Google

Google eCommerce Marketing Tools Cheat Sheet

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

Listing Promotional Messages on the CSEs

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”

“Bing Cashback” is the New “Live Cashback”

Microsoft has just officially launched its new search engine, Bing, which some facetiously say stands for either “But It’s Not Google” or, as a reciprocal acronym, “Bing, It’s Not Google”.

Whatever it may or may not be shorthand for, Microsoft has officially thrown on its gloves and challenging Google at what it does best, search.

Whether or not users will begin to adapt to the new engine is something that only time will tell, so for now we’re going to focus on the shopping experience it provides to users.

First things first, directly on the Bing homepage is a link for Shopping, which didn’t exist before when it was called Live (and currently exists on Google).

Clicking on the tab takes a user, appropriately enough, to the Bing Shopping page, where as we’ve discussed previously, highlights Cashback toward the top.

But now by virtue of the shopping page receiving exposure via the home page should certainly increase the amount of users who actually enter the shopping page and use it as a platform the way they’re using Google Product Search.

We’ve certainly noticed a steady increase in our merchants revenue via the Cashback platform as of late–though it’s hard to tell if it’s directly because of this change.

As with before as well, a search that Microsoft recognizes as a popular product search will be highlighted with popular brands, and price ranges that a user can click through (similar to Google’s “one box” feature):

We will continue to monitor if user adoption of Cashback continues to increase as users begin to adopt Bing either plain curiosity, or because their shopping section is now directly on the home page–or simply by the natural increase of online retail in general.

We here at CPC Strategy though certainly approve of any methods that make the online shopping experience that much easier.