I’ve said it many times…if you’re not taking advantage of the optional fields in your datafeeds, then you’re missing out on potential traffic. While I’m sure someone’s reported on this somewhere in the blogosphere, Google Base is now pulling out bulk upload (datafeed) attributes (fields) and making them more prominent, allowing users to quickly refine their search options.

These refinement options seem to show up for all items on Google Base, but we’re going to concentrate on products.

Searching for ‘plasma tv‘ gives the following results:

After clicking on ‘Products’, users can interact with any of the drop down fields and click on ‘more options’ to add those refinements to the list:

I added the ‘more options’ attributes and then refined my search. If you don’t find any products in your search (in this case plasma tvs with price: $1300 – $3000, brand: sony, location: within 30 miles of 94025), you can click ‘clear’ next to any of the refinement options you selected:

Eventually, when you type in ’sony plasma tv $2000′ into Google, I’d assume a subset of the matching results from Google Base will be displayed, but that doesn’t currently happen.

From a merchant perspective, it’s time to use as many of those optional fields (for Google Base and all the other engines) as possible. Google Base happens to be the only shopping search engine which allows merchants to define their own attributes (optional fields). Here are Google’s instructions for setting up custom attributes. I’ve tested out the ’string’ type attribute with some success. If you want better results on the shopping engines, try optimizing your feed – it’s no longer good enough to just post all your products and expect your listings to be found.

From a consumer perspective, using the refinement options was fairly easy. The only problem I had with Google Base was when I searched for something new. Typing in ‘digital camera’ kept all the same attributes from my previous search so I was looking at digital cameras with price $1300 – $3000, brand: sony. Would be better if a new search cleared my previously selected options.

Related Resources:
Data feed optimization strategies for Google Base, Shopzilla, and the rest of the Shopping Comparison Engines.
Self-service, affordable data feed submission services from SingleFeed.

Related Posts:
Vast Launches Vacation Rentals Search – July 8, 2006