Overview: Data Feed Syndication
Website: http://www.godatafeed.com/
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Description: A simple and affordable way to optimize your product listings, automate your datafeed submissions and drive more qualified, targeted traffic to your Website. » Read more: GoDataFeed Comparison Shopping Feed Syndication
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:
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.
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.
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”
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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.
