The year-end holidays are the biggest shopping season, and we know that many of you have been busy with your site preparations for months. To help, here are some tips on how to get the most out of your Google Product Search feeds this holiday. They can help you improve the quality of your data feeds, prioritize the types of data to send us, and help more shoppers find your products.

Submit tax and shipping data for your items: We'll soon be displaying tax and shipping information on Google Product Search to provide buyers with more accurate price information. Buyers use tax and shipping estimates to help them determine what to buy and which merchant to buy it from, so we strongly encourage all merchants to submit this data. Here's more information on how to do so.

Include unique product identifiers: In addition to using our five required attributes, be sure to include the recommended attributes relevant to your products, such as product identifiers like MPN, UPC, or ISBN. By including these, you're giving us more information to help us include your products on Google Product Search product pages (our merchant comparison pages) when multiple merchants are selling the same product.

Use effective titles: There's nothing like an accurate title to tell shoppers at a glance exactly what you're selling, so be sure to use detailed and descriptive titles for your products. Do keep in mind that Product Search truncates titles to under 70 characters, so avoid exceedingly lengthy titles.

Write accurate descriptions: Descriptions offer an overview of the product you're selling, so make sure that your descriptions are accurate and more than a few words in length. But if your descriptions are over 150 characters, you may want to shorten them to only include the most crucial information, as Product Search truncates longer descriptions.

Submit your feeds frequently: Lastly, remember to submit your data feeds regularly -- up to once a day -- to ensure that your product information is current for shoppers.

We hope that these tips will help you make the most of the holiday shopping season. For more holiday tips relating to other Google products that online retailers use (such as Google AdWords), please visit this page.

Posted by: Jessica Ng, Product Marketing Manager

We've always emphasized the importance of submitting high-quality product feeds to Google Product Search. This means submitting accurate, up-to-date product information in the form of attributes, as well as abiding by best practices for formatting these attributes. Doing so goes a long way toward helping shoppers find your items more easily.

Today, we're pleased to announce the addition of a new "Data Quality" tab in your Google Base account. On this tab, you'll find a host of suggestions for improving the quality of the item listings in your product feed. For example, you can find recommendations on the length of your title and description fields, or get a snapshot of the number of items in your feed that are missing key attributes. By addressing these issues, you'll be able to improve the quality of your feeds and help more shoppers find your products.

We hope you're as excited about this new tab as we are, and that you'll find the recommendations helpful.

Posted by: Jessica Ng, Product Marketing Manager

We've received some feedback from Google Product Search merchants asking for more direction on which values to include for the product_type attribute. We listened to your feedback, and today we're unveiling our new categorization system that you can use for describing the product type of your items. Product_type is an optional attribute that you can use to indicate the category (or categories) of the product being sold. We recommend that you use the category paths and values from our new product taxonomy.

The Google product taxonomy is a tree of categories that describe product families, with verticals (Electronics, Home & Garden, etc.) at the highest level, followed by more specific product families or products within these broad categories (such as Electronics > Audio > Audio Players & Recorders > MP3 Players).

If you already have a system of categorization of your own, you may also use that. Just include the full category path as the value for the product_type attribute (e.g., Books > Non-Fiction > Sports > Baseball).

We hope that this new taxonomy provides you with more suggestions on how to accurately describe your items, so that you can help even more shoppers find your products! For more information on our taxonomy and instructions on how to format the product_type attribute, please read this Help Center article.

Posted by: Weiying Li, Google Base Support

You can take advantage of this option when you register your data feed in your account. Select the type of feed you’re registering and then chose from a drop-down list of feed formats. We'll automatically format your feeds for proper integration and uploading into Google Product Search.

Google Base now offers more feedback on the performance of your items. Log in to your Google Base account and click on the new "Performance" tab.
You'll find information on how many items you have uploaded and how many of the items are active. You can also see how many clicks your items received on Google (e.g. on Product Search or on Real Estate search) and how many were retrieved through the Google Base Data API.

This new tool will allow you to spot trends with historical graphs of your account performance. You can also download detailed tables that show the performance of each of your top items.

We're excited about this new feature and hope you find it useful. More information can be found in our Help Center. And please share your feedback with us here.


