TUGCG – The Unofficial Google Commerce Guide

Google Shopper is a Labs product.  As an Android phone user, I’ve tested the application out a number of times.  The product allows you to perform an image search, voice search, or a text search for a product.  Image search recognizes cover art and scans barcodes.  Voice search is self explanatory, although for some reason, I’m always pleasantly surprised that it understands what I’m saying.   And text search is the normal text search you’d perform on any computer.  The application allows the consumer to view a history of product searches.  There’s also a way to ‘star’ a product like you’d star an email in Gmail, but I’ve never been able to figure out that feature.

Once you’ve performed a search, you get results that look just like Google Shopping search results.  And that’s because Google Shopper is just a mobile entry path for Google Shopping.  Which means that if a merchant wants to take advantage of Google Shopper, they have to submit a Google Merchant Center data feed.  Again, the power of the data feed at work.  Understanding one of the themes of this blog yet?

Once on a product page, which is just a stripped down version of a Google Shopping/Google Product Search product page, you have four options: see an overview of the product, compare prices, read reviews, and see product details.  As this is all driven by Google Shopping, all of this information is fairly straight forward, although I especially like the idea of reviews and product details.  I’ve stood in a Macy’s looking at luggage, scanned a barcode, quickly checked to make sure I wasn’t being ripped off, then checked out reviews of the bag.  And in comparing laptops, the product details came in handy as those little cards at Best Buy don’t always go into the detail I want.

On each product page, there’s an option to broadcast/share the product in lots of ways.  The way my Android phone is set up and connected with other services I use, the way of broadcasting products is similar to how it works for Picasa.  Clicking on the share button, I can send it to Facebook, Twitter (through whatever client I’m using), Gmail, regular mail, or text message.  I’m sure other methods of sharing would come up if I were connected to other services.   So in a couple clicks I could easily share a product with my friends on Facebook and ask for feedback.  Unfortunately, I haven’t gotten this feature to work in the last couple months as I get the error message: ‘Your link could not be shared.’ when I try to share it on Facebook.  (Paul, any help would be appreciated!)

When people talk about ecommerce these days, they are usually talk about transacting on the mobile phone.  Yes, this is a fast growing area of ecommerce, but I think the much more exciting prospect at this point is helping consumers make informed buying decisions when not in front of a computer.  This can be done through all the features that Google Shopper has available: check price, read reviews, see product details, share with friends, etc.  And then there’s the connection with Local stores, the so called Blue Dots and services like Milo, to help a consumer figure out if a product is available locally.  More on that later.

In November of 2009, Google made Product Extensions available to all US merchants.

…product extensions are a way for you to enrich your existing AdWords ads with more relevant and specific information. Product extensions allow you to use your existing Google Merchant Center account to highlight your products directly in your search ads. When your AdWords text ad appears, and your Google Merchant Center account contains products that are relevant to the searcher’s query, product extensions show the images, titles, and prices of your products in a plusbox under your ad.

There are two formats for Product Extensions, depending on the placement

Format 1: Top placement.  See it in action.

Format 2: Side placement.  See it in action.

This is a great opportunity for all merchants and Google as data  from Google and Rimm Kaufman Group has shown that Product Extensions increase click through rate (CTR).  With this new ad format, Google gets more clicks, which makes them more money, and the merchant gets more click throughs, which means more sales (assuming on site conversion remains constant – and no one has said anything to the contrary).

Product Extensions is an AdWords product which means that merchants are charged on a Cost Per Click (CPC) basis, as they would be for their normal AdWords ad.  A merchant is only charged when a searcher clicks through on a listing, not when a searcher clicks the + or – sign.

To get started with Product Extension ads, a merchants need to connect their AdWords and Google Merchant Center accounts.  This is done within Google Merchant Center.  Just click on Settings > AdWords and enter your AdWords Customer ID:

It might take 24hrs for the hookup to take effect.

What most merchants don’t realize, though, is that there are important ways to control and target the Extension ads

What’s more, product extensions give you the option to prefer which products are displayed when a user’s query triggers your ads. For example, you may sell dozens of laptop computers but you want to promote the newest or best selling inventory using product extensions when a user searches for ‘laptop computer’ on Google.com. By making a simple addition to your Merchant Center account, you can easily control the products that display for certain queries. Of course, you can always use automatic targeting, and let AdWords determine the most relevant products in your account to a user’s query.

