingleFeed’s learnings and expectations.

The post over at SingleFeed covers Google OneBox, Google Base Custom Attributes, and Data Feed Optimization.

Key takaways:

-Most people are submitting to Google Base through an automated XML feed which is not optimized

-Adding more information to your Google Base feed (bulk upload) might help you get exposure through Google OneBox results

-The more information Google Base gets through feeds which contain Google Base Custom Attributes, the more likely I think Google is to display OneBox results for related search engine queries as the data provided through the feed will be more relevant than what Google can crawl.