Posted by Matthias Ernst, Software Engineer

Posted by Gilbert Dietrich, German Google Base Team

Many of you have been asking for a way to easily upload and publish items for different countries to Google Base from the comfort of your account. We listened to your feedback and have created an international dashboard within your Google Base account, which lets you select different target countries for your feeds. This means that you no longer need to log in to three separate domains (.com .co.uk, and .de) to submit feeds to each country. Now you can simply log in to your usual account and have access to all your feeds, regardless of the country for which they were registered.

For example, if you select "US" as your target country from the drop-down menu instead of "All", only your US feeds will be displayed in your account. Within your Account Settings you can also choose a dashboard display language of your choice, independent of the country to which you are submitting your feeds.

Additionally, you can easily register your feeds for the various countries using one account. During the registration process, if you want to specify a location different than your default target country, you will be able to choose your desired target country for that particular feed.

Posted by Jessica Ng, Product Marketing Manager

If you're a Google Product Search provider, you've always known that we classify our attributes into three categories: "required," "recommended," and "optional." We've recently updated the list of attributes in each category to make it easier for providers to submit their product information and prioritize the attributes relevant to their products. Here is an updated list of attribute requirements, along with some information on what the categories mean.

Required attributes are attributes that you're, well, required to include for all your items. We won't be able to process and approve items in your feed that are missing required attributes. The following is a list of required attributes:

description
id
link
price
title

Recommended attributes are ones that we strongly recommend including for your data feeds, and we consider them as important as required attributes. However, we realize that not all providers and items have this information available; therefore, if your feed contains items without this information, we will still process them, but it will be more difficult to ensure that they appear for relevant search queries. The following is a list of recommended attributes:

brand
condition
image_link
isbn
mpn
upc

All other attributes are optional attributes. Optional attributes give you more ways to describe your items and additionally help shoppers find your products.

We hope that this update will make it easier for you to create data feeds and prioritize the time spent on them. For more information on these attributes, you can visit our feed guidelines here. Also, keep your eyes out for status messages on the data feeds dashboard that will provide additional guidance on the attributes we're recommending for your items.

To see attribute requirements for submitting item types other than Products, please visit the data feed overview in the Help Center.

Posted by Alyssa England, Associate Product Marketing Manager

In Q1, we attended several industry events where merchants were interested in hearing about other merchants' experiences with our commerce solutions products, particularly Google Product Search. With that in mind, we wanted to share some feedback we recently received from Zappos.com.

Zappos offers shoes, bags, and apparel as an online retailer that stocks more than 3 million SKUs and has more than 7 million customers. Zappos started using Google Product Search to drive more traffic and sales to their site.

In a case study, Darrin Shamo, manager of Zappos' SEM/SEO initiatives, recently shared with us that "Product Search brought in an average of 380,000 visitors a month during the vital holiday shopping season of November-December 2007 -- an increase of 400% over the year before. And the conversion rate was higher than all other comparison shopping engines in our portfolio."

"Our objective here is to lower marketing costs while hitting our target return on investment (ROI) across campaigns," Shamo continued. "Google Product Search is free, and that helps us accomplish this goal. By adding Product Search to our comparison shopping engine mix, we are able to boost our aggregate ROI by 11%."

Learn more about Google Product Search.

Posted by Dimitris Meretakis, Product Manager

To keep your items in Base current, you should send us a new data feed as often as your item information changes. The great news is that you don't have to send us your file manually anymore. Now Google Base can download your data feed from your website. Here's how to get started:

1. Make sure your updated data feed is available on a fixed, externally accessible URL on your website.
2. Define the schedule that Google Base should follow to retrieve the bulk upload file from that URL.

Google Base will retrieve and process your data feed according to the schedule you define. You can set daily, weekly or monthly schedules and specify the exact time your file should be retrieved. Just make sure that your bulk upload URL belongs to the website you registered in your Account Settings. Within your Account Settings you can also choose whether you want to receive email notifications when Base retrieves and processes your data feed. You can find all the details and step-by-step instructions about setting your schedule in our Help Center article.

