On Sunday, the Google Base Blog announced the launch of the Google Product Search Partner Program.
ChannelAdvisor, Channel Intelligence, and SingleFeed (the data feed optimization company I run) are the inaugural partners of the program.
Here are the details of the partner program.
As one of the partners, I’m obviously thrilled to be included in this launch.
As I said in our press release “While there are many online marketing channels for merchants to test, Google Product Search is one of the most effective, but least utilized marketing channels. With the assistance of SingleFeed [or CA, CI], merchants can properly list their products in Google Product Search and be visible in areas of Google.com search results that display structured product data.”
I think this is a great move for Google. Yes, I’m a bit biased, but…if you look at the Google Base help groups you’ll see that merchants need some assistance with getting up and running on Google Product Search. Furthermore, I’ve personally reviewed hundreds of different feeds being sent to Google Product Search and know that merchants and agencies aren’t even submitting the minimum required product attributes, let alone testing data feed optimization (DFO) strategies.
Most established etailers have someone dedicated to SEO and someone dedicated to PPC. These employees constantly analyze and optimize organic and paid listings. Yet marketing through shopping engines is still usually an afterthought. Way too many companies ’submit it [a data feed] and forget it’. Hopefully CA, CI, and SingleFeed, as well as future Google Product Search Partner Program partners will lead the way in evangelizing the benefits to proper data feed submission, as well as data feed management and data feed optimization (DFO).
Thank you Cynthia, Jessica, April, and Jassim for including SingleFeed. We look forward to working with you!
Brian, that’s certainly good news for SingleFeed – congrats!
My question is this: How many retailers out there can take advantage of anything more than the standard attributes requested by Google Base?
For instance, if you’re an electronics etailer, you would LOVE to be able to provide screen size, screen type, resolution, megapixel count, etc. What happens when you haven’t defined those attributes on the backend? We’re talking about an enormous undertaking in assigning all of your skus with specific attribute values.
I’ve been suffering in getting proper exposure on Base for a while now. I’ve submitted all the attributes I can and have reached our internal limitations. It seems like the most ridiculous merchants show up on key phrases such as “plasma tv” and “lcd tv”.
I would love to hear how you would tackle this differently.
I am happy for you and your team Brian!
afreydin- we have similar challenges with over 45k sku’s that need attributes pulled from the description into managable fields in our database. with our wide product offering, the attributes specific to particular groups of products vary greatly and our gbase feed would have dozens of different attributes.