The Google AdWords Product Listing Ads generally perform very well for most eCommerce retailers. You can read our guide on how to set up Product Listing Ads. Here are some extra tips to help you set up and optimize the campaign correctly.

Google Merchant Center

In your Google Merchant Center feed, you can add the following columns to help with Product Listing Ads.

Google AdWords

Once you add these fields to your feed file, you can filter your campaigns by grouping and labels.

You can find more info in the Google Help Center.

#1 – Google Shopping

Google Shopping is the king of free comparison shopping engines. It sends the most traffic out of all the CSEs listed in the post. You will need to create and account and submit a feed using the Google Merchant Center.

#2 – Bing Shopping

Bing Shopping is the Bing alternative to Google Shopping. Although they have less market-share, free is free. You’ll want to get set up here as well. NOTE: Bing has placed a temporary hold on new merchant signups, keep your eye on this page for updates. When they do allow new merchant signups, use this guide to setup an account within adCenter.

#3 - TheFind

TheFind.com has been growing quite a lot over the past year. Their model allows you to list your product for free. If you add their UpFront badge to your site, you will get better placement. Sign up at TheFind.com Merchant Center.

#4 - Oodle

Oodle is not really a comparison shopping engine, it is more of a classified listing site. However, they allow you to upload your product catalog via FTP with a datafeed, so you may as well submit your products here.

#5 - SortPrice

SortPrice has a different model from all other comparison shopping engines. They charge a flat fee for every merchant and you get whatever clicks you get. In addition to this, they offer to list a percentage of your products for free. More info is here.

#6 - ShopMania

ShopMania offers a free account with the option to upgrade to their premium packages. The free plan can only be used if you install their “We’re listed on ShopMania” site seal. Sign up and get more info here. ShopMania also offers a free Facebook Store for merchants listed on their program.

#7 - GoShopping

GoShopping.com is similar to ShopMania, they offer to list your products for free if you install their badge on your site. You can sign up here.

Greetings eCommerce Circle. Michael J Kaye was nice enough to give me the opportunity to share with you some important tips about shopping feeds and shopping feed optimization. Below are 10 things you should know about shopping feeds.

Top 10 things you should know about shopping feeds:

1. When choosing an eCommerce platform, make sure it has the ability to easily update and export your shopping feed so you can easily manipulate it for free online marketing channels.
   Good places to start are Google Product Search, Bing Shopping and TheFind.
   More info: Google Product Search AKA Google Shopping | Bing Shopping | TheFind
2. Each shopping feed has different product attributes in different columns, like product title, merchant product ID, and product categories. Some shopping engines will require certain attributes to list products on their website, like Product Title, Product Description, Merchant Product ID, Category, Product URL and Image URL. Sometimes the order of your columns matter, sometimes they don’t. If you make any header or column changes to a shopping feed, make sure you format your shopping feed so the shopping engine reads it correctly.
3. You’ll need to use an FTP program to download and upload your shopping feed from various locations. Some good free programs are FileZilla or CuteFTP.
4. Depending on your stock levels and number of products, you’ll need to update your inventory and shopping feeds often to ensure your product shopping is accurate. You don’t want to submit products to marketing channels that are out of stock. One way to update your inventory in your shopping feeds is to add a Stock Status column and use the values True or False to denote whether the product is in stock or out of stock.
5. Each shopping engine has a set of specifications that you can use to optimize the shopping you send them. We’ve compiled a shopping feed specifications and examples page that you can use to send shopping feeds to Google Product Search, Bing Shopping, TheFind, and more.
6. Each marketing channel or shopping engine can be tracked with different tools. Some shopping engines have their own tracking pixels that merchant can use for free to track sales, clicks, revenue and conversion rates. You can also append the product URLs in your shopping feed with tracking shopping for Google Analytics. This data can be used to optimize these accounts and should be installed in your order confirmation page so your shopping feed products can be tracked.
7. Some shopping engines like Shopping.com let you list a regular price and a sale price in your shopping feed. The engine then crosses the regular price with a big red X and displays the sale price in red below. This gives your listings an extra pop against your competition. More info: optimize Shopping.com shopping feed.
8. Categorization is important. Each of your products needs to be categorize with specific category information to get as much qualified traffic as possible. For Google Product Search, your product_type attribute defines your category. Each shopping engine has their own categorization. Be sure to look it up and match your products as accurately as possible for best results. If you’re unsure how to categorize your product, as your account manager at a shopping engine or post a question in a help forum. The extra time you take to figure this column out is worth it. More info: shopping feed categories.
9. Adding brand information to your products can greatly increase their findability. Even a step further, append your brand column in front of your product titles so your products can be searchable by those keywords.
10. UPCs and MPNs are very important pieces of data to get more traffic on the shopping engines. More importantly, UPCs and MPNs let you SKU up, or list on comparison pages with your competitors. Without unique identifiers on electronics and other hard goods, you’ll lose out on traffic because your listing will be separate, away from the main comparison page. Don’t have UPCs? Look on Google Product Search for the products you have that don’t have UPCs and view the product details. Most hard goods have UPCs, you can strip them and add it to your shopping feed.