Posted by Dimitris Meretakis, Product Manager

The Google Base data API is used to manage and publish all kinds of data. Some of this data is particularly time-sensitive, like news or events that will expire in a matter of hours. Other data has more value over the long term, such as recipes that are intended to be used and shared indefinitely.

To streamline the publishing process and make sure that time-sensitive items appear in the snippets feed as quickly as possible, Google Base now differentiates between high- and low-priority items. High-priority items are published immediately. Low-priority items are published to the snippets feed within a day, and are still instantly available on the items feed.

For now, the default priority is "high." On May 8, we'll set the default priority to "low" and set quotas for high-priority items to ensure fairness. We'll provide more information about quotas in an upcoming blog post, so keep your eyes peeled.

For detailed information about how the new priorities work, refer to the documentation. As always, if you have questions or comments, we'd love to hear from you.

Thanks for your participation in Google Base.

By Alex Dovlecel, Google Base API Engineering Team

If you've been wondering what the Google Base API team has been working on lately, wonder no more. We are happy to tell you that a couple of new features were released in the last couple of weeks.


Location queries
We think locations are extremely useful for building a large variety of applications. Mashups of Google Maps spring to mind. They look cool and are easy to develop. That's why we devoted some of our time to improving location queries.Now you can:

• Query addresses: The radius (or lack thereof) in a location query will help you tune your results. If a radius is not provided, Google Base will match the items that are located in the specified area (zip code, city, state, country). If you include a radius, then Google Base will return the items located at a distance less than the radius from the center of the specified area. Sounds complicated? It's not. Let's take a couple of examples:
  [location:@"Mountain View, CA"] will match items located in the city of Mountain View, California. It doesn't matter if they are close or far from the center of the town.
  [location:@"Mountain View, CA" + 1mi] will match items located within one mile of Mountain View's geographic center.
  [location:@"Washington"] will match items located in Washington. You can do the same for countries by replacing Washington with a country name like Switzerland, or France. By providing a ZIP code in the address string, like in this query: [location:@"93430, CA"] the API will make sure to return only items that are located in the given zip code (Mountain View, California).


• Query rectangular areas: For certain types of applications (like Google Maps mashups), querying for a rectangular lat/long boundary is important. Now you can easily do this by using the following syntax: [location: @+12.9+12.20..@+14.5+12.45].

For more information about location queries, refer to the developer's guide.


Reference attributes
We know items are not always isolated entities. Sometimes it makes sense to have one item point to another. Of course, you can build a relation between two items by using attributes of type "url", but that can be cumbersome. To address this case, we introduced a new "reference" attribute type. Now you can insert an item containing attributes that reference another Google Base item by passing the ID of the referenced item. For example the attribute
<g:my_ref_attribute type='reference'>17891817243016304554> refers to the item that can be accessed at http://www.google.com/base/feeds/snippets/17891817243016304554
You can also query for items that reference another item. The query [my ref attribute(reference): 17891817243016304554] will return all the items that have a reference attribute named "my ref attribute" which points to the item identified by http://www.google.com/base/feeds/snippets/17891817243016304554.

Make no mistake - Google Base is definitely not a relational database. You can't do join operations in queries. Google Base does not enforce referential integrity for your items. References can help you interconnect your data, so that you or anyone else who finds your data can more easily navigate from one item to the next.
For more information about reference attributes, refer to the developer's guide.


Images and thumbnails
If you want to embed images for items in Google Base in your website, we have good news for you. Images are now stored at base.googlehosted.com, and you can link to them directly. The Base API also supports a new value for the content query parameter called thumbnails. If you include the thumbnails argument, all of your g:image_link attributes will include links to the related thumbnails.

