Retail Performance Marketing - The Mercent Blog

Google Product Search Update: Google Merchant Center In / Google Base Out

In an effort provide a better optimized experience specific for retail merchants; Google has decided to move product feed support for Google Product Search from Google Base to their newly created Google Merchant Center. This means all Mercent Customers will start using the Merchant Center to upload and manage product listings instead of Google Base. Google Base will continue to exist, but will focus on other items, such as travel, real estate and finance.

If you've been using Google Base to submit your product shopping feeds to GPS then your account has already been transferred. Just sign in to the Merchant Center with the same Google Account you've been using for Google Base, and all your account information, data feeds, product listings, including your feed schedule and FTP information will already be setup in the new Google Merchant Center.

Using the Google Base API to manage your product listings will remain the same.

Google has written some new terms of service for the Merchant Center.

For the most part the new Merchant Center is very similar to the old Google Base interface. One exciting change is the new Dashboard that welcomes you when you first sign in the Merchant Center. The new Summary Dashboard will provide you a snapshot overview of your product listing performance and feed status. As you may remember previously you had check many pages in Google Base to get this information.

The only thing missing from the new Dashboard is the Error & Suggestion Messages found on the Feed Status Summary page.

One other UI change will be the addition of a yellow Shout Box at the top of the Dashboard page that will bring you important announcements from the Google Merchant Center team.

Check out our Flickr page for more Screen Captures of the New Merchant Center.

Google has also launched a new Blog and a new Help Center to help support the Merchant Center.

As an approved Google Product Search Partner we were able to chat with Google a few weeks back about the launch of and future plans for Merchant Center. Google says, at first there will be no substantive changes to their data feed specifications or tools around Google Product Search and the Merchant Center. In the mean time they will be looking for ways to improve their support for Merchants. Google shared with us that their long term plan is to not only provide additional capabilities & tools for merchants but also build support for and focus on other Google products within Merchant Center. One thing they specifically mentioned to us is they want provide additional insight into Product Search best practices for Merchants. Will Google Product Search get its own Matt Cutts? Only time will tell. In the mean time we welcome these merchant-focused changes with open arms.

Google Product Search is one of the many shopping channels Mercent supports today.

5 Holiday Readiness Tips for CSE Marketing

The holiday shopping season is well recognized as the peak revenue-generating period for the retail industry. However, this year the sudden economic downturn has generated additional pressure on retail marketers to drive sales. For smart online retailers the current economic situation presents an opportunity as consumers look to the Internet for convenience and cost-savings to fulfill their holiday shopping needs. Our Performance Marketing team has assembled a number of holiday readiness tips and best practices for this holiday season, which they plan on using to help online retailers efficiently, generate sales that you can use to best position your company for the challenging shopping season ahead. Download the entire 2008 Holiday Best Practices & Tips for Comparison Shopping Marketing Guide for additional strategies on tactical preparation for the coming months.

Here are our top 5 tips from the Holiday Best Practices Guide to prepare for a successful holiday season:

1. Bid Audit & Strategy
   Start by reviewing all of your bids on all engines to ensure your bid-levels have been adjusted as necessary on those channels that have already increased their bids for the holidays. To note, Shopping.com has reduced the minimum bid on many of its categories during this holiday season. If a shopping engine hasn’t yet implemented a bid change, be proactive in determining a ballpark range to which your bids should be increased (or decreased, depending on the category). Have those bids organized and ready to implement quickly once the engines raise their bid levels.  Prior to implementing your bids, perform a quick analysis to see if your conversion rate on key products and categories have increased enough to help offset the higher bid amount. Also, consider setting yourself a calendar reminder to turn your bids back down once you can no longer ship for the holiday season so that you don’t get hit with unnecessary costs post-season.
   
2. Review Your Product Filters
   It is wise to take a moment to review your product filters. Verify that you are only sending products to the channels that you have in stock. Few things are more disheartening to a holiday shopper than getting all the way to the point of purchase, and then discovering that the product is out-of-stock. For your high velocity products, you should consider raising your inventory threshold above “1 in stock” (or your own unique minimum inventory threshold) to account for additional holiday velocity. If you have any filters set up to remove products from your feeds based on explicit product data or performance criteria, evaluate those filters to make sure they still make sense given the season, increased bid costs, and increased conversion rates.
   
3. Revisit Category Mappings
   Test a good sample size of your products to ensure they are categorized correctly on each shopping engine. In addition to checking your own uncategorized products, look at how your current categories are set up and see if there are better ways to map them to the categories unique to each shopping engine.  This will help boost your relevancy and ensure your products appear for related searches.
   
4. Check for Feed Errors
   Ensure that the data you’re sending to each channel is accurate and fully accepted by each comparison-shopping engine without error.  Look at the individual data fields on a sampling of products across multiple categories to make sure they are populating the correct data.  Follow up by looking up these same products live on the shopping engines and verifying that they are appearing correctly.
   
5. Optimize Your Top Performers
   Use your top performing products and categories as your guide to data optimization. Use your website analytics to know what keywords drive conversion of your top performers and apply SEO best practices to optimize on those keywords. Make sure you have those keywords added to all the feeds that support them and your product ads include those keywords. Include holiday promotional language in your CSE feeds wherever you can. Work closely with your web team to ensure these promotions and other pertinent holiday information is available on your own product pages as well.  Retailers often overlook this because product pages aren’t traditional landing pages – but they are landing pages for your CSE customers.

