Google shopping-white-paper - part ii

Google Product Data Feeds:

Do’s & Don’ts

I. Overview

II. Formats § TXT

§ CSV

§ XML

III. Product Feed Specifications § Required Attributes

§ Additonal Attributes

IV. Uploading Data Feeds § Manual Upload

§ Automatic Upload

§ Google Spreadsheet

§ FTP Protocol

V. Optimizing Feeds § Product Type Attributes

§ Title & Description Attributes

§ Image Attributes

§ Keeping Data Fresh

VI. Conclusion

01 Google Product Data Feeds:Do’s & Don’ts800.330.9450

[email protected]

Data Feeds: Do’s and Don’tsIndex

While many ecommerce websites are al-

ready utilizing Product Listing Ads (PLAs),

it is imperative that companies understand

the “dos and don’ts” of how to properly set

up a product feed and optimize it accord-

ingly—particularly in the light of recent

changes from product

listing ads to Google

Shopping ads.

This is because PLAs

access both Google

AdWords and Google

Merchant Center (a.k.a

Google Shopping); ecom-

merce merchants need

to have full control of

their Google Shopping

data feed. Google match-

es search queries to the

data that is sent to Goo-

gle Merchant Center. On

top of this, Google has

feed specifications that need to be accurate

and up to date in order for the campaigns

to run properly. There are a multitude of

data issues that can arise when optimiz-

ing a data feed and enhancing data quality

02

Google Product Data Feeds:An overview

will help improve impressions, CTRs and

conversions.

Google defines a data feed as “a file made

up of a list of products which use group-

ings of attributes that define each one of

a merchant’s products in a

unique way.” By describing

products and using these

attributes, finding products

is much easier for online

shoppers.

The first important decision

to make is to choose the

format of the data feed. The

format needs to be selected

according to an individual’s

needs as a merchant as well

as the ability to create the

file. Using third party solu-

tions, SQL programming,

Microsoft Excel and Access,

along with other tools can help configure

and format product files. Google actually

supports data feeds in three general for-

mats: text (.txt), comma separated (.csv)

and XML (.xml).

“... it is

imperative that

companies under-

stand the

“dos & don’ts” of how to

properly set up a

product feed and

optimize it ...”

Google Product Data Feeds:Do’s & Don’ts800.330.9450

[email protected]

Smaller merchants are likely to prefer the use of a .txt format, as it requires the least technical knowledge and can easily be created using a spread-sheet editor, such as Excel or a Google Doc. The screenshot below shows an example of the spreadsheet version of a product feed. Field attribute names need to be included as headers in the first row, while the rows thereafter describe items according to the attributes. When adding products and the corresponding attributes to the feed is complete, the file needs to be saved as a tab-delimited file. You can access the Google Feed Specifications at:https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/160567which we will talk about later on in this report.

A comma-separated value is very common and looks just like excel. This file

format is very similar to .TXT in that it requires the least amount of technical

knowledge to use. The format is widely supported by consumer, business

and scientific applications. The most common use of this format is moving

tabular data between programs that natively operate on incompatible for-

mats. This works because so many programs support some variation of CSV

at least as an alternative import/export format.

.CSV Format

Data Feeds: Do’s and Don’tsFile Formats


[email protected] 03

.TXT Format

XML is for more technically advanced merchants and the data feed can also

be submitted as the extended version of RSS 2.0 or Atom 1.0. These files

can be created and edited using any text editor tool. Merchants using RSS

2.0 need to know that there are three pre-defined elements at the item level:

title, link, and description, where all three are required for product data

feeds.

In order to include additional required elements as well as more detailed

information about each product, Google extended RSS 2.00 by adding the

Google Merchant Center feed namespace.

.XML Format

The screenshot below shows an overview of required and recommended attributes that need to be included in the data feed before it can be uploaded to Google Merchant Center.

