Listing items on Google Product Search

I have had several people ask me how to get items into the Google Product search listings, so here is a quick guide.

What is Google Product Search

Google product search is Google’s shopping comparison.  Like other shopping comparison engines such as Shopping.com and kelkoo it displays a list of products based on a text search.  Unlike other shopping comparison engine, however, there is no charge to display items on Google product search (previously known a Froogle).  Google products search therefore represents a free opportunity for businesses to drive traffic to their websites.

How Results are Ordered

Google orders the results based on the relevance of a product to the user’s search query.  The results can also appear in the main Google search for relevant searches.

Getting Listed

Products are submitted to Google product search via Google Base. Google Base is Google’s service for submitting any kind of information so that it can be included in the Google search results.  

After setting up a Google Base account, products can be either submitted one at at time through a online web form or submitted in bulk via a feed file (e.g. CSV).  Details of how to submit items can be found here.

Google Base is also used for submitting information to other Google services such as Google News.

Optimising Listings

Google allows vendors to define a number of fields for each product which is submitted.  Providing full, keyword rich information in these fields will help the ranking of the products.

There are three different kinds of fields available, required fields such as price and description, recommended fields such as image and UPC (barcode) and optional fields such as age range.  Vendors should use as many of these fields as possible as this will differentiate their listings.  The feed specification can be found here.

Also remember of to add a profile of your company under the setting tab of Google Base.

Measuring Traffic

I don’t think that Google product search traffic is shown separately on Google Analytics. However, Google base does provide its own statistics on how many impressions and clicks a user’s listing recieve.