Continued from Part 1.

2) Frequently Test and Update Data Feeds

Google prefers frequently-updated data, and as a merchant you wish for your item listings to be accurate. Every time there is a rate change, shipping rate change, or important change to the product description, update the data feed. Some push data feeds as often as each hour for merchants frequently updating inventory or prices.

Equally as important will be running a test data feed, that submits your data to the Merchant Center for troubleshooting before including items in the search listings. Not doing a test run won’t just make it harder to fix errors following submission, yet not doing any research and due diligence could earn you an account suspension and penalties. Due to Google Shopping being such a heavily used product search instrument, an account suspension may result within a substantial revenue loss. Not to mention, being scolded sucks.

Google’s Merchant Help Center recommends utilizing test data feeds in order to identify then mend feed errors prior to submitting your feed for indexing.

There are 2 kinds of errors which may occur:

Data feed errors that indicate warnings and could signal upcoming regulatory alterations to the required values and attributes. As it is vital that you pay attention to those errors, and especially note trends within data feed errors, not immediately mending those items will not lead to any instant harm. However, it is a great idea to remain on top of upcoming changes in order for you not to be faced with the overwhelming duty of changing attributes upon every one of your products during one time.

Data quality errors that have to be immediately fixed to prevent penalties. Google raised data quality requirements lately and as a consequence, data quality errors possess a greater impact on item search rankings than many factors.

3) Use All Unique Identifiers for Comparison Tables

There will include 3 various unique product identifiers that merchants could involve in their data feed:

UPC
Brand
MPN (manufacturer’s part number)

The data is what allows Google to involve individual products within comparison charts therefore it is smart to involve all 3 identifiers as probable. Google Shopping requires at least 2 unique identifiers or your test feeds are going to cause an error.

4) Differentiate the Google Shopping Feed for Tracking Reasons

Due to you attempting to optimize the data feed for visibility, it just makes sense that you will wish to have the ability to differentiate this traffic resource from additional search traffic as well as referring URLs. The simplest method of doing this (particularly if you are utilizing Google Analytics) includes adding one identifier to the product URLs. We recommend utilizing the standard parameters for traffic resource (utm_source) as well as medium (utm_medium).

Now as you resubmit the data feed, the Google Analytics dashboard shows Google Shopping traffic as different from regular Google organic results.

Utilizing Google Shopping is not necessarily hard and if you are selling items online you ought to be taking advantage of all opportunities to drive eligible traffic back to your product pages via the program.