FusePump's 5 top tips for successful Google Shopping channel marketing & how to avoid disaster!
From September 22nd Google will start enforcing its new data feed compliance rules. This is a good thing in our opinion. Merchants will need to ensure accurate product information which in turn will ensure consumers find the right products, at the right proces, and conversion will increase as a result. Charlie Hawker explains how to get the best results:
FusePump top 5 tips for Google Shopping Channel integration
- Get to know the Google Dashboard
One of the best things to do is spend some time in the Merchant Center itself learning the where to find the issues and building a bank of knowledge. The graphs on the dashboard are sometimes not a clear indicator of your performance as they are only a 7 day snap shot, always refer to the performance report for an extended time line. Also be aware that the clicks graph on the dashboard is 2 days in arrears whereas the product search is up-to-date. With a better understanding of the dashboard you will be able to spot new features quicker for example at the end of last week there was the introduction of a downloadable report from the data quality section that has not been announced yet.
- Try and do everything they advise
May sound obvious but with the Merchant Centre it pays to do exactly what Google advise as soon as possible so that you can get the jump on your competitors. Data quality is the variable you get feedback directly from Google on and the aim should always be 100%. Remember with a continuous poor data duality score you items can be removed from product search entirely. Google give plenty of warning over changes, like everything, it pays to start adapting early as some new required fields could be hard to come by e.g EANs and MPNs. At the end of the day you can’t fight the data, if your titles are too short or you have made up unique IDs Google will know and you will be punished.
- Prioritise between “Data Feed Errors” and “Data Quality Errors”
There are 2 types of errors in the Merchant Centre, data feed errors which are less severe than the data quality errors. The feed errors are warnings on the file you have uploaded and often hint to forth coming required fields that will become data quality issues e.g. shipping weight. The quality errors need to be addressed as soon as they are spotted and prioritised above the feed errors, it could be that you are experiencing more recently due to the change in Google specification. It is our belief that the data quality score affects the rankings on Product Search more than any other variable you can control.
- Optimise*
It is possible to optimise the feed you upload, the first step is to address the data feed errors mentioned earlier but there is more. Our top tips are to evaluate your titles and descriptions and see if you can optimise them by including extra attributes available in your feed e.g brand, size or colour of the product. Be careful though as you only have a set number of characters to play with, 70 for the title, before it gets cut off, you don’t want to add something that won’t be seen anyway. Try and provide as many of the attributes you can in the feed spec to fully optimise your feed, Google wouldn’t be asking for it if they didn’t want it. Optimise your account as a whole including the settings. Make sure you have a have a named contact and correct email address in the general settings so Google can contact you in case of any problems or changes. It is also possible to link you AdWords and Google Checkout accounts with Product Search via the Merchant Centre settings.
* Remember that these are suggestions and if you are directed to stop any optimisation of titles or description please do so immediately.
- Robots.txt
One of the most frequent errors we see for new clients to the Merchant Center is “Product Crawl Issues”. These are sometimes caused by the robots.txt file on your website blocking the Google bots from checking your products. Please ensure that you robots.txt file is not blocking anything unnecessarily including “User-agent: googlebot > >> Disallow” Google are very good at answering more in depth questions or individual issues that you may be experiencing.
And finally...How not to do it
If you change your feed you need to be certain that it complies with Google’s rules and regulations in this area. FusePump only supply and integrate high quality Google compliant feeds. One of our competitors recently substituted the FP feed without first checking their own feeds compliance. Without having registered for diagnostics they couldn't correct the errors that Google found in their feed. The result was account suspension and serious loss of revenue, which is what happened below.
We are happy to talk to you about Google Shopping channel integrations and the forthcoming changes. Please contact us if this sounds interesting!
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