For example, querying reviews for "Golden Compass":
http://www.google.com/base/feeds/snippets/-/reviews?bq=golden+compass&content=thumbnails

... will return, among the others, the item:
http://www.google.com/base/feeds/snippets/11204632290451546619

...which contains links to thumbnails:

<g:image_link type='url'>http://i.walmart.com/i/p/09/78/06/79/87/0978067987924_100X100.jpg
  <gm:thumbnail width='60' height='60'>
http://base.googlehosted.com/base_media?q=http%3A%2F%2Fi.walmart.com%2Fi%2Fp%2F09%2F78%2F06%2F79%2F87%2F0978067987924_100X100.jpg&dhm=ffffffff80c81128&size=5
  </gm:thumbnail>
  <gm:thumbnail width='90' height='90'>
http://base.googlehosted.com/base_media?q=http%3A%2F%2Fi.walmart.com%2Fi%2Fp%2F09%2F78%2F06%2F79%2F87%2F0978067987924_100X100.jpg&dhm=ffffffff80c81128&size=2
  </gm:thumbnail>
  <gm:thumbnail width='120' height='120'>
http://base.googlehosted.com/base_media?q=http%3A%2F%2Fi.walmart.com%2Fi%2Fp%2F09%2F78%2F06%2F79%2F87%2F0978067987924_100X100.jpg&dhm=ffffffff80c81128&size=3
  </gm:thumbnail>
  <gm:thumbnail width='220' height='220'>
http://base.googlehosted.com/base_media?q=http%3A%2F%2Fi.walmart.com%2Fi%2Fp%2F09%2F78%2F06%2F79%2F87%2F0978067987924_100X100.jpg&dhm=ffffffff80c81128&size=4
  </gm:thumbnail>
</g:image_link>

For more information about using images in your application, refer to the developer's guide.

We hope these new features will spark some ideas for applications to build on top of Google Base. The more you use the API, the more we'll give back. Stay tuned to find out about more new features coming soon.

By: Chris Azalde, Google Base Support

We've been listening to your feedback, and we recognize that our terminology 'bulk uploads' isn't necessarily jiving with the way that you refer to your large content submissions. In light of that, we've recently renamed our multiple item submission method to 'data feeds' because, well, we just want to speak the same language as our trusted content providers.

This is only a terminology change, so just know that when we refer to your 'data feeds' or 'feeds,' it's what we used to refer to as 'bulk uploads' or 'uploads.'

Thanks for your participation in Google Base, and please keep that feedback coming.

By: Chad Hancock, Google Base Support

One of my responsibilities on the Google Base team is to help determine which attributes to create for which verticals. In light of that, I'm pleased to announce the triumphant return of one of my favorite attributes: model_number. Back by popular demand, a model number is a unique number or ID code assigned to a product by the manufacturer. This code is sometimes equivalent to MPN (Manufacturer's Part Number), but in cases where it's not, you can include both attributes to give us even more data about your items. This attribute is a great way to provide more information about your items, which in turn will help users find them.

Oh, and while you're at it, don't forget about some of our other great attributes. MPN and UPC (Universal Product Code) are essential for describing most products, especially electronics. If you're sending us books, ISBN (International Standard Book Number) is key. And the brand attribute is great for, well, anything that has a brand. These attributes in particular are really important for connecting your products with the people who want to buy them.

By: Dimitris Meretakis, Product Manager

Be it products, housing, jobs or vehicles, we want to make it easy for you to upload and manage your content in Base. A number of useful features are underway, starting with today's release of a new dashboard for bulk uploads. The new dashboard provides a better overview of the status of your bulk uploads and your items.

New dashboard:


Old dashboard:


We'll keep you posted as new features develop. And as always, we look forward to your feedback and welcome your suggestions. Many of our best ideas come from you!

By: Jessica Ng, Product Marketing Manager

Today, I'm thrilled to announce the launch of the Google Product Search Partner Program. The idea behind partnering with data feed providers is to give merchants like you an additional resource to support you in uploading your products. Our partners can help you in many ways when it comes to getting your products onto Product Search, including submitting your feeds with all required attributes, uploading catalogs daily, and supporting you with a dedicated technical team. This program is also great because we'll be able to give people who are searching more relevant results by ensuring quality feeds. In fact, the occasion has inspired me to write a little ode, based on the sonnet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Please enjoy!