Besides declaring the Google Merchant Center namespace (see yellow

highlighting), a prefix within every attribute tag must be added to distinguish

attributes from elements defined in RSS 2.0. Without the prefix, all of the

attributes and values would be ignored. Atom 1.0-based data feeds differ

from RSS 2.0 feeds in that they require five pre-defined elements at the entry

level—title, id, link, summary, and updated.



It is important to understand what field

attributes are available for data feeds. The

more relevant data sent to Google Mer-

chant Center, the better chance Google

has to match search queries to product

data. It’s important to know how the data

is formatted in order to optimize it accord-

ing to Google’s rules.

As the screenshot below shows, some

attributes are required, while others are

recommended. Items like clothing/apparel

or media might also need additional attri-

butes.

§ If required attributes are not includ-

ed for an item, that item will not

show up in Google Shopping results.

§ If recommended attributes are

not included for an item, that

item will show up less frequent-

ly in Google Shopping results.

It is also important to understand that an

item refers to a single variation of a prod-

uct as a SKU might come in multiple varia-

tions – different color, material, pattern, or

size. Parent-child relationships are espe-

cially important in the apparel category

where Google will police data policies the

most.

Visit Google Shopping to review http://

support.google.com/merchants/an-

swer/188494?hl=en product feed specifi-

cations.

The screenshot (above) shows an overview of required and recommended attributes that need to be included in the data feed before uploading to Google Merchant Center.

Product Feedspecifications



Product Feed Specifications: Required Attributes

ID: Each item has to have a unique identifier and the ID cannot be re-used between feeds.

title: This describes the item, so be sure to include any characteristics such as color or brand to differentiate one item from another. The title can be up to 70 characters long.

Description: Use up to 10,000 characters to include further information about an item. Be aware that this is displayed in the shopping search results.

Product type: This field categorizes the product submit-ted. It’s imperative to utilize Google category values at the most granular level as well as including product type (merchant category value). This allows Google to place products in the most targeted search query results. Note: It is possible to insert both Google and merchant category values in this field but not vice versa.

Link: This is the URL that links directly to a product.

Image link: This attribute will display an image of the item. The accepted image formats are GIF, JPG (or JPEG), PNG, BMP, and TIF. High resolution images are a good practice as Google will show pictures with higher image quality over other devices like mobile and tablets.

Condition: This lets the buyer know if an item is ‘new,’ ‘refurbished’ or ‘used.’ This is a required field and very important to show if a product is being sold at a discount.

Availability: This declares whether an item is ‘in stock’, ‘available for order’, ‘out of stock’ or ‘preorder’.

Price: The price needs to contain the most prominent price on the landing page and must include a currency according to the ISO 4217 Standard.

Brand: This needs to be the brand name of the item, not the store name, unless the product is manufactured by that store. This field is one of the three unique product identifiers that are required to process data.

GtIn: This is the Global Trade Item Number for the specific item.

MPn: This is the Manufacturer Part Number of the item, and it identifies the product to its manufacturer and speci-fies each item.

Gender/Age Group/Color/size: This is required for apparel products.

tax: This attribute is only accepted in the US and can be used to override any merchant level settings in a Google Merchant Center account.

shipping: Provide specific shipping estimates for items to override the shipping settings submitted in a Google Merchant Center account.

shipping weight: This attribute is required in order to set up a shipping rule in the Merchant Center that is based on weight.

Item group ID: This is required for all variant apparel products in the US.

Color: This defines the dominant color of an item but multiple colors can be added by using a ‘/’ in order of prominence.

Material: This attribute describes the type of material or fabric that makes up an item.

Pattern: Pattern or graphic print featured on an item.

size: Specific size of a product.


[email protected]

Google product category: This attribute is recom-mended as long as it is not required to further describe your item by category. There are over 4,000 Google product categories merchants can choose from at http://support.google.com/merchants/answer/1705911.

Additional image link: Any images that show your product/item from a different angle, images of packag-ing or variants of the product.

sale price: This attribute shows the advertised sale price of the item and is recommended for items that are on sale.

sale price effective date: This is used in conjunction with the sale price attribute and indicates the date range that applies to the sale price.

