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Google Local Shopping Wants You
Posted by CPC_Andrew - September 2, 2010 at 6:08 pm
Yesterday Paul Lee announced on the the Google Merchant Blog that Google wants merchants to submit their information to Google Local Shopping in a push to expand a local network of search results for it’s users.
Please note that excellent Product Search data quality is a prerequisite for participation, so make sure that you are submitting an accurate and complete data feed, including unique product identifiers. Additionally, to take part you’ll need to have your stores listed on Google Places, so make sure you have submittedand verified your store listings.
It will be interesting to see the impact this program has on shoppers.
CPC Strategy was founded by former employees of the comparison shopping engines and understands first hand what it takes to manage a successful comparison shopping campaign. You can check out our webpage at www.cpcstrategy.com. Don’t hesitate to Contact us to find out how we can make the shopping engines work for you.
Categories: General eCommerce, Google Tags:
Google Launches Realtime Search
Posted by CPC_Andrew - August 26, 2010 at 10:57 am
Google introduced a new standalone search page today with the launch of Google realtime. It lets you view entire Twitter conversations and filter results by location. If you’re an e-commerce merchant this provides a tool you can use to track how customers talk about your company.
Want to know what people are saying right now? We’re excited to introduce a new home and new tools for Realtime Search. Now you can filter results by location, see full conversations from Twitter, and get Alerts for Realtime Updates via email. Learn more and try it out at http://www.google.com/landing/realtime/ – what will you search for?
Three things you can do with Google realtime:
- Track down and befriend disgruntled customers.
- Provide on-the-fly customer support.
- See what people are saying about your competitors.
CPC Strategy was founded by former employees of the comparison shopping engines and understands first hand what it takes to manage a successful comparison shopping campaign. You can check out our webpage at www.cpcstrategy.com. Don’t hesitate to Contact us to find out how we can make the shopping engines work for you.
Categories: Google Tags:
Google Acquires Like.com, Looks to Enhance Google Product Search?
Posted by CPC_Andrew - August 23, 2010 at 8:04 am
Google’s recent acquisition of Like.com has us here wondering what effect the move will have on Google Product Search. Like.com specializes in visual search, which could mean upgrades to how we view images on Google Product Search in the near future. Steve Monfort reports from NASDAQ.
CPC Strategy was founded by former employees of the comparison shopping engines and understands first hand what it takes to manage a successful comparison shopping campaign. You can check out our webpage at www.cpcstrategy.com. Don’t hesitate to Contact us to find out how we can make the shopping engines work for you.
Categories: Google, Google Product Search, Uncategorized Tags:
Google Stiffening Up Product Listing Requirements
Posted by Tien - July 12, 2010 at 5:00 pm
There are basically two ways a product can show up on a Google Product Search–either under its own individual listing with other similar products, or grouped together with other identical products. Examples of each can be seen below:
For general products that may not be sold by many other merchants, consumers will get the former page and are presented with an assortment of similar options for what they want to buy.
However for specific products that are sold by other merchants, Google will group merchants selling identical products together as seen in the latter image. This provides consumers a better experience who already know what they want in choosing which merchant they want to purchase from.
While currently not required, it is highly preferable to be listed within the product pages if one exists, as consumers will more likely click on these product pages rather than individual listings.
However Google is going to soon change that:
Starting in late August, product offers in the Electronics, Books, and Media categories from US merchants may not appear in Product Search if your data feed does not include the necessary unique product identifiers, such as MPN, Brand, GTIN/UPC/EAN or ISBN.
So merchants in these categories who don’t provide unique product identifiers above will risk not having their products show up on a search anymore.
Merchants who sell within these categories should already be able to get this information from their supplier, but to double check, each product page on Google will have the unique product identifiers listed on them:
Ideally once Google rolls out this feature, within their Merchant Center login there will be details on which products are matched up vs which don’t, along with possible recommendations/suggestions on what they’ll be listed under.
CPC Strategy was founded by former employees of the comparison shopping engines and understands first hand what it takes to manage a successful comparison shopping campaign. You can check out our webpage at www.cpcstrategy.com. Don’t hesitate to Contact us to find out how we can make the shopping engines work for you.
