With the launch of Google shopping in May 2011, Australia became the latest addition to the country list where Merchants can now list their product details both in Google shopping search as well as Google web search which shows blended results taken from shopping search. In addition to Australia, Google Product Search is currently available in the U.S., U.K., Germany, France, Japan, China, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain.

Setting up a Google Merchant Account

You can sign up to Google shopping with any of your Google accounts. However it is highly recommended to use the same log-ins for both Merchant account and Web master tools account. To submit Data feed with web page URLs you first need to register the relevant domain with the MC account. If you submit feeds of multiple websites, set up a “Multi-Client Account”. When claiming and verifying a website it is important to select the right format of your domain name. Verifying http://www.example.com only covers the www sub-host and any paths underneath, but not the entire domain. To cover the entire domain, you must verify and claim the root domain, e.g. http://example.com

It should also be noted that Merchant Center is different from “Google Base” MC is for uploading product data. Google Base is used to upload other types of structured data such as real estate data.

Creating & Submitting a Data Feed
There two file formats supported for creating your data feed.

It is very important to follow the “Products Feed Specifications” as set out in Merchant Center Guidelines. If the nature of the store/products is such that the data changes every moment where daily updates are not enough, then the ideal solution should be “Content API for Shopping”

Before submitting a data feed, it needs to be registered in Google Merchant Center to let Google know to expect the file. There are 3 basic ways to upload the data file.

If you're submitting your items for the first time to locales other than U.S., U.K., and Germany, it may take several weeks for items to be reviewed and begin appearing in the search results.

Optimizing your Shopping Data Feed

Same as you optimize your web pages for ranking in Google web search, your product listings should also be optimized for higher ranking in Google shopping search. However the ranking factors are not the same. Below are some of the key ranking factors which appear to be playing a vital role as revealed by several studies and tests done by leading SEOs in the field.

Measuring Performance

 This can be done in Three ways

How We Can Help You

We at Netstarter were ahead of the game and have already built the tools to connect our client's ecommerce sites with Google Shopping. Feel free to contact us if you would like to get expert and professional consultation in optimising your Google Shopping listings.