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When thinking about data feed optimization (DFO), the first step we talk about at SingleFeed is proper engine set up and feed delivery.  Did your products actually go live on the shopping engines?

The second step in DFO is the quality of the data feed.  Are you including more than just the basic product attributes?  Are you categorizing all your products properly?  Do your titles and descriptions include proper keyword phrases?  And lots lots lots lots more!

But as we move into the holiday shopping season where clicks and click costs increase, merchants need to give some thought to a third step: Quantitative Data Feed Optimization.  While that sounds fancy, I’m just talking about doing some basic math to make sure you’re not wasting money on the shopping engines.  For example, if you get 400 clicks/month on engine X for product Y and it’s costing you $0.40/click, and you’re not recording any sales through those clicks, then maybe you should suppress that SKU from that shopping engine.  Each merchant will have a different profit margin, but the basic rule applies that if a product is not performing at all on a shopping engine, the maybe you shouldn’t send it to that shopping engine.

Some data feed management companies jump right into this type of quantitative optimization without first concentrating on the quality of the data feed, which means that they are suppressing SKUs unneccesarily and usually cutting your catalog in half.  That’s wrong.  However, if you’ve put in the time and effort to provide the shopping engines with great data, and you’re not seeing the results, don’t be scared to suppress some SKUs.  Some products just won’t work on all the shopping engines.  That’s fine.  It gives you the opportunity save money or shift that ROI negative spend to a better performing product.

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.