LoveYourFeed.com

Well it’s nearing the end of 2009, so here’s a little recap if you’re a new follower or missed out on some previous posts. It has been really great to get to help explain the world of data feeds, optimization and feed management to our readers and we’re excited to see our visitors and reader count grow. Thinking ahead to 2010, there will be plenty more informative and juicy posts to keep your data feeds optimized. We’re planning for a few blog post series and perhaps some guest writers!

Here’s our top 5 list from the past year:

1. Using Google Analytics Intelligence alerts for Data Feeds – How to let Google Analytics alert you if your shopping engine traffic dips
2. Using Google Product Extension Ads – Connecting your Google AdWords ads with your Google Product Search data feed
3. Google Base Product Type – Pay attention to this often left out and misused attribute for Google Product Search
4. Use Holiday Keywords in Product Titles and Descriptions – Leverage holiday keywords to gain additional traffic from the shopping engines
5. Getting Seller Ratings on Google Product Search – Ratings are reviews are incredibly important to your shopping engine performance. You should also check out an older post, Google Product Search Merchant Reviews.

What was your favorite LoveYourFeed post of 2009 and why?

While there may be no hard evidence or actual cases that prove the shopping engines don’t like excessive capitalization, we do know it definitely degrades the shoppers experience to a degree. Google Merchant Center’s Program Policies state “Use Standard Spelling and Grammar. Avoid any repeated and unnecessary use of punctuation, capitalization or symbols.” We’ve seen merchants delivering product feeds to the shopping engines that have products in all capital letters.

Observe- The result from Amazon is listing a remote control Ferrari and the whole title is in caps. This is not a good idea. First, your listing stands out like a sore thumb in the results page.  I know that the words red and Ferarri may elicit extreme excitement and enthusiasm, but there is no need for all the characters to be capitalized.

There are exceptions where capitalization makes sense, like when dealing with model numbers, brands w/ all caps names, and other abbreviations or shorthand.  In this case, a search for “Kingston 1gb ddr2 ram” returns the following snippet of results. You can see that it makes sense to include capitalization on the GB, DDR2, RAM, and also the model numbers.  Pay attention that RitzCamera fails to capitalize their model number ktm28652g in the product title. When viewing all the results for this product search, you’ll see that the other merchants (like Geeks.com) use full capitalization for their model number.

In short, DON’T USE ALL  CAPS, and don’t use all lowercase either. Be sure to use proper spelling too!
A quick tip- In Microsoft Office Excel, you can use the formula “proper” to correct any text that needs fixing.

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.

Google recently released Product Extension Ads, also known as Ad Extensions for AdWords. This new feature is available to merchants using Google AdWords and Google Product Search. Within your Google Merchant Center account, you can connect your AdWords account to use product information to create extension ads. AdWords will use your Google Base/Product Search feed to accomplish this.

It’s important to note that you may be able to obtain multiple links to your products on one of these results pages. You can have an organic listing, Product Extension Ad links, and Google Product Search results under the “Shopping results for…” section which can increase the number of chances you’ll get a visitor to your website.

For those who don’t what an Extension Ad looks like, check out these results.

Search “Fein Multimaster” with results from AllProTools/AllProFein

Search “Delta 470″ with results from PlumberSurplus.com. Note that their Google Checkout badge is showing as well, with a current $5 off orders of $30 or more.

Once you add your AdWords account id to your Google Merchant Center account, you can then go add new keywords campaigns that utilize this data. To learn more about how to create these ads visit AdWords Help Center.

If you’re like most merchants, you hardly have time in your day to grab lunch and check your voicemails, let alone analyze report data for hours to determine if a shopping engine has dropped in traffic. We recommend that merchants also use the ROI trackers from each individual engine in conjunction with our SingleFeed tracking, and also it’s a good idea to track this stuff with your own analytics. Most merchants these days are using Google Analytics; it’s free and fairly easy to setup and provides great insight into your website’s performance.

As a back up alert system, I came up with this idea for merchants to setup Google Analytics Intelligence Alerts for their data feeds, should something go wrong.  If you are using utm_ parameters on your produt urls for the shopping engines, then you”ll be able to set up one of these alerts with no problem. One of the available default tracking options we have at SingleFeed is to tag product urls with utm_medium and utm_source parameters which gives merchants the ability to see the breakdown of shopping engine traffic in Google Analytics.

Within your Google Analytics account, navigate to My Customizations > Intelligence area and click on “Create New Alert”. I’ve created 3 custom alerts for starters, but you can create how ever many you want.

As for the actual alert settings, if you are using SingleFeed’s default url parameters then you can set something up by either medium (shoppingengine) or source (engine name). You can set the % values at whatever you want, I figured 25% was a good starting point. You don’t want to receive too many alerts if you set it at 3%, but you wouldn’t want it to large and never receive an alert if it was at 90%. Perhaps over time, you’ll find a more realisitic number like 30 or 40%. Remember the goal of these alerts are to warn you that something has happened to cause the traffic on your Google Product Search listings to drop. That could be from a botched feed upload, expired products, etc.

This alert will notify you when your overall traffic from the shopping engines drops more than 25% from the previous week.

This alert will notify you when your traffic from the one specific engine (in this case, Google Product Searc) drops more than 25% from the previous week.

So here’s just one idea that you can implement to help protect your self from a larger issue of having your feeds go down and not know about it. We often hear from merchants who had no idea that their items were down on an engine because they weren’t checking the reports. We understand that reviewing report data takes time and you’re short on it. So let technology do the work for you and alert you when you need to step in and investigate.

* Please note that the settings you see here are intended for merchants using utm_ parameters on their product urls which go out to the shopping engines. Some changes may be needed if your parameters are different.

The shopping engines work just like search engines.  They looking for relevant data in your feed to inform shopping search engine result pages (sSERPS).  Yes, the algorithms look at a lot of information, but everyone who thinks about data quality knows that fine tuning product titles and product descriptions makes a big difference.

So I’m always shocked when I realize around this time of year that merchants haven’t taken the time to include holiday keywords in their product titles and product descriptions.  So run a quick test and see what happens.  There are so few search results when you search for ‘christmas present’ on the leading shopping engines that you can probably stand out really easily.   Smarter.com tipped me off to this strategy 3 years ago!

Don’t spam the engines, but if you have great potential Christmahanukwanzaakah presents, then go for it.

Here are some holiday keywords to consider: christmas/hanukkah present, christmas/hanukkah present for dad/mom/boyfriend/girlfriend.

For example, in the description for ‘Men’s Fleece Jacket’ test out something like:  Men’s Fleece Jacket makes a great christmas present for Dad.