Categories: Google, Google Base/Shopping, Google Product Search Tags:
Comparison Shopping Engine Spotlight: Google Product Search
Posted by CPC_Andrew - July 1, 2010 at 1:00 pm
Each month CPC Strategy is releasing a merchant-oriented Comparison Shopping Engine (CSE) Spotlight. Today’s spotlight features Google Product Search. We’ll talk about how it operates, and why you should list your products there.
“Google Product Search helps shoppers find and buy products across the web. As a seller, you can submit your products to Google Product Search, allowing shoppers to quickly and easily find your site.” – Google Product Search Welcome Page.
When you search for a specific product or type of product in Google’s search bar, Google will spit back one or multiple product listings from Google Product Search.
For example, if you type in vintage 1950’s t-shirt, the results page will look like this (click to enlarge):
- There are regular text listings that link to websites.
- There is also Shopping results for vintage 1950’s t-shirt section that shows a picture of a shirt and lists three sellers.
The listing with a picture is titled the “OneBox.” This is a premier listing for merchant items. Talking about the Google “OneBox” can easily take up multiple posts of its own, so here’s a link to a great post by Brian Smith at GoogleCommerceGuide.com which talks all about it.
On the picture above there are two links under the Google logo at the top left of the screen. One says everything, which lists a mixture of listings that are most relevant to the consumer’s search. The other says Shopping.
Here’s the display if you click the Shopping link (click to enlarge):
Product pictures are listed with links to merchant sites. Easy shopping for consumers and easy money for you.
Check out how Google Product Search compares to the other CSE’s.
Many comparison shopping engines (CSE’s) charge cost per click rates (CPC) on products that you list on their site. There are times when you’ll wage war with these CSE’s, constantly adjusting bids, cutting products, and tracking important performance information.
Google Product Search allows merchants to list their products for free.
If you consider that 57% of consumers start their shopping with a search engine, it’s essential that you list your products on Google Product Search.
Below are some useful links. Check them out, start listing your products for free. On Thursday 7/8 we’ll be posting merchant best practices with Google Product Search.
- About Google Product Search
- Google Merchant Frequently Asked Questions
- Google data feed requirements
- Google Merchant Blog
CPC Strategy was founded by former employees of the comparison shopping engines and understands first hand what it takes to manage a successful comparison shopping campaign. You can check out our webpage at www.cpcstrategy.com. Don’t hesitate to Contact us to find out how we can make the shopping engines work for you.
Categories: CSE Spotlight, Google Tags:
Google Product Search/Shopping’s Erroneous Product Counts
Posted by Tien - June 29, 2010 at 3:03 pm
One way a user can see how many products are live on their (or a competitor’s site) on Google Shopping is by using Google itself. By entering the search query site:sitename.com within Google Product Search, Google will list all live products sold by that merchant.
For example, to see what Amazon has listed in Google Shopping, one would type site:Amazon.com into the product search page:
Amazon has a monstrous 13 Million products live according to Google here, however we’ve found that for merchants listing a large amount of products, these numbers can often be off by significant amounts.
For instance in our Amazon example, on the side bar we can break the products down by price points.
There are four available, and since they are all-inclusive–each section should contain all of Amazon’s total products.
However, further investigation shows that something is a bit off.
If we view products in the first price point, under $25, Google says that there are “About 348,178 results”.
And from $25-$70, there are “About 253,252 results”; from $70-$150, 203,740 results; and finally for products over $150 Google says there are 208,140.
Taking the sum of these subsets, we get a mere 1,013,310, which is considerably less than the 13 million+ results Google reported earlier.
We’ve often had merchants with inventory counts that are really high, say 50,000-100,000+, wonder why not all their products are live when they use this search method, but it’s often the case that Google simply is giving a number that’s not very accurate.
To get the actual number of how many products a merchant has live then, the Merchant Center is your friend:
For the record, Google reports that this particular merchant has “just” around 90,000 products live on Google Product Search.
