Author: Nancy McCord

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Tips to Promote Your Website

In continuing with the last several blog posts on tips and tidbits, here are few of my top tips on how you can promote your website.

1. Promote your website with Google AdWords. If you need visibility and leads fast, Google AdWords is the best place to start. I recommend using AdWords for a boost right after you launch your website until you have enough impetus to garner organic placement and start generating activity on your own.

2. Make sure you are blogging. If you want to wean yourself off Google AdWords at some point, it is important to be actively involved in building unique informational content which over time will help you with organic placement and cause the natural building of inbound links.

3. Make sure you are building content on your website in addition to blogging. You’ll need more than blogging to garner placement. Consider doing articles smartly to get inbound links to your website. I don’t mean spin articles, but rather write thoughtful pieces that provide value.  Use social media to promote your articles, archive them on your website and place the articles on just a few article sites.

4. Use social media to promote your website, add value by not just talking about your own services, but make sure to work to create authority in all you do. Link to your site, your article pieces, and blogs as well as try to engage readers.

5.  Move into the wider world. Get active in your market sector on forums to tape into new ideas, thoughts, and share your expertise as well as learn from others. Share your website and yourself to get your name out there.

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Last Tidbits on Product Listing Ads Using Your Merchant Data Feed

Here are my last tidbits on using Google AdWords to show Product Listing Ads (PLA) pulled from your Google Merchant Center Data Feed.

  1. Make sure to click to validate your data feed once set up in Google AdWords so you are sure that you have everything properly connected in order to assure that ads will be show. This is done by clicking the “validate” button.
  2. Use Targets and Filters appropriated to determine what products will show. Filters operate at the campaign level and targets operate at the ad group and product level.
  3. Each product target you set up should be in its own ad group to maximize opportunities for the products to show.
  4. Start with a bid for your PLA that is comparable to your existing cost per click advertising programs.
  5. The relevance of your product and your bid WILL impact when your product shows.
  6. Bid higher on specific product targets than you do on all products.
  7. Use custom created AdWords URL to improve product tracking in your product data feed.
  8. On product listing ads you do not enter keywords in your program, but you do set up negative keywords to target your program.
  9. Promotional text is applied at the ad group level. This is where you would add a note like Free Shipping.
  10. Google will not always show your promotional text. It will depend on the space available.

You can view the full video below.

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More Tidbits on Google Merchant Data Feeds

Continuing from Monday, here are some more great tidbits about promoting your Data feed on Google.com by using the new required Google AdWords tie-in.

  1. Google recommends a separate AdWords campaign for Product Listing Ads (PLA).
  2. Create an ad group per product target to be able to create unique promotions easily.
  3. Make sure to create one all products ad groups for best practices as recommended by Google.
  4. You will be able to select Cost Per Click (CPC) or Cost per Acquisition (CPA) bidding for your program. Make sure you are selecting the one that best meets your needs.
  5. To use CPA bidding you must first be white listed and be advertising in the US.
  6. Set the bid lower on your all products target ad group than your targeted ad groups. In fact this may be the only ad group some retailers may need.
  7. When you tie in your Product Data Feed with Google AdWords you may have photos appear with your ad text or your products and photos may appear with other retailers in the organic results.
  8. Google will preferentially show the PLA with the highest cost per click in your account.

You can watch the full video on this topic on YouTube.

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Tidbits on Creating Your Google Shopping Data Feed

I’ve recently been at a seminar for Google Shopping and wanted to share some great tidbits that I have gleaned from the seminar.

First it is important to know that the pictures of products that can appear in the organic search results on Google.com are driven by a data feed you create and install in the Google Merchant Center. Previously this service was free, but by October 1, 2012 only only those data feeds that are tied to Google AdWords will be shown.

  1. You create and install your data feed as an .xml or .csv file in the Google Merchant Center to get started.
  2. The settings area in the Google Merchant Center is where you will link your Google AdWords account. Once you have set up an account, you very simply just input your AdWords 10 digit account number to link your feed to AdWords for payment.
  3. The most typical errors are image URL errors. Make sure that you have a link to a 400 pixel by 400 pixel image and a 250 by 250 pixel image in your data feed.
  4. You MUST list either the GTIN or MPN for your feed to go live.
  5. Know that your description in your data feed will be used for your ad text. So make it descriptive yet selling.
  6. Your title for each product can have a maximum of 69 characters. Your description can have a maximum of 500 to 1,000 characters. Remember this includes spaces.
  7. Do not put promotional verbiage in your product description like free shipping. You will be adding promotional text in Google AdWords for your specific feed’s promotional message.
  8. Do not use all capitals in any words such as THIS as AdWords does not allow block capitals.
  9. Make sure to add the new AdWords attributes to your feed to allow more targeting of your promotional needs now that your program must be tied to AdWords.
  10. Carefully review the required Google category attributes as there are as many as 32 or so that are required now.

Check back Wednesday for more great tidbits. You can watch the full seminar on YouTube for additional information.