For more information on shopping feeds be sure to check out the CPC Strategy blog, the most active shopping feed optimization blog online.

• Google Shopping – Free Program
• NexTag – CPC Program
• TheFind – Free Program
• Shopzilla – CPC Program
• Shopping – CPC Program
• PriceGrabber – CPC Program
• Bing Shopping – Free Program

Some notable changes in the Comparison Shopping world since last year: TheFind.com has seen tremendous growth and are now ranked within the top 3 CSEs. Since around one year ago Yahoo! Shopping, has been outsourcing their product listings to PriceGrabber. Bing Shopping is no longer offering cash back and can now be managed through the Microsoft adCenter portal.

Some other smaller but notable CSEs are:

• Become – CPC Program
• Pronto – CPC Program
• Smarter – CPC Program
• SortPrice – Flat Monthly Fee

Ever since Microsoft made Bing Shopping free, merchants have been lining up to get their products listed on the new Bing Shopping. The was process was very manual, and every merchant application had to be reviewed by Bing manually. They have recently launched a new tool within Microsoft adCenter for managing your Bing Shopping product listings so that merchants and advertisers can have one interface for both adCenter and Bing Shopping.

Here is a quick “how-to” migrate your existing Bing shopping account or create a new account within adCenter:

Step 1 - Login to Microsoft adCenter and go to the “Tools” tab. Once there, click on the “Bing Shopping Account Management” link pictured below:

Step 2 - For existing accounts, select “Migrate” and enter your Bing Shopping login credentials. For new accounts, select “Create New Account.”

Step 3 - Once you enter your login information or create a new account, you will be taken to the Store Settings screen. You can enter all your store info as well as upload a logo.

Step 4 - Go to the “Catalog Management” tab and choose how you will send the feed. In this new adCenter console, you now have the ability to have Bing automatically import your feed from an HTTP URL. This is a new feature that was not previously available in the Bing Shopping portal. If you choose “Microsoft Download”, you will be prompted to enter the URL where the feed can be downloaded. If you select “Merchant Upload”, you will need to enter the file name and manually upload the file with the FTP credentials specified in the next tab.

You should check back in a few hours to ensure the feed was processed correctly. Additionally, you may want to click the “View Catalog Quality Feedback” link and check for any specific feed errors. At this point you should be done… It’s a fairly simple process. However, if you have any questions, feel free to comment below.

As you surely know by now, Microsoft shuttered Bing cashback at the end of July. They have already launched the new Bing Shopping which is completely free for merchants. Like Google Product Search, it is a must for every merchant to be listed on Bing Shopping. It’s free, so why not?

Microsoft is currently allowing new merchants to join the program. You will need to go to the Microsoft Advertising site and fill out the Bing Shopping Merchant Application Form, once you do that you should hear back from the Bing Shopping team within a couple of weeks.