AdWords grouping: This attribute groups products in an arbitrary way. It can only hold one value and can be used with CPC or CPA bidding.

AdWords label: This attribute only works with CPC bidding but can hold multiple values.

AdWords redirect: This attribute allows advertisers to specify a separate URL that can be used to track traffic coming from Google Shopping.

Gender/age/size: While these attributes are required for all apparel items, it might also make sense to include them for any other items to further describe the products.

Color: This attribute describes items by color.

online only: This attribute clarifies whether an item is available for purchase only online.

Excluded destination: Attribute allows you to con-trol the destination of your items, and the period during which your items are valid.

Expiration date: This is the date that an item listing will expire. If you do not provide this attribute, items will expire and no longer appear in Google Shopping results after 30 days. You cannot use this attribute to extend the expiration period to longer than 30 days.

Custom Label 0: This attribute can be used to group the items in a Shopping campaign by calues of your choosing, such as seasonal or clearance. You can create up to five custom labels, numbered 0 through 4, for each item in your feed. You may submit one value per item for each custom label attribute.

Custom Label 1: See Custom Label 0 description above. Custom Label 2: See Custom Label 0 description above.Custom Label 3: See Custom Label 0 description above.

Custom Label 4: See Custom Label 0 description above.

Unit Pricing Measure: This attribute allows you to specify unit pricing information for an item. The attribute defines the measure and dimension of an item, e.g. 135 ml or 55g. The unit price refers to the volume, weight, area, or length of the product without any packaging or the net drained weight of the product (in the case of food).

Unit Pricing Base Measure: The ‘unit pricing base measure’ attribute specifies your preference of the denom-inator of the unit price (e.g. 100ml).

Energy efficiency class: The ‘energy efficiency class’ attribute allows you to specify the energy efficiency class for certain product categories as defined in EU directive 2010/30/EU.

Product Feed Specifications: Additional Attributes


[email protected]

Once a data feed has been successfully created, it is time to upload it to a Merchant Center

account. For entering data manually, follow these steps:

Sign into the Merchant Center account.

Go to Data Feeds > New Data Feed.

Choose where to display products (by country), in order to target different

countries; submit a feed for each individual country as some countries have

different attribute requirements.

4

3

1

2

Choose Google Base as the format and enter a name for the .txt file.

MAnUAL UPLoAD

UploadingProduct Data Fields


[email protected]

Save the changes, then go to “manual upload” to upload the feed. Third-party

technologies can also be used to automate the feed by using an FTP or SFTP

protocol. This is illustrated below:

5

Once the feed has been uploaded, Google will process and test the feed. De-

pending on the size of a file, it may take a while to process the feed. Check back

on the status of the uploaded data feed by clicking on the dashboard in the

Google Merchant Center. A linked status will appear next to the file. Click this

link, to view the details about the feed validation. It will show any errors that

need to be fixed before trying to upload the feed again. Make sure that any er-

rors and bad formats can be fixed otherwise it’s much more likely that products

will be disapproved.

To review the quality of a data feed, go to the Products link in the left naviga-

tion bar within Merchant Center. This page displays the status of each product

and will display up to 10,000 products randomly. If there are more than 10,000

products, a user must search by status in order to view them individually.

Note: it may take up to 24 hours for products to start appearing in Google

Shopping results.


[email protected]

Once the feed has been uploaded, it is

scheduled to expire after 30 days. In order

for products to continue showing in Goo-

gle Shopping results; the feed will need to

be re-uploaded. The feed will be need to

updated and re-uploaded on a daily ba-

sis or as frequently as products or prices

change.

While manual feed uploads are easy and

usually don’t take a lot of time (process-

ing the feed, however, may take longer

depending on the size of

the feed), an automated

schedule can be created to

have the feed upload auto-

matically without having

to worry about it. To ac-

complish this, click “create

schedule” in the data feed

overview, and the following

window will appear: Fill it

out with the desired fre-

quency, timing and location

of the feed and then click

“schedule” to complete the

set up process.

