Yesterday Google rolled out a major new interface for Google Base and has re-branded it Google Merchant Center. All the important info such as Active Products, Search Clicks, Data Feed info is displayed right when you log in. In the old interface you had to click through a few pages to see all the data.
More Info: Search Engine Round Table
Everything You Need For A Great Night !?
Unlike most other Comparison Shopping Engines, Google Base (Product Search) is free. Free for all merchants and free for consumers. Free as in beer.
With that being the case, it is very important to make sure your feed is uploading properly. It is very easy to format a small feed properly. When you have a large feed, it becomes much harder. Here are some tips & restrictions I found to be very helpful:
If you upload your feed via the web form in the Google Base portal, make sure your feed is smaller than 20MB. If you use the scheduled upload option, your file cannot be larger than 15MB. For really large feeds with tens or hundreds of thousands of SKUs, the best option is to generates multiple feed files and make sure they are smaller than 1GB and contain less than 100,000 items.
If you have more than a million SKUs, you will probably need to talk to Google to see if you can get around the 10 registered datafeeds restriction. Another option would be to use a Multiple Client account and break your feed into 10 feeds in each account.
Bonus Google Base Tip: “Google Base Feeds Can Now Include YouTube Video Demos for Product Search”
Image Credit: - 404 Not Found -
Sometimes it’s hard to stick out on shopping comparison engines. Every little tweak can help. Adding your logo to your listings will definitely raise your click through rate (CTR). This may be fairly obvious to some merchants, but many merchants don’t include their logo with their listings.
Aside from laziness, there are other reasons not include your logo with your listings. The main reason is cost. Most CSEs charge extra for use of their mechant logo program. However, if you can afford it or if you still have a decent return on investment, you should include your logo.
If you are not sure if it’s worth it for you, run a test for two weeks or a month and see how you click through rate, and in effect your return on investment increases.
Image Credit: Shopfin.org
When you have a large feed, there is usually a very long tail of products that send traffic to your site. Sometimes you can get one or two clicks on a thousand different products. You may not notice the cost of each click on it’s own, but it starts to add up. With a standard Kill Report it’s hard to get rid of the long tail because you don’t have enough metrics.
In extreme cases where you cannot stomach the excessive costs of a specific shopping engine (CSE) and you are unable to lower the spend through other methods, it is recommended to send a feed with only the brands that have performed well historically. Keep in mind that by running an inclusion only feed, you are also getting rid of products that may perform well. So keep testing the feed by adding new products and monitor it for changes.
You might stop a lot of quality traffic by sending an inclusion only feed. You might also save your business a ton of money. Keep your eyes open and watch the performance.
Most customers that are satisfied with their purchase from your ecommerce store will not go out of their way to review their shopping experience. It’s usually the customer who’s order got messed up who will go and leave you a review on PriceGrabber, ResellerRatings and the like.
It’s only normal, but what should you do? You need to push your customers aggressively to rate their experience. You can do this by displaying a banner on the order thank you page urging them to leave a review. Most comparison shopping engines provide the code for this.
If you deal with many shopping engines and don’t want to many banners popping up, you can utilize a script like this to randomly rotate a few of the scripts:
<script type="text/javascript"> var r_text = new Array (); r_text[0] = "PriceGrabberCode"; r_text[1] = "Shopzilla Code"; r_text[2] = "Shopping.com Code"; r_text[3] = "Smarter Code"; r_text[4] = "NexTag Code"; r_text[5] = "Yahoo Shopping Code"; r_text[6] = "Or Any Other Site Code"; var i = Math.floor(7*Math.random()) document.write(r_text[i]); </script>
Code source and explanation: WebDevelopersNotes.com
Aside from a pop-up banner after checkout, it is also a good idea to email all customers once you think they have received their order (3-5 business days from when you ship, or enough time that they will have received the shipment). You can offer them a coupon code or promo for the review, this will help you get more reviews. Just keep in mind that when you offer something in return you cannot offer a promotion for a ‘positive’ review. You can only ask them to rate their experience.
Your customers love you, but not enough to go through the trouble of finding and reviewing you. Help them, help you.
Being a new merchant on most comparison shopping engines can be frustrating because when you have no click through history or ratings your products show up pretty far down on the page. There some tricks you learn along the way, here is one that can be helpful for comparison shopping engines that group merchants offering the same product on to one page. PriceGrabber is the first to come to mind.
