The Many Forms of Google OneBox Shopping Results
Back in 2006, I wrote about Google OneBox results as part of a 4 part series that also looked at Yahoo! Shortcuts, Ask Smart Answers, and Microsoft’s Instant Answers. Google’s OneBox results as they pertain to shopping search have mushroomed over the years and Google currently has a number of OneBox shopping results. Here are the most common:
Basic 5-Pack:
The 5-Pack Normalized (multiple stores selling the same product):
The 5-Pack Normalized with Ratings:
Basic 3-Pack:
The 3-Pack Normalized (multiple stores selling the same product):
The 3-Pack Normalized with Ratings:
And the rare 4-Pack Normalized with Reviews
These OneBox shopping results are all obviously variations on a theme. A OneBox result starts with a picture, title, and price, but can be supplemented with normalized listings and reviews.
The most common question I get is how a merchant gets listed in Google’s OneBox shopping results. The easy answer is that the merchant has to submit a high quality data feed to Google Merchant Center. What is a high quality data feed? It starts with meeting Google Merchant Center’s basic data feed requirements, but the merchant has to go much further, improving the quality of the data and adding more relevant data to the data feed. Think of it this way, if you submit the basic minimum data feed requirements to Google Merchant Center, you’re probably in the 50th percentile in terms of the quality of the data feed. To move up to the 60th, 70th, or even 90th percentile, you have to add recommended attributes, optional attributes, custom attributes and improve the quality of the values of each attribute. You also need to pay attention to settings like Tax and Shipping, you have to submit bigger, higher quality images, and you have to submit fresh product data whenever there are changes in your data feed.
And in general, a merchant has to take data feed optimization (DFO) just as seriously as they would SEO. If you’re interested in improving the quality of your data feed, check out LoveYourFeed and start running tests on the amount of data you’re submitting and the quality of that data.