How do I love thee, Google Product Search Partner Program? Let me count the ways.
I love thee for expert feeds to the depth and breadth
My products may need, if ever out of sight
For the grace of ease and ideal data management
I love thee to the healthy levels of
Qualified traffic, whether by impression or click-through.
I love thee conveniently, as your dedication allows;
I love thee smartly, as up-to-date products achieve.
I love thee with all catalogs put to use
In my once solitude and memories of overtime.
I love thee with a confidence I seemed to lose
With my misplaced spreadsheets and feeds, - I love thee with trust,
Daily Updates, Attributes, for all my items! - and, what’s more,
I shall but love thee better by visiting here.

By: Jessica Behling, Google Base Support

We're currently conducting scheduled maintenance on the Google Base site and expect maintenance to continue through Wednesday, July 18th. During this time, you'll be unable to register a new bulk upload file or upload your file to Google Base either through your account's dashboard or by using FTP. Of course, this will not affect your existing items or listings in any way. We're working to complete this maintenance as quickly as possible, and we'll let you know on the Google Base Help Discussion Group as soon as file registration and uploading are available again.

By: Chris Azalde, Google Base Support

We recently added UPC, MPN and ISBN to the list of required attributes for bulk uploads of the Products item type. Providing this information will help us rank items better and allow us to deliver more relevant results to our users. Starting today, we're asking everyone submitting items to Google Base US whose items are in the category of products and use these unique identifiers to begin including them for their items. As we will be using this information to categorize your items, please take particular care in the values you provide for these attributes. Only universally-recognized values should be included for these three attributes. Not including accurate values for these fields can have a negative effect on the ranking of your items. Finally, these new attribute requirements are currently only for items submitted to Google Base US.

For more information about these unique identifiers, please select the specific attribute below:

MPN or Manufacturer Part Number, is the unique part number or code for an item determined by the manufacturer for that product.

UPC or Universal Product Code, is a unique numerical identifier for commercial products, usually associated with a bar-code printed on retail merchandise.

ISBN or International Standard Book Number, is a unique numerical identifier for all commercial books. You can find your book's ISBN on the back of the book along with a bar-code.

If you have any questions about this change, feel free to discuss it at this Google Groups thread. You might also find the answer you're looking for on our FAQ.

By Stephen Salinas, Google Base Support

As a Base user, you're probably well aware of the increase in traffic that Base listings can deliver to your online business. Now you can convert more of that traffic into sales with Google Checkout, a fast and convenient checkout process that allows customers to buy from you quickly and easily with a single username and password.

If you currently list individual products on Base-hosted pages, you can now place a Google Checkout "buy" button on each of your listings. Customers who use Checkout can buy from you quickly and securely – and you'll be able to use Checkout to process their orders and charge their credit or debit cards. Learn how to add Google Checkout to your Base listings.

Checkout can also be integrated into your own website alongside your existing process. Google Base merchants that accept Google Checkout on their sites get their product listings and AdWords ads badged with the Google Checkout logo in Google search results, which sets them apart from competitors and lets customers know that buying from those sites will be quick and easy. And until 2008, Checkout merchants pay no transaction processing fees. Learn how to offer Google Checkout on your site.

For more information about using Google Checkout with Google Base, visit the Help Discussion Group for tips from other Google Base users.

By: Jassim Latif, Google Base Support

Here on the Google Base support team, we're always trying to find new ways to provide you with fast and efficient answers. Here are a couple of suggestions to quickly connect you with the information you're looking for:

Use the Search Box
If you know what you're looking for, use the Search box on the top, right-hand side of the page to search the entire Google Base Help Center.

Visit the Help Discussion Group
Every time you look for an answer using the search box, links to relevant results in the Help Discussion Group will appear at the bottom of the page. Learn from and talk with other people who use Google Base.

In addition to connecting you with answers, we're continually adding new content to make it easier for you to quickly find what you need. If a Help Center article doesn't answer your question, let us know by voting "yes" or "no" under the "Was this information helpful?" section at the bottom of every Help Center article. We'll use your feedback to improve our Help Center content.