This upload method re-

quires the size of the file to

be less than 1 gigabyte, and the user-agent

“googlebot” cannot be blocked from the

directory containing the feed. Moreover,

the feed

URL has to point directly to the data feed

file in one of Google’s supported file for-

mats.

Important: The URL of the file location

must begin with http://, https://, ftp://, or

sftp://

AUtomAtinG the ProceSS:FEED sChEDULEs & UPLoAD FoRMAts


[email protected]

UPloADinG viA:GooGLE sPREADshEEtData feeds can also be submitted via

Google Spreadsheets. If a smaller sized

company doesn’t have the technologies

to automate data manipulation rules

and feed rules, it is possible to submit

via Google Spreadsheets. For this op-

tion, either use the existing template

that Google provides or submit a Goo-

gle spreadsheet that can be created by

an individual:

§ Click on the new data feed and provide the target country, format and data feed file name

§ Select the checkbox next to “I want to use Google spreadsheet” to store, edit and upload the feed.

§ Data can be uploaded by generating a template feed or by using an existing Google spreadsheet that contains all of the individual product information. The spreadsheet must be viewable to everyone with a link. The advantage of this option is that it is simple to create and to update as content is uploaded directly from the information given in the spreadsheet. However, this format cannot be used to upload a large volume of data: files must be no larger than 20MB.


[email protected]

FTP is an advanced method to submit data

feeds to Google Merchant Center. This

format has to be used for files larger than

20MB. The file also needs to be smaller

than one gigabyte.

If a file is larger than one gigabyte, it can

be split up and uploaded in several parts.

This is the process Vertical Nerve uses to

submit product data.

§ To use FTP, go to the Settings link in the Merchant Cen-ter account and click FTP.

§ Enter a username and password for the FTP account and click Save Changes. It may take sever-al hours before the account cre-ation takes effect. Also, once the FTP account is created, the chosen username cannot be changed.

12

UPloADinG viA:FtP PRotoCoL


[email protected]

Methods for Submitting Data via FTP:

§ Open a browser window

§ Type ftp://uploads.google.com and click enter

§ Enter the FTP username and password, then select log on

§ Drag and drop the feed into the browser win-

dow and wait for the file to transfer.

Using Web Browser:

An FTP program must be installed on the computer to use this method. The computer will need to be configured so that it can connect to Google’s FTP server:

§ Host name: uploads.google.com

§ User: the FTP username set up in Google Merchant Center

§ Password: the FTP password set up in Google Merchant Center

§ Logon-type: it should be set to normal, not anonymous.

Using an FTP Program


[email protected]

Send the feed using the DOS command prompt without hav-ing to use an FTP client:

§ From the Start menu, select Programs, then select MS-DOS Prompt, or from the Start menu, select Programs, then select Accessories, then select Command Prompt

§ When the black prompt screen appears, use ‘cd’ to get to the directory that the file is saved in.

§ Type in ftp uploads.google.com

§ When the FTP connection is made, the prompt will ask for the username. Enter the FTP user-name of the Google Merchant Center account.

§ Next enter the password, which was previ-ously set up in Google Merchant Center.

§ Type put <filename>. This command will send the file from the computer to Google’s FTP server.

§ Everything is complete after the “trans-fer complete” acknowledgement.

Using a DOS Prompt


[email protected]

Once the product feed is created, it has

been uploaded to Google Merchant Center

without any errors and has been running

for a few days; the optimization process of

the feed can begin.

Besides consistently monitoring the data

feed for errors, account managers need to

also ensure a high-quality shopping expe-

rience for customers. This can be achieved

by accurately describing all items, up-

dating the status of your products on the

website at all times, and complying with

Google’s Shopping policies. Vertical Nerve

takes this process very seriously. Our

team ensures that your product titles, de-

scription fields, promotional texts, Google

category values etc. are optimized so that

each product is displayed with relevant

keyword phrases that have high conver-

sion ratios.

