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Data feed optimization for the shopping comparison engines by SingleFeed
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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
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 curiosity clicks 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:
- 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.
- Don’t use your store’s categories as they won’t match the shopping engine categories.
- 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.
- 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.
- Do check with the shopping engine regularly to make sure they haven’t added/removed categories from the taxonomy.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
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