15 December 2011
Google has recently introduced a number of changes to Google Merchant shopping which require webmasters and online retailers to update their shopping feeds to include the many new attributes in order to be listed in the shopping portal.

We have updated many of our ecommerce clients feeds with the required new fields and Google Shopping does appear to be much happier with these offerings.

However, it remains to be seen if these new feed files will increase product visibility in Google Shopping as many of our clients have had varying degrees of success on how their products appear in the Google Shopping search results? We have contacted Google for further clarification on this but as yet, we have had no reply. We will post something when we do.

At a minimum, the following are the fields you should be considering for your Google Shopping feed file:

product_url
id
title
description
image_url
price
brand
condition
google_product_category
product_type
gtin
availability
currency

The Google Product Category is important as this is decided by Google through their taxonomy which can be found here - http://www.google.com/support/merchants/bin/answer.py?answer=160081

The Google Taxonomy allows you to decide on your category for your products and a good example to highlight this is Golf. If you sell golf products it is fairly simple to find the most suitable Google Product Category for this i.e.

"Sporting Goods > Outdoor Recreation > Golf

Additionally, Google will allow you to go a little further and be more targeted i.e.

"Sporting Goods > Outdoor Recreation > Golf > Golf Bag Accessories > Golf Bag Case

Overall though, the Google taxonomy is a little limiting and could do with more options to allow you to choose from.

A good way round this is to include in your feed file product_type. Product type allows you to tell Google the type of product you are selling i.e. Golf Shirt, Golf Trousers etc. So, if you keep you Google taxonomy to something like - "Sporting Goods > Outdoor Recreation > Golf and add in your product types you should be fine.

Overall, I agree that tidying up Google shopping does make sense and their feed file is still the easiest to set-up compared to the thousands out there that are not. However, I would expect our clients to appear better in Google Shopping as a result of making these changes and I will keep an eye on this to see if this does happen.

What to keep in mind with Google Shopping is to make sure your feed files have the required mandatory fields that Google insist on. If you don't, you will soon find yourself gone from the portal and fairly quickly too based on our clients feedback.

Additionally, including some non mandatory fields in you feed also helps - If you sell clothing of different colours and sizes etc, consider including the "product variant" attributes in your file. These are not mandatory yet but in time I'm sure they will be and it makes sense to consider then now and you never know Google might use these attributes in determining search returns for Google Shopping.

Best of Luck

John