While most advertisers would now stop

and focus on building out their Product

Listing Ads campaign in Google and opti-

mizing the product ads within AdWords,

the product feed needs to be constantly

optimized as well to guarantee a strong

overall performance. To learn more about

Vertical Nerve’s Product Listing Ad optimi-

zation processes please ask for our recent

white papers on our product-specific PLA

strategy or request one of our PLA webi-

nars.

Just like an approach to website/content/

ad copy optimization, product feed opti-

mization includes incorporating keyword

research and testing different product

images, titles and descriptions.

Product Data Feeds:Performance & optimization


[email protected]

KEy PRoDUCt AttRIBUtEs

PRoDUCt tyPE AttRIBUtEsThis attribute classifies the product in order to closely match the organization of products on a website. However, it is also important to choose a powerful description to reach the highest potential of traffic but with the least competition. So a clothing retailer for exam-ple, would want to research whether it is best to use “clothing”, “clothes” or “apparel” to classify products.

tItLE & DEsCRIPtIon AttRIBUtEsThe text of the title attribute will be shown on the general search results and Shopping results pages. The description will only be shown on the Shopping results page. First, make sure the title and description is consis-tent with the image of the product. Secondly, make sure that it includes an exact description of the product being offered. Include trends, holidays, or other current events in the de-scription to gain an advantage over competi-tion. The titles and descriptions need to also fit

IMAGE AttRIBUtEsThis is a very important attribute that often gets overlooked. To ensure an excellent customer experience, the image needs to exactly match the product that users a are looking for, down to the color, size, material, etc. Google also recommends high resolution images so that users can see quality pictures through smart phones and tablets. This is an optimization strategy the Vertical Nerve team recommends to improve mobile marketing strategies. It may also be beneficial to use unique product images in the case that one or more products being sold are the same as the competition. Just as testing occurs with different ad copy choices in AdWords, it is also crucial to test different images and build on the results that are seen. These tests need to be performed on regular basis to keep the product feed fresh and attractive to customers.

#1

#2

#3

16

As a rule of thumb, it is important that the

customer who clicks through a website

and sees the same product information

(price, availability, etc.) as is presented in

Google Shopping results.

Google provides the following tips to en-

sure fresh data:

§ Create or update a product feed right after the database is updated.

§ Submit the feed to Google at the same time as the website is updated.

§ If an update is made to a web-site multiple times per day, re-member to submit the feed multiple times per day.

§ Try to minimize the amount of time that the data is being processed, if a third-party feed provider is used.

§ Make sure that any scheduled feed fetch from the server happens at the same time as the website is updated.

§ Use the Content API for Shopping if the product information chang-es very frequently such that four updates per day are not enough to meet quality standards.


[email protected]

Some aspects of managing PLA feeds can

be complicated, but the guiding principles

are simple: providing as many relevant

attributes as possible and keeping product

feeds up to date allows Google to show the

most relevant products to customers, lead-

ing to hiring sales for merchants. Quality

data that is relevant to products pages will

help improve impressions.

Google Shopping product data allows

merchants to control PLA impressions

because Google will match search query

results to that product data.

Please contact our sales team for more in-

formation on how Vertical Nerve can help

improve PLA impressions.

Written by Dice Nakamura

VP of Business Development / Ecommerce Strategist

Product Data FeedsConclusion

Vertical Nerve helps companies grow their online revenue

through highly effective Search Marketing and improve

their online conversions through Web Analytics, Conver-

sion Rate Optimization, and website Design & Develop-

ment. Serving national brands since 1999, Vertical Nerve is

a Google Analytics Certified Partner and Premium Autho-

rized Reseller, a Google AdWords Certified Partner, Bing

Ads Professional Agency and Optimizely Certified Partner.

Learn more at www.VerticalNerve.com.Contact Sales:

[email protected] 800.330.9450© 2014 Vertical Nerve Inc.www.verticalnerve.com