Maintaining and optimizing your comparison-shopping engine campaigns can be a labor and time-intensive endeavor, but ultimately the retailers who win on CSEs are those that are able to efficiently promote the right products in the right places with the right merchandising copy and promotional offers.  Download the entire “Mercent 2008 Holiday Best Practices & Tips for Comparison Shopping Marketing” guide to learn more on how your company can harness this opportunity.

Check out the post by Linda Bustos "Holiday Marketing Tips for Comparison Shopping Engines" on the Get Elastic blog for a great summary of our Holiday Best Practices Guide.

CSEO Best Practice: Optimizing Your Product Titles

A properly formatted Product Title should be considered the cornerstone in your comparison shopping engine optimization (CSEO) efforts. To achieve optimal relevancy on most shopping engines, you may need to revise the Title in your feed from its original appearance on your site. On the other hand, Google prefers that the Title in your feed reflects the one found on your product's landing page. A bit of art and science is needed when crafting a Product Title because the balance of form and function changes from one engine to the next.

In general, the Title you craft should be clear, descriptive and accurate. A good Title should start with Brand, followed by a descriptive phrase or adjective about the product, and end with the product type (noun). Great information to include in your Title is gender, size, color and other descriptive attributes. You should avoid unnecessary use of punctuation, capitalization and symbols as way to make your products stand out. Crafting a Title that misrepresents your product is a sure fire way to lose the trust of those you are trying to sell to. No one likes being tricked.

The Title is a major factor in how your products match to search queries and is used by most engines to tie your products to additional sub categories. Your Title should not focus on clever marketing terms or fluff text but rather relevant product information a user may search for (such as brand, gender, model number, etc.). Keep in mind that you will not be able to craft a perfect Product Title that catches every nuance of every related search and categorization opportunity. For example, "Fender American Deluxe Stratocaster Electric Guitar (Black Maple)" is relevant for the person searching for "Fender Deluxe Stratocaster ", but not as much if they are searching for "Montego Black Fender Strat". Remember, if you can’t fit it all in the Title you can use the product description to include additional descriptive information.

Be aware of the total allowed character limit each Shopping Engine has for Product Titles and take advantage of it to ensure you have the most optimal Title in play. Do not exceed the allowed limit for a Title or it will be truncated. A truncated Title is an easy way to lose credibility because a potential customer may view this as a mistake and look somewhere else to purchase even if you offer the best price.

Here’s a quick reference to how many characters are allowed in the Product Title by Shopping Engine:

Engine	Field Length
Become	80 Max Characters
Google Product Search	80 Max Characters
Microsoft cashback	255 Max Characters
MSN Shopping	50 Max Characters
NexTag	80 Max Characters
PriceGrabber	255 Max Characters
Pronto	255 Max Characters
Shopping.com	100 Max Characters
Shopzilla	100 Max Characters
Smarter.com	No Limit, Truncate 70 characters in Search Results
Yahoo! Shopping	No Limit, Truncate 45 characters in Search Results

In general, the preferred Product Title structure is:

Brand >> Model >> Descriptive Copy >> Product Type

Even though this structure will work for most products, consider each product type has a unique list of attributes that could be used to make the Title more relevant.

Here are a few examples of different Product Title structures:

Product Type	Title Format	Example Title
Clothing	Brand  >> Style / Color / Material >> Gender >> Clothing Type	Eddie Bauer Blue XL Tall Long Sleeve Men's Straight-Collar Oxford Shirt
Electronics	Brand >> Model Number >> Style / Color >> Product Type	Apple iPOD Touch (MA627LL / A) Black 16GB Wi-Fi Digital Video / MP3 Player
Furniture	Brand >> Series >> Style / Color / Material >> Furniture Type	South Shore Lexington Collection Dark Mocha Queen Size Platform Bed
Movie	Title >> Year >> Author / Artist / Director >> Format Type	Swingers (2002 Miramax Collector's Series) ~ Jon Favreau, Vince Vaughn, and Ron Livingston (DVD)
Musical Instrument	Brand >> Style / Color / Material >> Series >> Instrument Type	Fender American Deluxe (HSS) Black Stratocater Electric Guitar
Wine	Winery >> Year >> Region >> Wine Type	Etude 2006 Carneros Estate Grown Pinot Noir Wine

Helpful hints for Product Titles:

• Use standard spelling and grammar.
• Use common terms. (Use “sofa” not “davenport”)
• Do not include HTML or control characters.
• Don't use ALL CAPS and unnecessary punctuation. (!, ?, etc)
• Don’t use promotional text (Clearance, On Sale! & Free Shipping).
• Avoid using specific price, availability & time information.

There is no “one size fits all” formula to crafting a Product Title. The information above summarizes general best practices that will help you get 80% - 90% of the way there. Careful consideration needs to be given to the type of products you have, the channels you’re advertising on and how your target audience searches for these items. You can never go wrong with testing ideas on a subset of products, measuring the results and testing again. Of course, using tools like Hitwise, WordTracker and Google Insights for keyword research can go a long way for things like “shoe” vs. ‘footwear” or “drum set” vs. “drum kit” and so on.