CPC Strategy was founded by former employees of the comparison shopping engines and understands first hand what it takes to manage a successful comparison shopping campaign. You can check out our webpage at www.cpcstrategy.com. Don’t hesitate to Contact us to find out how we can make the shopping engines work for you.
Categories: Google, Google Base/Shopping, Google Product Search Tags:
Google Merchant Center Gets Minor Makeover
Posted by Tien - May 25, 2010 at 3:12 pm
Changes are minor, but for those who are in their merchant center a lot, they should jump out at you:
Today, we’re rolling out a few changes that will make the Google Merchant Center easier to use. We’ve simplified navigation between sections and we’ve merged the “Active” and “Inactive” product pages into one “Products” page. Additionally, we’ve added the ability to search for a specific product by product ID on this “Products” page, making it easy to zero in on any of your products. Lastly, we’ve made some minor stylistic and textual changes, like changing the term “Published” to the more descriptive “Searchable.”
The ability to search for a product is quite beneficial for merchants who want to track how many impressions/clicks an individual product is getting, as before they would have to browse page by page to the product they want to find.
Source: Google Merchant Blog
CPC Strategy was founded by former employees of the comparison shopping engines and understands first hand what it takes to manage a successful comparison shopping campaign. You can check out our webpage at www.cpcstrategy.com. Don’t hesitate to Contact us to find out how we can make the shopping engines work for you.
Categories: Google, Google Base/Shopping Tags:
Google Merchant Center Hiccups May 2nd’s Performance Report
Posted by Tien - May 5, 2010 at 3:13 pm
Merchants logging into their Google Merchant Center account recently may have panicked when they saw that their active items and click totals reported zero for Sunday, May 2nd:
However this is just a reporting bug that’s affecting all merchants, and has no bearing on the listings themselves.
Merchants employing 3rd party trackers such as Google Analytics, Omniture, or others can view their traffic on those mediums and confirm that all is well with their Google Shopping listings.
CPC Strategy was founded by former employees of the comparison shopping engines and understands first hand what it takes to manage a successful comparison shopping campaign. You can check out our webpage at www.cpcstrategy.com. Don’t hesitate to Contact us to find out how we can make the shopping engines work for you.
Categories: Google, Google Base/Shopping Tags:
Google eCommerce Marketing Tools Cheat Sheet
Posted by Nii Ahene - January 14, 2010 at 7:28 pm
We often get questions from merchants about the many services offered by Google to drive traffic and sales to their eCommerce websites. Due to the multitude of offerings and similar names making sense of Google’s major marketing channels can be a challenge to the casual observer. Below you’ll find CPC Strategy’s breakdown of Google’s product marketing tools as well as links to the Google page were you can find out more information about the service.
Google Adwords
Google Adwords is Google’s PPC program that allows merchants to create keyword and site-targeted advertising campaigns on both search result pages and websites participating in Google’s Adsense program. Advertisers are charged on a per click basis (usually), and are in control of where and how often their ad is displayed using Google’s bidding interface.
Google Adwords
http://adwords.google.com/
Google Product Search/Base
Google Product Search, formerly known as Google Shopping or Froogle allows merchants to post products online to a product database. Merchants submit data feeds to Google, which Google ranks, scores, and skus up against other sellers based on item relevance. These listings appear both in Google’s Shopping Portal and on search result pages (Onebox). At the time of writing Google Product Search is open to all advertisers and there is no cost associated with submitting data feeds and receiving traffic from this service.
Google Merchant Center
http://www.google.com/merchants
Google Product Extensions
Google Product Extensions is a new feature which marries Google Adwords campaigns with Google Product Search listings. Google Product Extensions supplement a merchant’s regular Adwords search-campaign with titles, images, and prices from a merchant’s Google Product Search inventory. These inventory enhanced ads are displayed in the same right rail area of the search result page as text ads. Even though Google charges the same amount for clicks on Product Extension ads as they would for normal text ads we’ve seen an increase in click through rates for ads when the feature is enabled. This program is available to all US merchants who advertise on Adwords and send inventory files to Google Product Search.
