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Google Microformats Will Have Large Impact On Online Retail — Not All Good

Alan Rimm-Kaufman — Mon, 18 May 2009 11:01:13 +0000

Late last week, Google announced Rich Snippets, where site owners can use microformats to provide additional structured data to Google.

This is isn’t a big deal for online retail yet, but it will be, in the next 6 to 18 months.

Today, HTML markup is about how data should be presented. By tagging elements on a HTML page with standard class names, microformats are about what data mean. Microformats will form the foundation of “Web 3.0″, aka the Semantic Web.

Google is starting with microformats for people (hCard) and reviews (hReview).

It seems clear Google support for the SKU microformat (hProduct) is coming soon, as there’s already documentation for it on Google WebMaster Central.

What will this mean to online retailers long-term?

The first retailers to add hProduct tags to their product pages will enjoy an early sales advantage, as Google will present their products first because of the extra data.
The advantage will be short-lived, as large retailers and standard e-commerce platforms will quickly jump on the band wagon.
Retailers will chafe at the simplicity of the format. hProduct doesn’t encompass shipping, tax, bundled pricing, or even UPC. Argh. When Google miscategorizes or misprices your product atop their SERP, get ready for additional customer service calls.
hProduct markup is essentially a product data feed, albeit with limited fields. Google’s current product search hasn’t gained much traction, but widespread hProduct data will help Google disintermediate the shopping comparison engines.
Long term, hProduct markup will increase consumer perception of Google-as-store, eroding weaker retail brands (see “search engines atomize retailer brands”, halfway down this post.) Building a strong well-defined brand is key.
When Google presents more SKU-centric multi-merchant data on the top left of the page, paid search on the top right becomes more crucial to get your link in front of shoppers. The paid search core competencies –optimal bidding, extensive keywords, and solid “why-shop” copy — become even more important.

What should online retailers be doing about this today?

I’d recommend keeping a close eye for mentions of hProduct on the WebMaster Central Blog.

I’d also recommend planning to add hProduct tags to your SKU pages, probably by late ‘09 or early ‘10. (Here’s the link the Google hProduct documentation again.)

For better or worse, this is where online retail is heading, and your marketing and merchandising teams will benefit from being there at the beginning.

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FeedBurner, Google, And The 502 / 503 Error

Alan Rimm-Kaufman — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 04:48:13 +0000

Last week we transferred our FeedBurner account to Google and encountered some hiccups.

Here is Google’s FAQ on this migration, and here is an extremely helpful Google page providing known bugs and workarounds.

Q: What Feedburner bug did RKGblog encounter?

A: We got 502 and 503 errors on our primary RSS url, feeds.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog. We use a FeedBurner (FB) service called MyBrand to preserve our domain in our feed URL. If you are not using MyBrand (you should be), then migrating from old FB to the new Google account is just pushing one button. If you are using MyBrand, you also have to follow the instructions on this page on adding a CNAME so FB has DNS authority to serve that subdomain for you.

The bug is that the feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mybrand page doesn’t work as you’d expect. To make it to work, you first need to hit the deactivate button, then hit activate. Deactivation is the magic step. Be sure to note your feed-specific domain name(s) before deactivating, as doing so will clear the text field. Once you ‘deactivate’ and ‘reactivate’, add the CNAME as per the instructions, wait for the DNS to propagate, and flush your local DNS cache, all should be working.

Q: Why use FeedBurner at all?

A: I can think of eight reasons to use FB for RSS.

SmartFeed. This sends the right flavor of RSS based on the requester’s user agent string.
- Is this still relevant in 2009? Unsure.
BuzzBoost. This is a Recent Posts widget.
- Nice, but we’ve seen homepage loading delays because of this. We’ll be replacing the FB widget on our homepage with a static include, generated hourly by a trivial cron script.
Bandwidth. FB fetches RSS from your site when pinged, then FB handles all the requests for your feed from the outside world. Free bandwidth.
- Nice. Thanks, Google.
Adserving. You can use Feedburner/AdSense to insert ads into your feeds.
- We don’t put ads in our RSS. Thus, not relevant to us.
FeedBulletin. Provides a RSS feed on the fetch health of your feed.
- Useful. We could use our Nagios system to monitor our feed availability, but FeedBulletin/FeedMedic is already there.
Site analytics. FB used to provide very nice site analytics for blogs. They just dropped those in favor of Google Analytics.
- Sigh. I found the FB data, presentation, and UI far better than the GA replacement. I miss those clickable french fry charts.
Email. Feedburner can maintain an email list of people wishing read your RSS via email.
- Useful and appreciated. Be aware that migrating this list elsewhere could be difficult, as discussed here.
Subscriber counts. This was FB’s strength, imho. FB grabbed subscriber data from the user agent strings of the various ‘bots taking its feeds, then aggregated subscription and reach counts for each publisher, time period, and feed item. Rick Klau discussed FB data collection here. Note FB counts can be manipulated.
- While some suggest weak methods to approximate FB stats, I don’t know of any good alternative to FB for subscriber and reach data. Unfortunately, FB’s counts have been fluctuating wildly recently, causing some to question their usefulness.

