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Updating your shopping engine data feed frequently is important, especially during the holidays.

With increased web traffic and sales, you’re likely to be selling out of products or introducing new items for the holiday season.  You’re also likely to be changing prices and marking products as “on sale” and it’s imperative that you update feeds to the shopping engines so they have accurate information on your products. There’s almost nothing worse than a shopper clicking on a CSE ad (costing you $) to find the product out of stock or at a different (higher price). Many of the shopping engines do factor in the “freshness” of the data feed and take into account how old or stale a feed is and will deem your listings less relevant.

Even if your product information doesn’t change at all, we still suggest regularly updating your feed.  SingleFeed updates merchants feeds daily, and we would say that you should do weekly updates at a minimum.

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.

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.