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As many of you may know, last week Google Product Search started requiring additional unique identifiers such as UPC, MPN, and Brand for all products except Apparel and custom made goods. Books must supply ISBN as well.

Your feed will still be accepted by Google Product Search if you don’t supply these unique identifiers, however, your items may not show up in the search results without them.

We’ve heard from many retailers about the requirement of UPC, some have said it’s unfair or too difficult to obtain this data. In some cases, no UPC or MPN data exists at all for certain types of products.  Google will allow merchants to fill out an exemption request form, and evaluate unique identifiers can be omitted. In most cases where UPC or MPNs are readily available and already provided by other retailers, a merchant’s exemption request will be denied.

Tip 1 – DO NOT make up UPC or MPN data

Tip 2 – Use a UPC look up tool to find values for your products

Tip 3 – Ask your supplier or distributor if they have this data available.

Every retailer is looking for a way to get their Google Shopping results to stand out.  If you’re using other Google products such as Google AdWords or Google Checkout, then you’re familiar with the special Google Checkout badge that you can get to show up on your AdWords ads by linking your accounts. The same thing can be done with your Google Merchant Center account and your Google Checkout account. By linking your two accounts you can get your shopping results to display a Google Checkout badge, the blue shopping cart, and be included in the Google Checkout filter.  Learn more about promoting your store’s Google Checkout payment method this holiday season.

Have you wondered how to make your Google AdWords ads more prominent and improve performance? It’s time to hook up your Google AdWords and Google Shopping accounts.

Join SingleFeed and The Rimm-Kaufman Group to hear how to make the most of your Google Shopping and Google AdWords accounts. Learn about AdWords Extension/Plus Box ads, improving your data feed quality and customizing ads to improve click through and conversion rates.

In this webinar we will cover:

- Connecting your Merchant Center & AdWords accounts
- Creating AdWords Extension/Plus Box ads
- Optimizing & tracking your Extension/Plus Box ads

Title: Connecting Google Merchant Center with Google AdWords
Date: Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Time: 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM PDT

Register Now

SingleFeed is a Google Merchant Center Partner and leading provider of data feed management and optimization services for small and medium sized merchants ranging from $250K-$20M in annual revenue.

The Rimm-Kaufman Group provides full-service paid search marketing & attribution management services. RKG clients range from startups to the Fortune-500 and include both marketers in retail, travel and finance.

Google recently implemented a policy that requires you to verify your store’s URL through Google (using Google Webmaster Tools). If you have not done this by now (deadline was May 18th), Google will deactivate your listings until you have completed the process.

We wrote a blog post over at SingleFeed.com that explains how to claim your website URL through Google.

Typically a merchant would be using their same Google account/login for their Google Merchant Center account and their Google Webmaster Tools account. If you have two different logins (one for each service) please follow the steps below.

Login to your existing Google Webmaster Tools account and select the domain you wish to verify. Click Add User and insert the email of your Google Merchant Center login and click continue. This should allow you to complete the remaining steps of the verification process.

Join SingleFeed next Wednesday for an informational Webinar in which we’ll walk through all the ways your Google Merchant Center feed can be used. It starts with listing products on Google Product Search, but you can also leverage your data feed on the Google Affiliate Network and Google AdWords. It’s time to put the power of your data feed to greater use. Get a jump start on your competition today!

All serious ecommerce businesses with revenue over $500K can benefit from this informative Webinar. Register today if you want to improve your performance, drive more sales, and discover how to better leverage your Google Merchant Center feed.

Brian Smith and Ryan Douglas of SingleFeed will cover:
- Google Product Search and Google OneBox listings
- Google Merchant Center Account Optimization Tips
- Google Product Extension Ads w/ Google AdWords
- Google Product Ads w/Google Affiliate Network

Register now.

SingleFeed is a Google Merchant Center Partner and leading provider of data feed management and optimization services for small and medium sized merchants.

*This webinar will be recorded. If you cannot attend live, please register and a link to the recording will be emailed to you after the event.

This is one of the quickest account settings to implement which has a significant impact. Shoppers are looking on comparison shopping engines for the lowest prices, why wouldn’t you make your tax and shipping cost transparent? Waiting to provide tax and shipping until they reach your site, or worse the checkout process can hinder your performance from the CSE’s. If you don’t provide it, another retailer will and likely get the click AND conversion. Provide as much information to the shopper further up the sales funnel/process. Merchants who don’t provide tax and shipping info often see higher bounce rates and lower conversion rates from the shopping engines. The goal here is to eliminate any FUDDs as early as possible.

1) You’ll want to login to your Google Merchant Center account and visit Settings > Tax and Shipping.

2) Next you will enter Tax information. Most merchants will charge tax to orders that ship to their home state. Below are the 3 steps to follow.

3) Create a new shipping method under the area Shipping Settings. You will need select which option is best suited for your items. Note that you can only set 1 shipping method within your Google Merchant Center account. If you have a sophisticated shipping program, you should try to include shipping weight AND shipping cost values in your data feed. Tax and Shipping values set in the feed override the global settings at the account level.

Select “Flat Rate” if you ship everything for the same flat rate or for free.

Select “Custom Table” if you ship based on tiers or tables for weight, price, or number of items. For example- some merchants charge rates of $5 for orders of $0-50 and $10 for orders of $51-99 and $0 for orders $100 and up. Other merchants charge $12 for the first item and $6 for the second, third or fourth. Another example could be based on a weight table.

Select “Carrier-Calculated” if you ship using UPS, Fedex, or USPS rates which are estimated by ship from zip code and the shoppers ship to zip code. These estimates may not be 100% accurate, but they provide the shopper a very good idea of the shipping costs, with no major surprises.

If you have questions that aren’t covered in this post, check out Google Merchant Center’s help article, or comment below and ask us!

So spend 10 minutes setting this up to ensure your account ready for success!

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=”

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.