Q: Why MyBrand? Why serve RSS from your own domain?

A: FB says MyBrand “allows publishers to showcase their feeds by serving them from their own domain.” While there may be slight branding benefit here, the key issue is transportability. If your subscribers are signed up through a FB url, you can’t easily change that without losing subscribers. By having your feed URL on your own domain, you can move on and off FB (or anywhere) as needed.

Every company with a blog or a RSS feed should ensure that their feed URL is on their own domain. No exceptions.

For example, RKGblog lives at feeds.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog. That looks like our servers, but we’ve delegated the feeds-dot subdomain to FB by setting a CNAME on our DNS machines. Requests for that URL go to FB servers, which return our cached content and tally our stats. You can see this by pinging feeds.rimmkaufman.com: the response comes back from ghs.l.google.com.

If we wanted, we could direct that URL back to our Wordpress RSS URL, taking FB out of the loop. Our subscribers wouldn’t notice any change.

Q: Do all Feedburner publishers have to migrate from old FeedBurner to the new Google-login Feedburner?

A: Yes. The switch is mandatory by Feb 28, 2009.

Q: Are RKGblog’s Feedburner subscriber and reach counts still fluctuating? Are they still half their prior levels?

A: As of 1/26/09, yes to both.

Q: Are there any good alternatives to Feedburner?

A: I don’t know of any myself, but I’m not a RSS expert. Please comment below with suggestions. I’m especially interested in alternative feed analytics options.

Q: What is the DNS cache, and how does one flush it?

A: DNS maps names like ‘www.rimmkaufman.com’ to IP address like ‘216.197.64.53′. Your local machine keeps a cache to save time. When working with DNS, you need to clear your cache to see your changes immediately. To dump the DNS cache on a windows box, pull up a DOS window (Start > Run > cmd) and enter ‘net stop dnscache’ then enter ‘net start dnscache’. On a linux box, use ‘/etc/init.d/nscd restart’.

Update 1/30/09

FB seems to be working fine. Our feeds appear stable. Reach and subs counts are still half their early January levels. Suspect the halving will be the new normal.

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Feedburner To Google Account Transfer Considered Harmful: We Advise Waiting

Alan Rimm-Kaufman — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 12:18:52 +0000

As of today, Jan 23 2009, there remain significant bugs in the Feedburner to Google Account transfer process.

We here at RKG hit the “migrate” button too quickly. Now have some heavy lifting to get our RSS working again. (Perhaps we’ll drop FB until it works?) We’re not alone: the phrase “google feedburner transfer broken” returns 37K hits on Google today.

Apologies to all our readers experiencing disruptions due to FB/Google server problems. What a mess.

Feedburner users: we recommend delaying this migration as long as possible, until the process works.

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Did Your RSS Counts Drop After Migrating to Google Accounts?

Alan Rimm-Kaufman — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 13:58:12 +0000

Last Friday we moved our RSS from Feedburner to the new Google account platform (see Transferring FeedBurner Accounts to Google Accounts FAQ).

Since then, our subscriber counts are down 50% and our reach numbers down 60%. We’re trying to determine if this is normal or if something broke.

Did you experience any issues reaching our feeds over the last week?
If so, thanks for describing in a comment.
Did your site experience RSS declines after switching?
If so, thanks for sharing in a comment.

Heads up: If your site uses FeedBurner, you too must make this switch by 2/28/09.

Sigh. I liked the old reports better too.

Update:

Feedburner Needs To Get It Together, TechCrunch

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On Writing Effective Blog Post Titles

Alan Rimm-Kaufman — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 09:13:29 +0000

Here are the titles of the 30 most-clicked RKG blog feed items over the last two plus years.

Sorry for all those ellipses. This is a scrape from Feedburner via the Feed Stats -> Item Use -> Show Stats For All Time screen, and FB truncates titles on that page. (Anyone know how to export such FB reports cleanly?)

The list is skewed towards newer posts: our subscriber counts have been growing, so more recent posts have had the advantage of more potential readers.

These 30 may or may not be our best posts, whatever “best” means. These are the top 30 post titles which enticed subscribers to read further.

Note you still get a sense of each post even from these truncated titles. I don’t think that is an accident. I’d suggest “left-loaded” titles have a better shot at engaging folks blitzing through their feed readers. Ditto titles containing proper nouns and numbers, and titles which entice or promise.

Also worth mentioning that the Feedburner Top Items report is quite different from the Top Pages report. Top Pages indicates which pages pull natural search traffic. Top Items indicates what interests our subscribers, and is thus more interesting to us.

Thank you for reading rkgblog!

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RSS Is About Content, Not Presentation

Alan Rimm-Kaufman — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 11:05:17 +0000

Last week we thought it would it be interesting to embed an AJAX poll in the body of a blog post, Selling Via Content: What’s Your Opinion of Dell Lounge?

We forgot that the majority of our readers follow this blog via RSS feeds or via email. Feedburner rendered the poll as a simple unordered HTML list, stripping the interactivity. We also used a smidge of CSS to hide the poll title auto-generated by Democracy. CSS doesn’t reach the feed, so that minor tweak was also lost.

Neither change mattered in this case, but the marketing takeaway is clear: RSS is about content, not presentation. Keep the markup in your feeds simple. Avoid embedded code. Make it easy for your content to fly free.

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45 Web Marketing Ideas For Online Retailers (Video)

Alan Rimm-Kaufman — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 11:44:49 +0000

Thanks for all the warm feedback from folks who attended my NEMOA talk last week! Encouraged by the comments, I decided to record it yesterday. The recorded video isn’t as good as it was live — better flow and energy that morning in Cambridge with all the great NEMOA folks in the room — but hopefully still useful.

Here’s the video:

video link

Here’s the page of links mentioned in the video: rimmkaufman.com/nemoa2008

This talk does not have any grand unifying theme. Rather, it is a random grab-bag of Marketing 2.0 ideas related to online retailing that I find cool. The intended audience was catalogers, so some of the topics or suggestions may be less novel to folks hanging out on the cutting edge of the blogosphere.

I recorded the talk and optimized the Camtasia recordings for Youtube. Boof — some sections were just a smidgen longer than YouTube’s 10 minute rule. So instead I put them on Yahoo’s JumpCut. That’s why the video looks like five sections spliced, and why the image quality isn’t great — it seems optimizing production for YouTube is less optimal for JumpCut.

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Google’s Rick Klau Discusses RSS and Recent Changes To Google’s Indexation Algorithm

Alan Rimm-Kaufman — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 19:44:30 +0000

Rick Klau is a really sharp web marketer.

Rick now works on content acquisition for Google, having joined Google as part of their FeedBurner acquisition last year.

Just before the holidays, Rick spent some time chatting with me about RSS, online reputation monitoring, and recent changes to the Google search index algorithm.

Here’s the podcast and transcript from our conversation on December 19th, 2007.

Listen to podcast: rkgblog-interview-rick-klau.mp3

Rick Klau Interview: Transcript

Alan Rimm-Kaufman: I’m honored to be here today with Rick Klau of Google.

Rick Klau: Alan, it’s great to be here, thanks so much for including me.

Alan: Thanks so much for taking the time. Now, over at Google, Rick, your title is Strategic Partner Development for Content Acquisition. Can you tell us a bit what that means, what you do at Google, and how you ended up there?

Rick: Absolutely. I’ll start in reverse since it makes a little bit more sense to explain the title once you know how I got here. I joined Google about seven months ago as a result of the FeedBurner acquisition. As you know, I had run the publisher’s services group at FeedBurner for a little over two years, and when Google acquired FeedBurner, I ended up in the content acquisition group and was asked to move out to our Mountain View headquarters.

Content acquisition, we are, broadly speaking, the group responsible for acquiring all of the non-crawlable content for distribution throughout Google’s services. So if you think about satellite imagery, aerial photographs, business listings, you name it; all of the information that the search engine can’t get on it’s own, we’re part of the group that works with content partners to make sure we get access to that information and make sure it’s easily distributed.

My role specifically, strategic partner development, is one of negotiating partnerships with our content partners and seeking out opportunities where there’s content we either don’t currently have or don’t have completely, and making sure that we work well with those partners. Interestingly also, remain focused on FeedBurner, mostly in looking for ways to add value to existing RSS and Adam feeds, and try and fit those into the context of my role here in content acquisitions.

So I think one of my focuses for 2008 will be finding ways to make RSS its own content acquisition vehicle for the hundreds of thousands of publishers that use FeedBurner today.

Alan: I’m sure most of our listeners are well acquainted with FeedBurner, but for those that might not be; can you give just a quick synopsis of what FeedBurner does and its role in the web ecosystem?

Rick: Certainly. We, prior to the acquisition, we were the largest manager of RSS feeds in the world. What that means is we published feeds on behalf of publishers and provide a suite of analytics to help publishers, whether they be bloggers, podcasters, or major media organizations like Dow Jones, USA Today, and Ziff Davis and others use FeedBurner both as an analytics provider so that they can get better insight into how their feeds are consumed, but also an optimization layer to provide integration into their RSS content. And then finally an advertising layer where we built out an ad server to monetize the distribution of their syndicated content.

Alan: Neat stuff. At an earlier show this year, I heard you tell a story about the “boy was I dumb” post by Leo LaPorte that nearly sunk FeedBurner in your early days?

Rick: Well, there was certainly some fear. You’re referring to what at the time was well known, I think fortunately memories fade on some of these things. But yeah, I was interviewed by a journalist well over two years ago now, as podcasting was just starting off. And at the time, Leo, a well known tech commentator, had a podcast running through FeedBurner. And Leo hadn’t realized he had activated a service within FeedBurner that made his data public.

And I shared his data with the journalist, knowing that he had made that setting public, and when the data came out, Leo was upset with the fact that we had, by his estimation, violated some terms of service. We hadn’t, we thought we’d been pretty clear in how the service was set up, and what the settings were. But rather than turn it into a finger pointing session of say, “Hey, Leo made a mistake,” that wasn’t going to solve the problem.

There were hundreds of comments on that initial post that he made on his site, and as you would imagine, when something like that happens there were lots of other posts. We felt at FeedBurner that our business was contingent on earning and maintaining the trust of our growing number of publishers, so we –

Alan: How did you get, sorry to interrupt –

Rick: No, go ahead.

Alan: But how did the management team, at that point you were a relatively modest sized start up, and you were facing this tremendous PR disaster, how did you become aware of it, how did you respond, how did you know what was going on in the blogosphere being spoken about you guys?

Rick: Well, it’s actually pretty funny. We were a small group, we were about a dozen, maybe 15 of us at the time. And it just happened to be late in the summer when I was taking a weekend vacation with my in-laws at a little hotel on a lake in Wisconsin; our CEO was at a wedding; our COO was visiting family; so none of us were actually home. And I got an email from a friend of mine on my BlackBerry, telling me that there was this post at Leo’s website.

So we immediately went into a distributed damage control mode, where we were monitoring Technorati, we were monitoring other services that were crawling RSS feeds at the time and looking for real time mentions of this particular post, and then we took it upon ourselves to divide and conquer.

Each of us was monitoring different threads in different places, making sure to leave comments where appropriate, answer emails as they were coming into our work queue; there were five of us that were really trying to shoulder that burden collectively. We estimate we left well over a hundred comments that night, and answered an equal number of emails that night and the following Sunday.

The end result was that by Monday, when the rest of the world was waking up and getting into work and seeing this minor dust storm that had erupted, the end result was not a, wow, look at the mistake FeedBurner made, by then, Leo had already acknowledged that it was something he’d done, not something we had done, and effectively recanted the initial accusation.

All of the attendant discussion that had happened throughout the blogosphere had clarifications that pointed out what happened, why it happened, what we were doing as a result. And much of the what I would consider mainstream coverage of this was instead about what a wonderful job FeedBurner had done monitoring discussions of our brand instead of, wow, what a scary privacy issue this might have been.

So instead of it being a risk or doing any damage to FeedBurner, it ended up being quite a positive thing. And then, hilariously, about a month ago, Leo and I ran into each other at a conference, ended up having a beer together and we had a great evening. And we both were laughing about that event from two years ago, and today both can point to how different communications are in an age when conversations are effectively instantaneous.

Alan: I think that’s a huge takeaway message for anyone responsible for an online brand.

Rick: It hopefully is, and I’ve tried to share with people, it could have been, it would have been very easy to get extremely personal very quickly and be upset with Leo; but you know what, we all have blogs, and our blogs are our outlet. So for him, he felt he’d been wronged, and so it was only natural that that would be where he would start the conversation.

We don’t have the ability to pick and choose where those conversations happen; I think marketers more generally, to extrapolate this more broadly, they don’t get to control those conversations either. But it is absolutely incumbent upon them to use the tools at their disposal to get engaged and monitor those discussions and participate.

Alan: Good stuff. On the RSS theme, such great marketing channels such as email and banners and so forth have been almost destroyed by over-advertising and by spam. Will RSS meet the same fate?

Rick: I sure hope not. I think, clearly we’re at Google, which is a company which has managed to support an ever-growing ecosystem of publishers and content sources; where advertising isn’t seen as overly intrusive, but is in fact conducive to the production of content and the distribution of content.

With regards to RSS, though, I think there are a couple of things that will help avoid some prior mistakes; you mentioned email as one, certainly where spam has become a challenge. And that is, it’s part technical, I think it’s also part user behavior.

On the technical side, RSS is fundamentally different in that the user is in complete control of the receipt of the content. Unlike email, where the user has to part with their email address and then trust the publisher not to a) sell that email address to someone else, or b) start distributing commercial content to that email address.

In the case of RSS, the user gives up nothing. They go to Google reader, they say I want to subscribe to Alan’s blog; and if Alan starts putting content into his blog that that user doesn’t want, they unsubscribe. Alan has no opportunity to continue to communicate with them ever again. So I think there’s a fundamental difference there that helps that user adoption, where there are very few risks to that channel of communication being hijacked.

As a result, I think that it is increasingly a channel of distribution that publishers large and small are looking to as a way of building up a loyal communication vehicle with a growing audience of people. And to the extent that they do that, they know that the people who are opting in really do so at their discretion, so it’s up to the publisher then to maintain control of that channel and not abuse that trust. Because it’s very easy for the recipient of that content to shut it down.

We’ve seen that happen time and again, when publishers abruptly change the content in the feed, or they change the balance so there’s ads then content. You see an almost immediate impact, where, once the signal to noise ratio is out of whack, users leave. And thanks to services like FeedBurner, publishers know when that departure happens.

Part of what we like to think we do is give publishers visibility to that audience and control very cleanly the balance of monetization and content, so that they can monetize that distribution without abusing.

Alan: Thanks.

Changing gears a bit, there was an interesting post yesterday on the Google webmaster central blog post of yesterday, in which you guys announced that RSS and Atom feeds will be coming out of the broad Google search index.

Can you explain what that means to us folks?

Rick: Absolutely. This is something that I think at every search engine conference for the last two years, certainly well ahead of Google acquiring FeedBurner, I would get asked to talk at every presentation. Does publishing an RSS feed create a risk of duplicate content, do I risk getting penalized if my feed shows up in Google alongside my website.

Google has always worked very hard to insure that we know where the authoritative source of content is, and it wasn’t often that a feed would compete with the website as the authoritative location of where that content lives. But nevertheless, there were certain edge cases where that did happen. And the harder that the search quality team looked at feeds and looked at the feed content that was being indexed in the search engine; it was almost always the case that the feed content was a corollary to an existing webpage or an existing website.

In other words, there were very few cases where the feed had content that didn’t live somewhere on the web. As a result, we made the decision, and actually started doing this a couple months ago, and just this week documented what we did and why we did it; we have removed feeds from the index entirely, with one exception, and that is if you’re publishing a podcast, there are many cases where podcasts do not have a corresponding web page. In those cases where feeds have – media enclosures is the term for them, the media file, whether it’s an audio or video file – we will continue to index and include podcasts in the Google.com index. But for text feeds, those are no longer being indexed in the search index at all.

Alan: So since most bloggers write to their blog, and that generates an HTML page as well as a feed, there’s no worries, is that correct? Because the content’s actually ending up on a website page somewhere which Google can find?

Rick: That’s absolutely right. And that’s true whether you’re a blogger or whether you’re Wall Street Journal publishing a feed that is a component and compliment to your main, the latest news in the financial market.

Alan: So it’s a pretty small, specialized set of people that this might affect, and the general bloggers have no worries that their content will vanish from Google?

Rick: In fact, it’s the opposite. What this insures is that the content will be authoritative and will be the reference point for the index points; searchers too. The feed becomes a mechanism for distributing content to end points, through services like iGoogle and Google reader and many of the other hundreds of RSS readers out in the wild. And searchable through Google blog search, but there will no longer be a risk to a publisher that, by publishing one post, which in the case of most blogs ends up in a feed and on a website; that that would ever create a situation in which there duplicate content possibilities.

