Channel Intelligence Blog

Tips for Accelerating Product Sales with Google – Recorded Webinar Now Available

Our latest webinar, Accelerating Product Sales from Google, is now available online.

In this webinar, representatives from CI and Google provide tips, such as which changes to a merchant's data feed can make the biggest impact, and discuss upcoming Google enhancements that will be available for the 2009 holiday season. Access the recorded webinar here.

Some of the points addressed include:

• How to take advantage of Google's new Gallery View feature, which will soon be widely available.
• How a merchant's data feed is used to power other Google properties, including AdWords, OneBox and the Google Affiliate Network.
• What changed with the switch from Google Base to the new Google Merchant Center.
• What to do when a merchant has issues submitting a data feed to Google.
• How reviews can be used to differentiate a merchant's listing.
• Tips for promoting local stores on Google via the product data feed.

You're sure to take away about a dozen points that you can put into practice right away. Enjoy!

New Webinar: Accelerating Product Performance and Sales from Google Starts with Your Data Feed

Have some time available this afternoon? Why not stop by for our latest webinar, scheduled for today, Wednesday, October 14, 2009, from 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM EDT. 

The webinar will feature how to boost product sales through enriched product data feeds and other retailer-tested tips, as well as introduce several new innovations merchants can draw on. Guest speakers from Google, Inc. will join CI to present upcoming Google enhancements that retailers can leverage for the 2009 holiday season.

Guest speakers Vivek Tata, Associate Product Marketing Manager, and Sarah Beritzhoff, Strategic Partner Manager, of Google, Inc., will join CI’s Larry Weeks, Senior Manager of Strategic Marketing Consulting, and Rob Streeter, Sr. Manager Partner Development, to discuss ways merchants can better leverage Google for a more profitable 2009 holiday shopping season.

A foundational element often overlooked when advertising on Google is the provision of content rich, high-quality data feeds, since Google's powerful database leverages data feeds to render the merchants' products to the right consumer at the right time. Expect to learn more about this essential element and its role in successful campaigns, as well as a host of other ways to improve sales performance. 

Register here: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/954874201

Shopping Engine Self Management Portal Gives Diapers.com a Much-Needed “Change”

We’d like to welcome Diapers.com on board with our SellCast® Solutions. Here’s their story…

Diapers.com had been advertising on shopping engines since 2007 but was outgrowing its initial service provider. The marketing team at Diapers.com still wanted to manage all the major aspects of their shopping engine program, but they needed better optimization of data feeds, better reporting--and most importantly, better management tools that would let them easily manipulate data feeds on-the-fly.

After evaluating offerings from several providers, they choose CI. 

Now after using our BETA Self Management Portal (due for September release) for over a month, they’re seeing an average conversion rate of about 4% and a return of over $6 for every dollar spent. 

See what Diapers.com had to say in the press release...

A Little Clean-up can Mean big Money

Say you’re shopping for a pair of sneakers.  You search on the web and get a ton of listings.  Which listing do you think you’re more likely to click on and eventually buy from: the one that says “Men’s Nike Air Max 360 Running Shoe” or “White Sneakers”?  Guess what, your customers are more likely to pick the first link as well.

Contrary to popular belief, most consumers don’t just roam the web clicking random products to buy.  The high majority of them are very targeted shoppers who are looking for specific items or specific types of items to purchase.  When you deliver your data to the CSEs or search engines, you’ll be far better off if you spend the time to look at what’s being sent and clean the data up.  Remove confusing text, rearrange the words, and eliminate HTML to actually help consumers find your products.  We’ve seen traffic increase by 10%, 20%, and even 50% just because someone took the time to look at their data and fix obvious problems.

In most cases, the publishers you’re sending data to don’t clean it up.  If you’re not doing it or have someone helping you, you can end up like one of the recent casualties I saw:

Product Name: “Nike Shoe”

Product Description: “function openReview(url){window.open(url, ‘ReadReview’, ‘toolbar…”

How much traffic do you think this retailer is getting?  How many sales has he lost because he never cleaned up his data? There are simply too many options out there for consumers to waste their time trying to determine if this blob of text is what they are looking for.

The product name isn’t descriptive enough to connect with consumers and the description is just plain bad.  Ensuring your product names and descriptions don’t have JavaScript or HTML is a simple way of making your data more readable by consumers and that turns into more traffic.

Take the time and look at your data or get help.  At least make sure you’re sending quality data for your most important products.  You can’t afford not to.

‘Fire and forget’…it ain’t

It’s funny how the old adage, ‘Nothing is constant, but change itself’, applies to everything.  Take building and sending data feeds as an example.   We use the concept of templates to build data feeds for our partners.  Every time we build a feed, we follow the most current template and tweak it from there.  This helps to ensure we’re following the partner's specifications and that we can create the feeds as efficiently and quickly as possible.  However, just because we’ve followed the specs today doesn’t mean the feeds are right tomorrow.

Recently Pronto added “Retail Price” and “Special Offers” to their specifications and Google added support for about a hundred new attributes.  Now, these new attributes aren’t always required, but the statement “recommened for effectiveness” is a pretty powerful one.  Even though we’ve had hundreds of feeds already built for these destinations through the templates, we still needed to go back and modify them in order to take advantage of the new data points.  While keeping up with all the changes from all the destinations can get a little monotonous, it’s pretty exciting to see traffic and sales increase because of it.

So, the next time you fire off one of your data feeds, be sure you don't just forget about it.  One little change could mean thousands of dollars in new revenue.  It’s certainly worth the time to make sure you’re leveraging every change and making your feed as effective as possible.

Them is more what you'd call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules

One of the biggest challenges we have when sending data out is determining how best to format the data for our clients and the destinations.  This doesn’t sound like it would be hard:  contact the destination you’re sending data to, get their specs, send the data.  You’d think that it would be easy, right?  Wrong.

Take a recent episode where we contacted a new destination and asked if they would have a problem with product page URLs that were redirectors from a different domain.  We got a quick, “No, our system can’t handle that. We have to have the raw URL”.  This means tracking the leads can get much more complicated.

Fortunately, we tested this ‘rule’ and found out everything worked with the redirectors we put in place.  In fact, we found out later that it wasn’t really that big of a deal and redirectors were okay.

So, the moral of this story is that having destination specifications are important.  However, understanding what’s a hard rule vs. a nice guideline can save you a lot of headache.