By Brett Crosby, Google Analytics

Do you know how much traffic you're getting from Google Base? Google Analytics is a free and easy way to monitor all traffic coming to your site, including traffic from your Google Base listings. At first glance, it would seem tracking listings from Google Base would be simple. However, since Base listings often appear within the regular search results on Google, it can be tricky to differentiate traffic from the two sources. One way to differentiate traffic is to create unique landing pages on your website specifically for Base listings. You can do this by simply creating two versions of the same page on your website, but giving one a slightly different name. Here's an example:

Regular landing page: http://example.com/page1.html
Unique Base landing page: http://example.com/page2.html

By creating two versions of the same page on your website and submitting the unique landing page URLs to Base, Google Analytics can show you exactly how much traffic is being sent to your website from Base. Just make sure to include the unique landing page URL in the link attribute of your bulk upload file.

If you're comfortable editing the HTML on your website, you can get started by signing up for a free Google Analytics account (or if you have an AdWords account, log in and click the "Analytics" tab), and adding the code to the pages of your site. That's it. In a very short time you should see the effectiveness of your Google Base listings. To get a deeper understanding of the power of Google Analytics, take a look at Conversion University. But if this all sounds like too much work, we have many authorized consultants who can do the legwork and help with analysis. If you're already using Google Analytics to track your Base listings, share your experience in our Google Base Help Discussion. Whatever you do, the key is to start tracking so you can make the best decisions about how to drive quality traffic to your site.

By Marc Scaletta, Google Base Support

Heya, I'm Marc, and I've been working on the Google Base team since February 2006. Up until a couple years ago, I spent the majority of my life in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. Then my wanderlust finally overcame my rational side and I moved to the Bay Area. When I got here, I heard great tales of the Google culture (and food!) and decided that it seemed like the perfect place for me. Given my background in e-commerce, the Base team seemed a natural fit, and here I am.

My job includes answering questions when you write in, and also looking over your bulk uploads to make sure everything is going smoothly. In college, I studied computer science, so I deal with some of the more technical aspects of Google Base as well. For instance, I created the ColdFusion Example for the Google Base data API -- a mashup application that uses both Google Base and Google Calendar.

Looking for some advice? Dry brown rice contains oils susceptible to rancidity. To keep it fresh longer, refrigerate in an airtight container.

Oh, Google Base advice? I've got that too: Submitting your items through the Google Base data API, while requiring more technical knowledge, gives you some additional flexibility. With the API, for instance, you're able to add, delete, or edit single items rather than having to generate a file and submit it. This can be very beneficial for web applications interfacing with Google Base or for content providers with large amounts of data.

By Jessica Behling, Google Base Support

We're always excited to share our ongoing efforts to improve the search experience. Today we announced some updates to Froogle that simplify the user interface and make it more consistent with web search. At the same time, we renamed Froogle to Google Product Search. For more on this, please see our post on the Google Blog, and feel free to share your thoughts on Google Groups.

By Naureen Kabir, Google Base Support

With Google Base, as with Google search more generally, our goal is to connect people with the information that is most relevant to them. Last month, Roshan wrote a post about maintaining the quality of your items so that they remain live in our search results. One of the things he mentioned that can help achieve this is the product_type attribute. We've been seeing a lot of files from providers submitting to the Products item type in which the product_type values are being specified in ways that won't allow our system to identify your product correctly when people are searching. So I wanted to clarify how to best enter values for this attribute.

The product_type attribute is used to categorize items so that we can match them to search results. Entering product types that are too general or that are incorrectly formatted causes our system to categorize your item incorrectly, and we won't be able to connect your product with the right searchers. So when you enter the product_type attribute, you should think specific and relevant. For example, if you're selling keyboards for computers, you should include "keyboards" as the product_type and not "computers." We strongly recommend that you to use our example product_type list as much as possible.

If your product doesn't fit with the exact values on the example product_type page, you can include some variations; the most important thing is that the product_type be relevant and that it distinguish between an actual product and the accessory for the product. For example, for the above keyboard example, the product type "usb keyboard" is also acceptable. If you're selling Ipod skins, the values "accessories" or "mp3 accessories" are fine.

Finally, some providers are including values such as "health, beauty, fragrances" or "MP3 Players > Ipod > Ipod Accessories > Ipod Skins" as their product_type values. Since we only accept one value, neither example works. Unfortunately, entering your values with commas or > symbols will miscategorize your products, and searchers won't be able to find them. So make sure you're using correctly formatted, relevant values when using the product_type attribute.