The first thing to do is research your product category and look for trends on how the search results are displayed. You are looking for this:
PriceGrabber: First Result From Group Of Sellers
Most consumers will click on the first result, that’s where you’ll want to be.
In order for PriceGrabber to show your product with the first results of grouped merchants, you’ll need to make sure that you are using the same SKU as well as brand name spelling. If you have the same info, you’ve done it, you will now be in the first result.
Now you are on the first search result, you’ll want to try and get you products to stick out from the other merchants on the pages. You can do this by adding your logo or a discount promo message.
PriceGrabber: Compare Products Page
Being that Google Product Search (Base) is free you want to spend some extra time to make sure that you are getting the most out of it. There are several things you can do to optimize your feed.
The Google Base datafeed specs are fairly simple. aside from the required fields there are many optional columns that you can include. Your best bet is to include all that you can. There is a neat tool by Tom The Developer that allows you enter a search term and analyze the data fields that your competition is using. Google loves data, the more data you use, the better your products rank.
The product title and description are the most important parts of your datafeed. You will want to include pertinent info such as Brand Name, Model Number & Product Name in the title column. The description should include all the same information as the title as well as a more thorough description and product details.
Google’s ranking algorithm also takes your feed’s historical performance into account. As long as your account is live, Google collects information such as Click Through Rate and Bounce Rate and analyzes it to see if it is in the consumers best interests to show your product with higher placement.
Google likes to keep it’s content fresh, you should try to upload a feed on a daily or weekly basis for best results.
Google allows merchants who accept Google Checkout to display the Google Checkout logo next to your products in Google Product Search. You can goto your account settings and link the two accounts. This helps your products stick out from the masses.
Google aggregates your merchant reviews from many different rating websites and displays a star ranking of one through five next to your merchant name. Customers have the ability to sort and filter the results by the number of stars a merchant has.
Since Google Product Search is a Price Comparison Shopping Engine, you will want to see that your prices are always competitive for the best performance.
There are so many comparison shopping engines out there that it is hard to keep track of them. It’s just as hard to know where to start. These are the top 7 CSEs by traffic as ranked by Compete.
There are plenty of other CSEs out there, these are worthy mentions:
SortPrice is still relatively small compared to the others but is worth mentioning because of their pricing model. They charge a flat fee per month so you can get any amoutn of traffic without worrying about the Cost-Per-Click.
Comparison Shopping Engines (CSE) are a great marketing channel to promote the products you are selling. Most CSEs work on a pay per click model with rates varying by category. Because the CSE gets paid per click they try to drive as much traffic as possible and for most part it is targeted traffic. However, when you have a large product feed you will have a lot of products with many clicks and no return on investment (ROI). There are several thing you can do to rectify this.
The first thing to keep in mind is that people go to Comparison Shopping Engines to… Compare Prices! You will want to map out your competitive landscape and ensure that you are priced competitively. An item priced a penny cheaper than the competition will show up much higher on the page. Some websites will advertise the same product significantly cheaper just to lure the customer in and then tack on a ‘shipping/handling/processing’ charge. Make you your price looks competitive from the first glance on the CSEs.
Another thing consumers compare on CSEs ar your store ratings. Those little stars can make the difference between night and day. When a consumer sees 4 or 5 stars, they feel comfortable purchasing from you even though they never heard of you before. You should always push your happy customers to leave reviews for you because as a general rule of thumb, only pissed off customers go out of there way to leave reviews about their shopping experience. One additional reason to strive for positive reviews (aside from having happy customers) is that most CSEs incorporate store reviews into their ranking algorithms and will display your products higher on the page because of it.
Always make sure that your products show up in the correct categories. When an item is not categorized properly you will start receiving unwanted clicks that will not convert into sales. On the flip side, if your items are categorized properly you will receive much more qualified traffic and it will have a much better ROI. However you generate your feeds it will be in your best interests to map your sites category structure to each CSE.
When you have a large number of products in your feed it becomes imperative to run Kill Reports on a constant basis. A Kill Report is a performance report from any tracking software that contains the following columns:
What you will now need to do is analyze which items are not worth the cost based on a threshold that you define. For example any item with more that 50 clicks and no revenue, or any item with a cost of more than 50% of revenue produced. Once you come up with a magic formula that works for your business, you should run a Kill Report once or twice a month and exclude those items from future feeds. Something to keep in mind, is that if you see a specific brand performing poorly consistently over time you may want to exclude all that brands products from your feed. Results vary from CSE to CSE so I would suggest running a separate report for each CSE.
