It is time to address Product Feed optimization regarding the new commercial site called Google Shopping.

Google Shopping is Going Commercial

Google Product Search in the U.S. is becoming a purely commercial model built on Product Listing Ads. This new product discovery experience is called Google Shopping and the transition will be complete in October of 2012.

Google purportedly believes that having a commercial relationship with merchants will encourage them to keep their product information fresh and up to date. Higher quality data is expected to mean better shopping results for users.  In turn, this should create higher quality traffic for merchants.

So, Google Shopping (AKA Google Product Search) will no longer be free after the 1st of October.

Consider Optimization of the Google Feed

However, an important consideration will be that the Google Feed  is optimized, which is the source for Google Shopping.

In the past, Merchants would load their entire product list into the Google Feed. Now that the service is no longer free, the merchant needs to show discretion when choosing the products that are in the Google Feed. These products in the feed should be expected have a profitable return on investment compared to the advertising costs, also referred to as ROI – or in Adwords-speak, an effective Cost per Acquisition (CPA).

The Google Feed should also be filled with effective keywords. The fields considered by Google during the match to the user’s search term should not be just filled with keywords about the product. These fields need to be filled with keywords that would be used in a search by the potential buyer. Do not believe that these are the same thing. When developing an Adword Campaign, keywords are chosen to match the search term being entered by the user. This is now the consideration for the Google Product Feed.

With a Product Listing Ad, there are no keywords, as there are in a typical Google Ad. So the Keywords that will be used to match the search term are from the Google Product Feed fields, like the Product_Type attribute. Be sure to be selective in the products you are using in the Google Product Feed and the keywords you are using in the Product Feed fields.

To learn more and get started merchants can visit: www.google.com/ads/shopping