[livetech]

Guide For Making The Most of Google Products

If you are running an e-commerce site, one of the easiest and quickest ways to promote it is via Google Products. Google Products (formally Froogle) is a large price comparison site with free listings. It is remarkably easy and free to get your products listed on Google Products, but people have problems to even beginning getting their feed listed on Google Products.

To begin with, Google Products are generated via Google Base feeds. Google Base handles a number of different feeds for different areas of Google (for example, did you know there was a Google Personals that takes it data from dating sites?!?). I only have experience with Google Products, so that's what I'm focussing on.

How to get your Product Feed Listed
To begin with, you need to create a feed. Now the long way to do it is by doing it by hand with the following structure (this is taken from one of our Actinic Stores - Boutique Perfumes:-

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:g="http://base.google.com/ns/1.0"
xmlns:c="http://base.google.com/cns/1.0">
<channel>
<title>Boutique Perfumes</title>
<description>Boutique Perfumes</description>
<link>www.boutiqueperfumes.co.uk</link>

<item>
   <g:id>015253</g:id>
   <title>Annick Goutal Ce Soir ou Jamais For Her</title>
   <link>http://www.boutiqueperfumes.co.uk/acatalog/annick-goutal-ce-soir-ou-jamais.html</link>
   <description>Eau de Parfum Spray 50 ml</description>
   <g:image_link>http://www.boutiqueperfumes.co.uk/acatalog/50ml_generic_spray.gif</g:image_link>
   <g:price>54.00</g:price>
   <g:expiration_date>2009-03-27</g:expiration_date>
   <g:currency>GBP</g:currency>
   <g:brand>For Her - 015253 - Eau de Parfum Spray 50 ml</g:brand>
   <g:condition>new</g:condition>
   <g:product_type>fragrance, skincare</g:product_type>
</item>

</channel>

I have separated out the "item" tag. What this does is that for every item within the store, you need to create a separate item with the tags listed above. It is quite a long process, though if you do a google search for your e-commerce solution, you can find a google product feed generator (Actinic has one built in, Zen Cart Users can use this one).

Optimise your feed
A quick run down on the tags:

title - title of the item or shop
description - description of the item or shop
link - URL link for the item or shop
g:image_link - Image of the product
g:id - unique id for your product. THIS MUST NOT CHANGE BETWEEN UPLOADS, so when you re-upload your feed, you must keep each product the same. I believe this is for tracking purposes in the backend
g:price - Price
g:expiration_date - The day when the feed will expire. Depending on how often you change your shop, this could be sooner or later
g:currency - Currency
g:brand - Brand Associated with the Product
g:condition - Condition of the item
g:product_type - product tags relating to the item in question

From the above, I find that the best to optimise are the titles, descriptions and brand. For both the shop and the items. For brand awareness I genereally keep the shop title the same though, as the keyword benefit is negligable.

So, for the title and description, I would use general SEO rules of making them keyword rich.

For the Brand, I would put the brand of the product in there. This shows that if people search for the brand in the google products directory, or search for another product by the same brand, my product will show up.

So, using the example above, I'd modify the feed (using a text editor) like so:-

 <?xml version="1.0"?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:g="http://base.google.com/ns/1.0"
xmlns:c="http://base.google.com/cns/1.0">
<channel>
<title>Boutique Perfumes</title>
<description>Boutique Perfumes - Buy Annick Goutal Perfumes, Fragrances and Skincare Products Online</description>
<link>www.boutiqueperfumes.co.uk</link>

<item>
   <g:id>015253</g:id>
   <title>Annick Goutal Ce Soir ou Jamais For Her</title>
   <link>http://www.boutiqueperfumes.co.uk/acatalog/annick-goutal-ce-soir-ou-jamais.html</link>
   <description>Annick Goutal Ce Soir ou Jamais For Her Eau de Parfum Spray 50 ml</description>
   <g:image_link>http://www.boutiqueperfumes.co.uk/acatalog/50ml_generic_spray.gif</g:image_link>
   <g:price>54.00</g:price>
   <g:expiration_date>2009-03-27</g:expiration_date>
   <g:currency>GBP</g:currency>
   <g:brand>Annick Goutal</g:brand>
   <g:condition>new</g:condition>
   <g:product_type>fragrance, skincare</g:product_type>
</item>

</channel>

There are tools that can automate much of the process, but it's still worthwhile to go through the feed and manually check it.

Upload the Product Feed
Now comes the uploading part. Uploading will make it appear in Google Base, however it may still not appear in Google Products. There are many pitfalls to uploading which I go through on my blog here, however the basic pitfalls are:

- You didn't specify a price
- You specified a location for your shop (some feed generators do this! This will appear before the first item definitiion)
- You didn't register your feed as a product
- You uploaded to the wrong area:

US Products: base.google.com, prices in US$, descriptions in English, products must ship throughout US
UK Prodcuts: base.google.co.uk, prices in GB£, descriptions in English, products must ship throughout UK
German Prodcuts: base.google.de, prices in €Euros, descriptions in German, products must ship throughout Germany

Even if your product appears in Google Base, it may not appear in Google Products if you follow these rules, do double check.

Analyse
Finally, Google Provides basic levels of impressions and clicks, so you can track how your products are doing. So you can hopefully be able to see what products are being successful, and what aren't, and re-optimise accordingly.