This targeting takes place by adding attributes to the Google Merchant Center data feed.  We strongly encourage you to read the directions here.  Here are the accepted attributes:

-adwords_queryparam

-adwords_prefer_for_query

-adwords_redirect

The adwords_prefer_for_query is especially powerful as it allows a merchant to target the exact offer for a specific query.

Product Extensions, like Product Listing Ads, are part of Google’s Ad Formats initiative (video or text).

Product reviews are an essential part of online shopping. BazaarVoice and PowerReviews provide incredible value to merchants and eventually the consumers who use the reviews to make informed buying decisions.

Back in April, Google announced its Product Reviews Program in partnership with BazaarVoice. In the blog post, Google mentioned that it would display the logo of the merchant that a review came from on Google Product Search.

Through the program, we will begin featuring full-length product reviews and user ratings from participating retailers and manufacturers wherever it will help users with their shopping, including in our search results and advertising programs. On Google Product Search, for example, we’ll feature your logo alongside representative reviews from your site, increasing brand exposure for your web store at a key point in the conversion process.

I’m starting to see these logos.  Here are some examples:

Search: Nesco Professional FD-75PR 700 Watt Food Dehydrator – see logo for Northern Tool

Search: Cuisinart CBT-500 SmartPower 600 Watt Chrome Blender -  see logos for HSN, QVC, and Best Buy

Obviously a great branding opportunity for any merchant.  Google will have other partners in the program and will also allow merchants to submit directly if they don’t work with one of their partners.

In November of 2009, Google started testing a new ad format called Google Product Lising Ads.  I will refer to the ad format as Product Listing Ads or just Product Listings.  While Product Listings was announced on the Google AdWords blog and is called a new feature of Adwords in this Google Ad Innovations video, it’s easier to consider this a Google Affiliate Network product as the merchant pays on a Cost Per Acquisition/Action (CPA) basis.

Regardless of which unit within Google owns this product at this point, here are the important details:

Update: Read my blog post on Stephanie Tilenius’ keynote at Internet Retailer.

Even though Google has been active in ecommerce for about 8 years, Stephanie Tilenius will give an address at Internet Retailer entitled Google enters the commerce arena.  Maybe that means that Google Product Search is finally ready to come out of Beta! 

Stephanie Tilenius joined Google as VP of eCommerce joined Google from eBay back in February.   According to this NYTimes article, and in typical Google fashion, Google said little about her exact role.

This will be Stephanie’s second official talk as VP of eCommerce for Google.  Last month Stephanie gave a presentation at ChannelAdvisor’s Catalyst conference.

According to this SearchEngineWatch.com article by Chris Sherman, Google launched Froogle as a free shopping engine back in December of 2002.

Froogle is organized as a directory, with 15 different product categories.  These categories include Apparel & Accessories, Arts & Entertainment, Auto & Vehicles, Baby, Books, Music & Video, Computers, Electronics, Flowers, Food & Gourmet, Health & Personal Care, Home & Garden, Office, Sports & Outdoors and Toys & Games.

“Froogle shines particularly well with some of the more esoteric queries,” said Jonathan Rosenberg, Google Vice President of Product Management. This is because Google has tried to build a one of the most extensive product search tools available on the web, going for both breadth and depth of coverage.

Results are determined by an algorithm that’s similar to Google’s PageRank method used for determining ordinary web search results.  There’s no paid inclusion or any other way for merchants to influence the way their products are presented in results, says Rosenberg.

“Data in Froogle comes from two sources,” said Rosenberg. “Merchant feeds, and the rest is a crawl of web pages that identifies product offers.”

Froogle was an early ecommerce move for Google, working with merchants like Overstock to understand retail.  Froogle really didn’t take off like many of Google’s services.   Many reporters therefore called Froogle a failure.  I wouldn’t call Froogle a failure, I’d call Froogle a test.  A really slow, long test.  As far as I know, this was the first time Google took in data feeds from merchants for any purpose.  That’s a big change.

So why didn’t Froogle ‘take off’ as some would expect?  The main rumor I heard throughout the years was that one of the two Google founders liked the idea of Froogle while the other founder didn’t.  Without unanimous support, there wasn’t really a serious effort to improve the service.

