Google Shopping becoming a paid-for service

Google Shopping, the comparison shopping engine from Google, is about to change in the UK and several other countries from today. From 13 February it is moving from a free service to a paid-for one, in an increasing attempt by the UK & Europe’s biggest search engine to monetise its functionality.

 

However it will take a little while to transition over from the free service and the change will not be completely implemented until around the end of Q2 2013. Based upon Cost-per-click (CPC) bidding for each product, the system will be run from your Google account .It will then work in a similar way to the AdWords system that is used to display advertising alongside the organic search results (SERPs)

So....Are you ready for Google’s newly-monetised service?

If not,there are certain things you can do to prepare yourself

1. Create an AdWords account
   If you do not have an AdWords account already, you will need one if you want to keep your products showing up… but it will cost you when someone clicks on one of your products.
2. Make sure your bidding is competitive
   Just like pay-per-click costs, bidding on Product Listing Ads is not just based on what you want to pay for a visit, but what your competitors bid. Setting maximum daily budgets is therefore the obvious way to avoid any financial surprises.
3. Understand the work involved If you currently manage your free listings yourself and have little knowledge of the Google AdWords system, you could be in for a steep learning curve.
4. Make sure your feeds are correct
   The slightest error in your feed to Google Shopping could break the entry for your products in the Google Merchant Center account. These feeds also need to contain as much information as possible and be completely up-to-date (so you’re not paying for products you no longer sell or have stock of).
5. Keep a close eye on your analytics
   Remember, the number of visits to your site is not usually the best indicator that your paid-for campaigns are optimised. Ensure your analytics account (e.g. Google Analytics) has your goals set-up around conversions and then adapt your product listing adverts to get the most sales.

I’ll be following this new service as it gradually gets rolled-out to users. If you have any experience of paid for PLA’s(e.g. tips and hints) I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Screen scraping: not dead, just renamed

A few years back I blogged about the act of screen scraping and why it was wrong to do this.

Since that time I've seen clients (primarily eCommerce ones) develop feeds for:

• Affiliates



• Google product search



• 3rd party applications (e.g. Mobile apps)



• and other such things

This however means that a decent website may quickly end up developing a number of different feeds that all do different things. It can therefore create a mesh of XML files & API's that can become quite complex to maintain and manage.

One approach is to create a single feed that is then used for everything, perhaps going via a marketing agency, who can then reformat it for different purposes. However this can turn out to be a pretty bulky file (e.g. if you have a large catalogue, this can quickly become several megabytes in size) or can contain details that you might not wish all parties to have (e.g. links to your hi-res images from your Content Delivery Network that you may be paying by the megabyte for).

So I was reasonably interested in this article from eConsultancy that seemed to address this very issue. Had they really found a decent solution to this problem? One that I think will only get worse over time as the needs of eCommerce sites grow.....

Well the answer lies in this part of the posting:

Next-generation data feed solutions allow feeds to be generated and deployed
quickly and at low cost by extracting the ‘front end’ product-related HTML code
from the website, with no requirement for any ‘back end’ data – or expertise on
the part of the merchant. By harvesting elements such as pricing, availability
and product attributes directly from the merchant’s website, it is possible to
ensure that the extracted data feed is comprehensive and accurate

So let me get that straight. This 'next generation' method doesn't use an actual data feed from the site owner. It works by 'harvesting elements' from the HTML of the merchant's site without their actual involvement.

And that's not screen-scraping how exactly?