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Let’s face it, the word “taxonomy” sounds boring. Couple that word with data feeds and you have a whole new level of ennui. If you are submitting a really good feed to a comparison shopping engine, you’re probably including the “category” values. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, go here -Why Categorization Matters. Most of the shopping engines require you to provide category values so that the engine understands where you want your products to show up or be classified under.

Merchants often times get lazy and improperly categorize, or worse, don’t provide any category values in their shopping engine data feeds. This hurts them more than they realize; their products show up in unintended departments on the engines, and may get curiosityclicks when displayed there which don’t help your performance. I know it can be tedious and time consuming to categorize every individual product for multiple shopping engines, but it must be done.

There’s a unique taxonomy for Pricegrabber, Nextag, Shopping.com, Pricegrabber, Shopzilla and the others. Google Product Search even has a taxonomy called product_type (that is optional but strongly recommended).

Here are a few Do’s and Don’ts on data feed categorization using shopping engine taxonomies:

1. Don’t copy and paste or fill the same category value for all your products. Chances are you have products that are in different categories.
2. Don’t use your store’s categories as they won’t match the shopping engine categories.
3. Don’t leave category/taxonomy values in a feed blank. Your feed will be rejected from the engine, or your items will show in all the wrong places.
4. Do use the correct taxonomy guide from each engine. Every shopping engine taxonomy is different, make sure you have the most up to date version.
5. Do check with the shopping engine regularly to make sure they haven’t added/removed categories from the taxonomy.
6. Do include gender and age information. If you sell apparel and accessories you MUST include the gender and age field as the CSE’s have unique categories for men’s/women’s/kid’s products like apparel.
7. Don’t use categories like “Gifts” or “New Items” or “Sale Items” is entirely useless information.

Here are links to a few shopping engine taxonomies:

Pricegrabber Taxonomy
Google Product Search Taxonomy
Shopzilla Taxonomy
Become.com Taxonomy
Shopping.com Taxonomy

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=”

We often see many merchants delivering feeds to the shopping engines with no sort of tracking method implemented. It doesn’t make any sense to just start sending data feeds and not have a way to track clicks and conversions. We’ve recommended that merchants use the ROI tracking solution from Become.com in the past, and suggest this for any of the other comparison shopping engines as well. But what if you don’t use those other engines, or don’t want lots of tracking code snippets on your website? You should use your Google Analytics account to help keep track of the clicks. This won’t always provide the most detailed conversion data, but you can still see click traffic. Here’s how to set up Google Analytics to monitor your shopping engine traffic with utm parameters. Not sure what utm parameters are? Check out this helpful Google Analytics article.

utm_source: Here’s where we suggest a high level campaign name like “shoppingengine” or “cse” so you can differentiate all traffic from the shopping engines.
utm_medium:  This is where you might insert the name of the specific shopping engine
utm_content: A lot of merchants will add the sku or product id here so they can segment reports based on their products.
utm_campaign:  This is a parameter that a marketer might want to add if they are constantly running promotions or sales and they want to distinguish the different prices or offers that are being pushed in their feeds.

An example of using some of these utm parameters on a product url would look like this: (Note- the first parameter requires a ? to join your base product url. For consecutive parameters you can use an &)

http://www.mydomain.com/product1.html?utm_source=cse&utm_medium=googleshopping&campaign=valentines2009

Once you’ve added the parameters you want and deliver your shopping engine feeds start watching your Google Analytics traffic sources reports. If you have conversion tracking enabled for ecommerce stores, you should also get a basic report on orders and revenue. You can create a custom segment in Google Analytics to show you only this filtered view.

SingleFeed offers advanced conversion tracking and can automatically add utm parameters to product feeds for merchants as well.

Note- If you are submitting your products to the shopping engines with an automatic feed from your store (ie- Yahoo! Store catalog.xml file) you won’t be able to have these parameters appended to your urls.