I interviewed a PR rep about Froogle in September 2005.  They were definitely very closed way back when.

But by the holiday shopping season of 2005, while reporters were still not sold on Froogle, the shopping site was starting to drive traffic for merchants.  As one merchant commented on ComparisonEngines in January 2006:

And the great thing was that Froogle was free, a complete departure from the other shopping engines on the web.  I was starting to see the light…along with many other merchants on the web.

Froogle was both the way to submit products as well as the shopping engine.  In November 2005, Google launched Google Base to accept data feeds which would be used to power Froogle (as well as other types of vertical searches on Google Base). If you’re getting confused, you’re not alone.  Everyone was confused.  You can read Google’s first newsletter to merchants about Google Base over at ComparisonEngines.com.

While the name of the official submission method changed, what’s more important is that Google started to change the way merchants thought about their data.  They started to talk a lot about attributes.  And what’s really cool is that Google started to allow some flexibility of attributes, basically admitting that it didn’t know everything about every product.  The merchant was the expert.  None of the established shopping engines (NexTag, Shopping.com, PriceGrabber, etc.) allowed for this type of data feed customization.

We’ve also expanded our product feed format to include some new standard fields (now called attributes). You can specify everything from quantity and unit price to accepted forms of payment and even define your own attributes. If you have product information that doesn’t fit into one of our defined attributes.

I was critical of Froogle and Google Base back in December of 2005, writing a series of posts: Froogle Spam, Froogle Leftover Spam, and Cleaning up Froogle – One Post at a Time.  But Froogle kept moving in the right direction.

In 2007, Google ditched the name Froogle and replaced it with Google Product Search.  Google was getting smarter about branding.   While Froogle was a cute name, Google Product Search aligned the shopping site’s name with many other Google services.  And it was around this time that Google started to commit resources to further developing its shopping site.

Whenever analysts ask me about Google’s commerce ambitions, I tell them to watch Epic 2014 or 2015.  Not all of Epic’s predictions have panned out and many aren’t applicable to ecommerce, but it’s a thought provoking starting point for this blog.

Go ahead, click on the pic below.  You might have seen the video before, but it’s an important 8min reminder of Google’s potential in many areas.

Googlezon as imagined in Epic 2014

Epic 2015′s focus isn’t commerce, but 4:36 into the video, Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson imagine the creation of Googlezon:

Google and Amazon join forces forming Googlezon.  Google supplies the Google Grid and unparralleled search technology.  Amazon supplies the social recommendation engine and its huge commercial infrastructure.  Together they use their detailed knowledge of every user’s social network, demographics, buying habits, and reading interests to provide total customization of content and advertising.

What Robin and Matt didn’t imagine is that Google itself would create its own commercial infrastructure, Googe Checkout.  In June of 2006, Google Checkout launched in the US.  This provides Google with all it needs to provide an end to end commerce experience imagined in Epic 2015.  Google has the search technology, social recommendation engine (think Google Product Reviews program), commercial infrastructure (think Google App Engine and Google Checkout), and detailed knowledge of every user’s social network (think Facebook Connect), demographics (think Google Analytics), and buying habits (think Google Checkout).

The key is tying all of these pieces together to provide “total customization of content and advertising.”  You can see Google starting to do this with Google Merchant Center and the Google Merchant Center data feed.  While not the lynchpin of Google’s commerce efforts, the Google Merchant Center data feed is damn close.

The Google Merchant Center data feed powers Google Shopping (aka Google Product Search), Extension Ads (a Google AdWords product), Google Product Ads (a Google Affiliate Network product), Google Commerce Search, Google Mobile Shopping (Blue dots!), and it’s easy to make the leap to believe that the Google Merchant Center data feed will also power Google Places, Google’s updated version of Local Business Center (it is now powered by a separate Business Feed).  I  joked early on that SingleFeed’s tag line should be ‘One Feed to Rule them All’ and it seems it would be an equally appropriate tag line for Google Merchant Center.  With GMC’s (yes, it’s time for an acronym) hooks into other Google produts, you can start to picture of all the ways Google could power or enable commerce for merchants.

Don’t worry, I’ll explain all of these pieces in more detail and give plenty of examples.  That is in fact the point of this blog!