On Tuesday July 13th 2010 Google Product Search sent out an e-mail to their merchants letting them know that as of August 2010 merchant who submit products in the electronics, books or media categories will need to include applicable manufacturers part numbers (MPN), brand names, universal product codes (UPC) and international standard book number (ISBN) in their data feed. These fields will NOT be required but as they say “to avoid seeing a drop in traffic from Product Search, we urge you to start including these unique identifiers as soon as possible”

As I have said all along, the more information that you include with your listings, the more relevant they will be and the higher they will list within the search results. If you are an electronics merchant currently submitting to Google Product Search, you better be submitting those fields anyway! If you are not, you should head back to comparison shopping engine marketing class 101.

I have posted the whole e-mail below in case you missed it. As always have a great day and if you need help with anything, don’t hesitate to drop us a line.

CSE.Manager@gmail.com

Hello,

Starting in late August 2010, we are making some changes to how your products in the Electronics, Books, and Media categories may appear on Google Product Search. In order to provide as much information as possible to our users, we need your help in matching your products to our “product pages” where users are able to view useful data such as product specifications or reviews. If you are submitting products in the above categories for the US version of Google Product Search, please start including unique product identifiers, such as MPN, Brand, UPC or ISBN. We will make similar changes to Product Search in the UK and Germany at a later date.

These attributes will not be required for your feed to process correctly, however, to avoid seeing a drop in traffic from Product Search, we urge you to start including these unique identifiers as soon as possible. You can find unique product identifier information on Product Search product pages, under the “technical specifications” section for Electronics items, the “Tracks” or “Details” section for Media, and the “Overview” section for books.

For more details, including what specific identifiers you should include for each category of item, please see our Help Center at http://www.google.com/support/merchants/bin/answer.py?answer=160161

Sincerely,

The Google Product Search Team

Email preferences: You have received this email service announcement to update you about important changes to your Google Merchant Center account. Please do not reply to this email directly. If you have any questions, please contact us from our Help Center at http://www.google.com/support/merchants

Copyright 2010. Google Inc, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043.

Over the years I have come to the realization that most merchants believe that having the lowest price is the only way to be successful on a comparison shopping engine. While this statement does carry some weight, it is not necessarily 100% true.

There are a lot of other ways to compete on a comparison shopping engine, even if you do not offer the lowest prices. Today, i am going to talk about one specific way to help you compete — product branding.

Merriam-Webster.com defines branding as:

The promoting of a product or service by identifying it with a particular brand.

Most comparison shopping engines offer a very simple way to brand your products by allowing you to upload your company logo. On some engines this is a free service, on others it is a paid service. Either way, it is a very good investment as it can set you apart from your competitors and help to raise your conversion rate.

In our day and age, when it is possible for anyone with a computer to sell products online, I can’t stress how important it is to make your product listings look as professional as possible.

A customer will be more likely to purchase from a professional and legitimate looking business than one with no company product branding, even if the price may be higher.

Think about it, do you want to give potential customers the impression that you are a legitimate and well established business or that you may or may not be selling items “that fell off the back of a truck?”

Time and time again it has been said by customers that you can not put a price on peace of mind. Customers want to feel confident about placing an order. They want to feel secure. Adding your logo to your product listings give you the ability to instill some extra confidence right from the start!

To help get you started branding your product listings, here is a great offer from the comparison shopping engine Become.com!

Valued Partner,

Thanks for letting us know what you think of our discounted logo program! We received such positive feedback from our retail partners on how the discounted logo performed for them during the holiday season and through January that we had to do it–we are keeping the discounted logo program.

The logo program will remain discounted, and bidding at least 5 cents above the minimum CPCs will allow you to a) take advantage of the positive impact that bidding makes on ranking and b) increase your branding on Become.com.

Follow these simple steps to take part in our logo program:

Upload a logo (.gif, .jpg) that is 88×31 pixels exactly in the ‘Account/Store info’ section of your dashboard, if it is not there already; it will take the system approximately 24 hours to process a new logo, and after this time it will appear when you bid appropriately
Bid up–by category in the dashboard or by product in the feed–by at least 5 cents
That’s it!

Best of luck in February!

Best,

The Become.com Team

If you have any questions about this offer from Become.com or would like to learn more about product branding, let me know!

CSE.Manager@gmail.com

Have you ever wondered why your competitors are ranking higher than you on Google Product Search?

Well as we all know that on Google Product Search content is King. Your titles should have key-words and key phrases (terms and phrases that a shopper would use to search for the product.) Your descriptions follow the same rule but unlike the title, you have much more room to add these key phrases.

So elaborate, be creative!

If you feel confident that your title and description are very SEO friendly but your still being out ranked, the Google Base Competitor Analysis tool created by (Tom the Developer) can help to tell you why.

This tool allows you to search for products or keywords on Google Product Search and be presented with much more information that is not generally displayed on the normal Google Product Search listings. You will be shown the pertinent fields (and data within said fields) that your competitors are including!

Here is an example of what you can see using this tool:

Here we can see the Weight, Condition, Product_type, Manufacturer’s part Number (MPN), Universal Product Code (UPC), ID, Model_Number, Brand attributes that a competitors listing includes. You can the cross reference this data to see what you can do to improve you listing. You can also use this tool to potential help populate data that you may be missing from your data-feed.



Lets say you get your products from a drop shipper but the data-feed they gave you does not include an UPC number. Using this tool you can look up the product and get its UPC number from someone who has that data input. Obviously you’ll want to make sure that the products are identical so that you aren’t incorrect or erroneous data.

Lets say that you are not being included in a Google Product Search group listings.

You would want to know why right?

Well you can use this tool to look up your competitors in this group and find out what data that they all share in common but you lack. Generally an incorrect or missing UPC or Model Number is the culprit.

The Google Base Competitor Analysis Tool is something that I use often to help improve my clients content and data feeds. The best part about this tool is that it is free. That’s right, FREE!



You can access the Google Base Competitor Analysis Tool here



CSE.Manager@gmail.com