More information about Google Product Extensions
Google Product Extensions Post
Google Product Listing Ads
Google Product Listing Ads are the newest addition to Google’s advertising suite and while they look similar to the ads surfaced through Google Product Extensions Google Product Listing Ads differ in two main ways. First, Google algorithmically chooses where, when, and how often these ads show up and second, the merchant does not pay for the click itself and instead pays only when a transaction is completed on the merchant page. Google Product Listing Ads are current in closed beta, but CPC Strategy will happily provide listing assistance once the product opens up to all advertisers.
More Information about Product Listing Ads
Google Product Listings Ads Post
CPC Strategy was founded by former employees of the comparison shopping engines and understands first hand what it takes to manage a successful comparison shopping campaign. You can check out our webpage at www.cpcstrategy.com. Don’t hesitate to Contact us to find out how we can make the shopping engines work for you.
Categories: Google, Google Base/Shopping Tags:
Listing Promotional Messages on the CSEs
Posted by Tien Nguyen - November 4, 2009 at 3:58 pm
One of the unique aspects of CSE management is figuring out how all the shopping engines’ unique features differentiate themselves from each other.
While columns such as product URLs, product names, descriptions, etc. are generally universal among them all, there are many discrepancies among them that a merchant should know about in order to maximize their listings on the engines.
Below we provide details on practices that will help best promote your products specifically for each engine:
Listing Nextag Sales Price:
- Include MSRP or regular price in feed
Nextag Free Shipping:
- If everything has free shipping, select “Always Free for All Items” in the “Manage Shipping Rules” section
- Otherwise include shipping costs in feed
Nextag Promotional Message:
- For a single message, bid at least $0.05 on the “Message” under “Manage Bids by Category”, then click “Set Marketing Message” and choose from the available templates
- To select different marketing messages by product, include a “Marketing Message” column in the feed and be sure to bid at least $0.05 on the “Message” for all products under “Manage Bids by Category”
Listing Free Shipping:
- Set column “Shipping Rate” to 0 in feed
Shopping.com Promotional Message:
- Include message in “Stock Description” column in feed.
- Free
- 100 character limit
Shopzilla Free Shipping:
- If shipping is free for all products, select “Free shipping for all products” under shipping information.
- If not, set rules through feed, column: “Shipping Cost”
Shopzilla Sales Price:
- Include “Original Price” & “Sale Price” columns in feed
- Be sure to select Contact Us in your Shopzilla login and notify your account manager that you’re adding a column; your listings will temporarily come down while they re-process your feed.
Shopzilla Coupon:
- Go to “Manage Listings”
- “Special Offers”
- Select from the available options
PriceGrabber Free Shipping:
- Set it under the column “shipping costs” within the feed
- In the login under “Your Account” it can be modified in “Shipping and Tax Info” (not available for all accounts)
PriceGrabber Coupon:
- All the info can be included in the feed using their coupon spec sheet.
Google Products Search Tax and Shipping:
-Add a column called “tax” in the format–Country:State:Percent: y/n shipping
So for example if a merchant is based in the United States, California, charges 8% tax, and offers free shipping, that column would read– US:CA:8:y
More info can be found here: http://www.google.com/support/merchants/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=160162
Become Promotional Message:
- Include desired text in feed
- Bid on desired categories in “Bids” tab
Become Sales Price:
- Include the following columns: “MSRP” and “Price”
Smarter Promotional Message:
- Have the two columns: “Regular Price” and “Sale Price”
- Go to “Extras” tab
- Select “Submit Coupons” and fill in appropriate fields
Yahoo Shopping Sales Price:
- Have the two columns: “price” and “sale-price”
Yahoo Shopping Free Shipping:
- Fill in the appropriate SKU with “0” in the column “shipping-price”
Pronto Sales Price:
- Include the columns: “Retail Price” and “Price”
CPC Strategy was founded by former employees of the comparison shopping engines and understands first hand what it takes to manage a successful comparison shopping campaign. You can check out our webpage at www.cpcstrategy.com. Don’t hesitate to Contact us to find out how we can make the shopping engines work for you.
Categories: Become, CSE Management, Google, Nextag, Pricegrabber, Pronto, Shopping.com, Shopzilla, Smarter.com, Uncategorized, Yahoo Shopping Tags:
