Have you noticed lately that the top half of the search results on Google for product searches are dominated by ads? And not just any ads. While regular text ads still appear as the first few results, Product Listing Ads (PLA) also appear, along with Shopping results all above the organic results.
If you sell any products through your website, even if you have good organic rankings, you need to properly set up product feeds to allow your products to appear in the shopping results (free) and in the PLA (paid) to gain as much real estate as possible on searches related to your products.
There is still a lot of opportunity with PLA, as many companies aren’t participating yet. Generally I only see large brands using PLA. This isn’t because PLA are more expensive or exclusive to these big sites (they aren’t).
I think it’s because people either haven’t taken the time to set up their feeds properly or because they are confused by the process. My goal is to persuade you to try PLA and to make the process more clear for you.
Even though I’m a PPC gal, part one of this series will just focus on setting up your product data feed to get your products listed in Google’s shopping results. Once you have that part done, setting up PLA only takes a few more steps. We’ll focus on that process in part two of the series.
Where Will My Products Be Displayed?
Google Product Search
If you click on a shopping result from a search results page or search directly from google.com/shopping, you will see results that are driven by product feeds submitted to Google by sellers. You do not have to pay to have your products shown here, but you do have to optimize your feed, get (real) positive reviews, and offer competitive pricing to rank.
These “free” shopping results are as free as the regular organic results — you have to put time and resources into properly optimizing to compete. This post will discuss how to properly set up and submit your product feed. For more information on optimization for Google Product organic ranking factors, see this post.
Google Product Listing Ads
Product Listing Ads (PLA) are to product search as regular AdWords ads are to organic search. PLA are also a great way to get pictures of your products on the search results page if you aren’t ranking well organically in Google Products.
If you have a unique product or something that is very eye-catching, Product Listing Ads may be much more effective than regular text ads — though I recommend running both ad types as PLA aren’t displayed for all searches. Part two of this series will focus on setting up PLA after you’ve submitted your product feed.
As I mentioned, there’s still a lot of opportunity here, even in markets where companies are using product feeds or PLA. For instance, to continue with the tea theme, while many retailers are featuring teapots, none are featuring loose leaf teas. This demonstrates a great example for Teavana.com which has ads in 1st position for both teapots and loose leaf tea searches. If they were to add PLA for their loose leaf teas, they may see a dramatic increase in CTR and (hopefully) sales.
Sounds Great. How Do I Get In?
The first step is to set up your Google Merchant Center if you don’t already have one. Google Merchant Center is simply the place where you will upload your product feeds and see data related to them. There are other features available in Merchant Center, such as e-commerce search for your site and Google Checkout, which you may choose to use after you are familiar with the service.
For now, simply sign in to your Google account (use the one you use for AdWords) from the Merchant Center page. You will be asked to fill in your account information. You don’t have to do that now, but you will want to before you upload your feeds. You will also need to verify ownership of your url by placing a snippet of code on your site before you can use Merchant Center, just like you have to do with some other Google products. Now you’re ready to create your product data feed.
What is a Data Feed & How Do I Create One?
A data feed is simply a file that contains pertinent information about your products. If you have a large number of products or if you are more technically inclined, you can use an xml file to submit your feed. If you don’t have many products or do not have the ability to create an xml file, you can create a data feed in Excel or with a Google Doc spreadsheet.
This template has the standard columns (fields) required and recommended for all data feeds. Additional fields are required if you are selling clothing/apparel or media. You can learn about the requirements for each field here.
Some fields have very specific requirements that you will want to pay close attention to. If you don’t fill out all of the fields properly, your feed may not validate. Even if your feed does validate, your products may not be shown in the Shopping results and your PLA may not display. Make sure to review all of the requirements, but pay special attention to these fields:
- id: This field must be unique for each product. Even if you submit more than one feed, you cannot use the same id for another product in another feed.
- title: This will be displayed to users, so it should be compelling and descriptive. But, it cannot include marketing copy such as “free shipping.”
- description: This field is displayed in the shopping search results, so it should be written with the buyer in mind. But, you must follow Google’s editorial guidelines closely.
- product_type: This field is used to classify and categorize your products. You will use Google’s category taxonomy to list all of the categories your product fits within.
- link: If you want to use utm parameters to track performance in Google Analytics, you will need to append the urls in this field with your desired parameters.
- image_link: This is the image that will be displayed with your listing, so you want to use clear, compelling images. Also, if you offer products in multiple colors or styles, use an image that reflects the correct product color or style for that listing to increase your click-through rate.
- expiration_date: If your products are only available for a limited time, the expiration date field can be used to automatically remove products from the search results when they are no longer available. By default, products expire after 30 days. You cannot use this field to extend that period. You will need to update your feed at least once a month to ensure consistent inclusion.
There are also some fields that are very helpful to retailers such as the sale_price andsale_price_effective_date fields. Using these two fields, you can schedule sales so your prices are automatically updated when sales begin and end.
The shipping and shipping_weight fields are only required if you do not have flat-fee shipping for all products. If you do, you can set this in your Google Merchant Center settings and do not have to include these fields. You can include this standard shipping information in your Merchant Center settings and override it with product-specific shipping information in your feed on a case-by-case basis.
The tax field is flexible and can accommodate very complex tax structures if needed. If your tax structure is simple, you can enter it in your Merchant Account settings. This field is only required in your feed if you want to override those Merchant Center settings. Make sure you include tax information in at least one of these two places. If you do not, your products will not display.
Once you have all of your product information in your spreadsheet, save it as a tab delimited .txt file. If you have multiple feeds, make sure to name the file something that will identify which feed it is.
Uploading Your Feed
Hop back over to your Merchant Center account and click on Data Feeds from the left navigation. Click the New Data Feed button. Here you are simply telling Google that you are going to submit a feed. Choose the country in which you want your products to display (you must submit a feed for each individual country because shipping and tax information will most likely be different).
Choose googlebase as the format and enter the name of your .txt file. Click on the manual upload link and upload your .txt feed file. Google will now process and test your feed. Depending on the size of your file, this can take a while. If you only have a few products, it happens very quickly.
Click back to your dashboard to check the status of your upload. Next to the file you just uploaded you will see a linked status. You can click on that link to get details about the feed validation. If you have any errors, fix them and re-upload your file. Once your feed is validated, it can take up to 24 hours for your products to start appearing in the search results.
Once they do, you’ll want to do some quality control to ensure all of your products are being included. You can see all of your products that are appearing in the search results by going to http://www.google.com/products?authorid=[your Account ID]. You can find your account ID along the top of any page within your Merchant Center account. If your products aren’t displaying, check these common reasons.
You can also click on the Products link in the left-side navigation within Merchant Center to see the status of each product. If you have more than 10,000 products, this page will display 10,000 random products. You will need to search for specific products to see their status. The list of possible statuses and their definitions can be found here.
Updating Your Feed
If your products or prices change frequently, you’ll want to upload a new feed each time there are changes. You can schedule the feed upload within the data feeds section of Merchant Center by clicking the create schedule link. In order to schedule the feed update, your feed file will need to be hosted on a url that Google can access. It can be password protected so the file is private.
If your products or prices do not change frequently, you can simply schedule the feed to update monthly so your products don’t expire after the 30-day standard expiration. Or, you can manually upload the feed once a month. If you forget to update your feed, your products will expire after 30 days and you will stop receiving traffic.
Tracking Performance
We’ll get deeper into monitoring and optimizing later in the series, but you should begin properly tracking performance now. Within Merchant Center, you can click on the Performance link in the left navigation to view impressions and clicks for each product. To get more useful information, you will want to either use utm parameters in the links in your product data feed or set up a filter in Analytics for referrals that include google.com/products.
Stay tuned for part two of this series where we will discuss the steps required to set up Product Listing Ads now that you have a working product feed.
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