Once you are approved to join the shopping program, you’ll get an email with your account login information and feed specs. All you need to do to go live is:

• Fill out your merchant contact info, shipping and tax rules within the Merchant Portal.
• Setup and submit your data feed via FTP.

If you’ve done it before for Google Base, you can do it again. It’s free, you might as well…

UPDATE: This article is outdated, you can find updated instructions for the new Bing Shopping/Microsoft adCenter self-service portal here.

As part of this “test-and-learn” mentality, we will be retiring the Bing cashback feature, which means that the last day you can earn cashback will be July 30, 2010.

Why are we doing this? When we originally began to offer the cashback feature, it was designed to help advertisers reach you with compelling offers, and to provide a new type of shopping experience that would change user behavior and attract a bunch of new users to Bing.

In lots of ways, this was a great feature – we had over a thousand merchant partners delivering great offers to customers and seeing great ROI on their campaigns, and we were taking some of the advertising revenue and giving it back to customers. But after a couple of years of trying, we did not see the broad adoption that we had hoped for.

This is definitely bad news for small eCommerce sites. Bing cashback was one of a few good channels with little up front costs. Goodbye Bing cashback…

TheFind.com has been around for some time and has been a great tool for consumers to find the products they are looking for. Until now TheFind has populated its product database by crawling the web and filling in the blanks from third-party feeds.

I just realized this a few days ago, but in late April they launched the ability to upload a feed via FTP.

Great news! TheFind has launched a feed upload tool through the Merchant Center and now accepts direct feeds from merchants.

What does this mean for you?

• Greater control over product information on TheFind (ability to set up notifications to primary email address, letting you know when the feed is live)
• Faster updates (initial feed can go live within 72 hours)
• Increase product relevancy through our new, expanded attributes, as seen in our the data feed specs.

I’ve just submitted a data feeds for several clients, we’ll see how it works. In the meantime, you can register here.

Comparison shopping engine campaigns can drive tons of traffic — Are you getting sales? That’s the question. We hope the answer is yes. When it’s not, here’s a quick tip to remove under-performing items.

You can get better results by removing all items under a specific price. For example, if you sell sneakers you may also have socks in your feed which are getting a lot of clicks that doesn’t translate into revenue. What you can do is remove all items under $10 from your feed. You’ll get less clicks which in effect will cost less. You will probably end up with the same amount of sales. Your best bet is to try this for a few weeks and see how it performs.

Another great idea is to run a kill-report every few weeks.

As more and more people flock online to look for the best deals at eCommerce sites, many have used various shopping comparison sites to hunt for the lowest price. Well a new site, Flit.com, is trying to put a new twist on the comparison shopping model by letting consumers compare stores as opposed to individual products. When a user arrives at the site they are presented with a search box to enter the product they are looking for. The unique twist comes in the search results where, instead of listing out the product prices and where to buy it, Flit just lists the companies selling it, without providing prices. The site is very much geared toward the eCommerce shopper who loves certain merchants and prefers to shop based on a trusted provider over finding the lowest price. Many are comparing Flit to a faster version of the mall shopping experience, but in an online environment, because consumers can quickly be presented with all of the stores that carry the item in question. The benefit is that consumers now do not have to drive to the mall to compare at their favorite stores.

However many wonder how this comparison shopping model will survive, since consumers have to spend so much time clicking into individual stores just to compare prices. This is in stark contrast to normal comparison shopping where a user can do a product search on Google, which will then return the actual products and prices, and the option to sort by brand in the left hand navigation. Flit.com requires shoppers to go view each store one by one, where they have to click excessively to find and compare what they are looking for. On top of this, unless they are keeping a running list of their findings, truly comparing prices becomes increasingly difficult with each click.

One thing Flit.com does very well is keep track of all user shopping history including which ecommerce sites they enjoy shopping at the most. Fans of the site need not worry, as it is expected to get improved functionality next month by giving users the options to view side-by-side product comparisons combined with the store shopping experience. Overall the feedback is mixed with the first launch of the product, but Flit.com has the framework and potential to become an amazing ecommerce comparison shopping site, where consumers will love to shop.