Our Integration Director, Matt Sullivan, has compiled a quick list of some important factors that Intelligent Reach would recommend when merchants wish to promote their products via Google Product Search or Google Merchant Centre as it often referred to now.

1. Add tracking to your Google Feed – redirects are not allowed. If you are using it to power PLA campaigns, remember to add a different tracking URL in the adwords_redirect column.

2. Provide Unique Product Identifiers – (EAN/UPC Numbers)

3. Pricing – Aim to be as competitive as possible

4. Reviews - Google take customer reviews into consideration in their rankings; consider incentivising customers to leave reviews on the following sites:

• Ciao.co.uk
• Dooyoo.co.uk
• Kelkoo.co.uk
• PriceGrabber.co.uk
• ResellerRatings.com
• ReviewCentre.com
• SafeDirectory.co.uk
• Shopsafe.co.uk
• Shopzilla.co.uk (Bizrate)

5. Optimise product titles – (Manufacturer/Brand + Product Name + Colour / Type / Specifics)

6. Avoid generic product terms – Try and be specific to decrease level of competition.

7. Provide ‘fresh’ data – Data must be accurate and up to date, stock levels, price etc. If not updated within 30 days your products will expire. Ideally you will submit daily updates.

8. Adhere to the exact Google products feed specification – This MUST include Brand, Shipping, EAN (unless clothing/furniture) Product Description, Character and Title Description must also be met.

9. Taxonomy – Google now have their own taxonomy; ensure you map your internal categories to this format in your Google Feed.

10. Clothing Category – If clothing, specify every product variation (colour and size) and also provide a grouping key. Intelligent Reach were the first feed provider to work to this specification in the UK. (This was developed in conjunction with Intelligent Reach for one of our enterprise clients)

11. Robots.txt – Google must be able to crawl your site, allow access to Google Robots and don’t block them.

12. Site Ownership – Ensure easy site verification by adding the HTML files or tags to your server via your webmaster tools.

13. Performance Optimisation – Regularly monitor performance such as traffic to key products and categories, identify areas with low conversion and optimise accordingly. Currently this is limited to optimising feed content but as all of us at IR have been saying the days of free traffic are coming to an end!