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.
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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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The daily budget in Google AdWords is kind of confusing for some advertisers. If you set your budget to $50, you will notice some days it will spend $48 some days it will spend $59.32.
Even though it is called the daily budget, the way Google actually calculates it is slightly different. They will take your daily budget and multiply it by the number of days in the month to get a monthly budget. This is the magic number that your campaign will not spend more than. I believe anything over this number Google will actually refund you. (Can anyone confirm this?)
It is important to look at the daily budget and see if you are hitting your daily budget on most days. If you are, chances are you can get more traffic for your campaign if you raise you budget. As long as your ROI is ok, you will want to raise your daily budget where you will not be losing out on traffic.
In addition to bringing more traffic, you will probably see an increase in overall ROI. When you have more traffic you have a better chance of turning conversions.
Image Courtesy: Darren Hester
