Life Lessons in Web Analytics

Google is known as the big gorilla of the Internet. Only the ignorant or mildly insane do not manage their ecommerce operations with Google in mind. In the comparison shopping realm, there is one place every single ecommerce site should submit their product catalog to: Google Product Search. Why?

1. It’s free.
2. It actually serves up traffic for those in niche industries.
3. With it, you can achieve better than #1 results.

Yes, better than #1 results! When a search is niched enough (see: long-tail) Google will display the top-three product results above the top search engine results. For a top-down left-to-right Internet user, those will not get skipped (until banner blindness sets in, but Google will likely be mixing up their results in the future – discussion for another time).

So you are submitting to Google Product Search and want to get in that coveted top three area. Since Google Product Search is free, you cannot raise your bids to rank higher. Try these tips:

1. Put as much information in your feed as you can. This applies to all comparison shopping engines, not just Google Product Search, but it especially applies to the free comparison engines. More information strengthens your listing and can only help. See all the possible Google Product Search item attributes.
2. Use what you know about search engine optimization. Describe your product using keywords your customers would use. Have smart product titles. Remember to include the manufacturer part number.
3. Submit your data feed regularly. Outdated product information helps no one, and Google Product Search will eventually drop your products anyway. I am unsure of this connection, but Google the search engine likes frequently updated pages, so it might not be a far fetch to state they like frequently updated feeds as well. See this recent Official Google Base blog post.
4. Experiment. This last one is important to know what works against your competition and what doesn’t. Change a few product titles or descriptions and see if your rankings move. I moved my items’ SKU number from last in the product title to second after the brand name and saw a little bump up in rankings. See some relevant Shopping.com optimization tips from LoveYourFeed.com.

Good luck, and if you think of anything else, please share!

Google Product Search has introduced a major change recently with the grouping of SKUs. Instead of listing all products, they now group items with the same part number together and list them on a separate product page. This is a big change and will affect that way people like me and you optimize for Google Product Search.

And now the product page. Notice how prominent Google Checkout is.

Note that this is not live for all products, nor it is guaranteed that Google will be running with this from now on. Just because bloggers find a change doesn’t mean it is going to be implemented (as evidenced by my NexTag find at the onset of this blog).

One observation though: does this mean Google’s product pages will now start ranking in Google, much like Shopping.com, Shopzilla and other major CSE product pages rank in the search engines? That could be another major change that ups the ante, because product feed optimization will then coincide with search engine optimization.