It has become the first port of call for many of us out there looking for a specific product, Google Product Search. Formerly Google Product Base and Froogle, the service provides price comparisons via a search tool on the web and mobile for products. With their recent updates, it has now become a key part of search results, showing the price comparisons in prominent search results.
Searching for a Disney Mug - free rankings
Until now it has been relatively easy to generate a product feed, no matter what the structure of your current site. In September, the 22nd to be specific, Google are enforcing a new set of changes as part of an attempt to enhance the quality and offerings of their Google Product Search service.
Update your Google Product Feed by 22nd September
How to implement the Google Product Feed updates
This isn’t easy and entirely depends on the structure of your e-commerce platform. For some, this can be a very costly and time consuming process. To see the new requirements for your country specifically, see their help page.
Here is a summary of some of the requirements that you have to integrate:
Unique Product Identifiers
For clothing products, “brand” is always required and for other products you have to specify gtin or mpn. At least 2 of the 3 (brand/gtin/mpn) are required.
gtin – Global Trade Item Number, usually what you find on the barcode. This is the UPC (North America), EAN (Europe), JAN (Japan) and ISBN (books)
TIP – Most barcode scanners actually just function as a normal ‘keyboard like’ device when plugged into your computer. Usually, scanning a barcode in is the same as typing the number on the keyboard and hitting enter. You can customise the way some of them work and some differ, but this is the most common way.
mpn – This is the manufacturers code, unique to that product
Different variations of one product must be added as seperate products
If you have an attribute management system, this is where the coding for the new changes can potentially become complicated. With the majority of systems that support attributes and utilise filtered navigation, you have just one product and add the attributes to it. With this way of doing things, it means that the filters have to be separated from the products in order to output as separate items in the Google Product Feed.
gender, age group, size, material, pattern and colour
These fields are required for clothing and recommended for other products, if applicable.
If multiple products are actually different variants of the same product, they must be grouped together with the “item group id” attribute of the feed. This must be a unique identifier that links all these products together.
Images and availability are required
Your e-commerce shop should have a stock system or indicate availability anyway if conforming to “best practices” – however, it is also now a required field of the Google Product Feed. In addition, you must supply an image for each product. If different variations must be added as separate products (see above), then that also means you will need to associate the different images with the different attributes.
Google Product Category attribute
As if managing your own category system wasn’t hard enough, now you have to implement two! Each category on your shop will need to be associated with the correct Google Product Category, or the Taxonomy as they like to call it. This will then need to be output as part of the feed, and yes, it is required. See http://www.google.com/support/merchants/bin/answer.py?answer=160081 for the full list of categories.
Everything else
If you haven’t had enough already, you can check out the full list here: http://www.google.com/support/merchants/bin/answer.py?answer=1344057 in a table that is fairly easy to read. There is a lot of information that is required, and some that is recommended.
Oh, and by the way – if Google say “recommended” – it usually means, “we will display your results first and more prominently if you fill them out”
This is going to be hard work and very time consuming, potentially costly too. On the bright side, at least you won’t have as many other stores competing with you on the feed any more. Good luck!
As a final point and a little silver lining to every cloud, here is a little tip shared with me by my colleague Dan Cave. By signing up and using Trust Pilot, as trust builds through the tool, your results are much more likely to rank higher in the product feed.