Alan: Thanks for soothing the nerves of millions of bloggers out there.

Wrapping up, what’s the most important tip for online marketers to know about RSS?

Rick: I think that the key, especially as we move into 2008, retailers, online marketers should look at RSS as more than a distribution vehicle to end users; it should be a tool for reusing and truly syndicating our content into multiple places. So if you think about a feed as a pointer to the latest content on that marketer, that content can show up in an animated ad, which will keep their creative, always up to date. It can show up on their website, it can show up in their email signature files; so they get to have one piece of content get reused in a multiplicity of ways. It’s a very efficient model, and one that I think we will see more and more marketers come to really embrace in the year to come.

Alan: Rick, thank you so much for being generous with your advice and your time this afternoon. Appreciate it.

Rick: Alan, it’s been a pleasure to talk to you again, have a wonderful, as we wrap up here, wonderful end of the year.

rkgblog-interview-rick-klau.mp3

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CoComment

Alan Rimm-Kaufman — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 08:50:34 +0000

Last week, Rick Klau of FeedBurner gave a fantastic talk about RSS and the social web at Darden’s Online Marketing Update (shameless plug: course will be offered again in the spring). We’re still working on permission to share the video of Rick’s talk online.

“People thought FeedBurner was a much larger company than we really were, or thought that I had assistants posting in my name,” said Klau. “We were able to respond to just about everything said about us across the blogosphere, and keep on top of all those conversations.”

Reading and responding to blog comments is a critical aspect of brand management.

One of the great tools Rick mentioned in passing was CoComment, a browser add-in that tracks responses to the comments you leave on other people’s blogs.

CoComment aggregates your comment threads, and, best of all, makes that aggregation available as an RSS feed. This lets you monitor comment threads from within your favorite RSS reader.

Installation is super easy — I had an account created and the FireFox add-on installed before Rick had finished Q&A.

Worth checking out: CoComment

Leigh Vosler: 22 Tips For Optimizing Comparison Shopping Engine Feeds

Alan Rimm-Kaufman — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 11:54:22 +0000

Last Thursday at the Shop.org merchandising conference in San Diego I participated on a data feed marketing best practices panel. All of the panelists offered great tips during our lively discussion, but Leigh Vosler from Sierra Trading Post went way above the call of duty and prepared excellent written notes as well.

Leigh’s graciously allowed me to post her 22 suggestions here.

Leigh cautions: These optimization strategies are suggestions and do not guarantee success. These are data feed optimization tactics I have used or others have suggested and which I think everyone should at least think about, if not test.

Leigh’s Tips for Cost Savings

Manage Bids either by category or by product
Remove poor performing/converting products
Remove sold out and out of stock products
Refresh and update/FTP data feed daily (if possible)
Daily click through random links [yours obviously] to insure the shopping engines are displaying your data correctly and to ensure links go to correct landing page.

Leigh’s Tips for Improving Conversion

Make sure you have the budget to keep your store running 24/7.
Use the MPN or UPC code to better compare with other merchants.
Write a product name that identifies the product by the common usage name (pants not dungarees, shirts not tops).
Request the product categories from each of the shopping engines. Take the time to map your products to the CSE categories for quicker and better data matching
Ensure your store profile is completed fully and up to date. Name, location, phone numbers, customer service hours & contact info, shipping information, return policy, etc
Request the feed specs from the shopping site, then include all relevant fields and product information in your data feed.
Use any and all optional relevant data fields. Don’t forget to include ALL possible product attributes — color, size, material, style, model, UPC
If you change your data feed, contact the shopping site, as a change may cause the feed to error out.
Include a tracking code or mechanism in your data feed to better understand conversion. If possible track at the product level.
Watch & Budget for the Q4 CPC price increase which occurs on nearly all engines.
If your data feed utility or 3rd party has the capability to add a unique column advertising discounts, sales and special events, include this column when building the feed. The column may remain dormant part of the year, but it is a revenue generator when you are offering something special. 2 -3 day shipping, 20% off sale, Clearance, Free Shipping etc

Leigh’s Tips For Evaluation and analysis

ROAS is not important if you are bidding too low to be found on the engine
Optimize / tweak the feed weekly if necessary
Compare both titles & prices to other merchants within the shopping engine
Change CPC within categories if possible and review sales / conversions
Manage high $$ products different than low $$ products due to ROAS impact.
Track all sales at product level if possible.

Many thanks, Leigh!

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