Total Blue System Ecommerce

Monitor results from Froogle, Google Base

You can send your website product catalog data to the Froogle shopping engine, via the Google Base integration with your website's Catalog module. What's new is that now you can track the results more precisely.

Since our clients have standardized on the Google Analytics tool, we're now embedding a Google Analytics tracking URL within the product URL's that are sent to Google Base from your catalog.

So if your product URL is something like http://www.[domain].com/catalog/category/p_123.html, the URL that is now sent to Google Base looks like this:  http://www.[domain].com/catalog/category/p_123.html? utm_source=googlebase

This uses the utm_source variable and gives it a source that's unique from the 'google' source you'd otherwise see. But because it's a source, you'll see it alongside the other search engine sources in your reports: yahoo, google, ask, msn, etc. (Note: the utm_medium variable is not being specified, so we'll have to see how Google Analytics perceives it, possibly the 'organic' search medium because there is no cost for the Google Base listings.)

We want to measure how effective Google Base will be at sending you qualified buyers. It's important to the future of the Catalog module in 2007, as we anticipate building out the capability for more structured data about your products. One reason to do this is because Google Base can accept more structured data and then refer your products more effectively (in theory). For example, data about what age group your products are appropriate for, as in the case of children's educational products or toys.

But first, let's see what impact Google Base makes in referring shoppers to your site...

Attract shoppers from Froogle via Google Base

You can now feed product information from your website to the Froogle shopping engine.

The Total Blue System Catalog module now enables you to select products individually, or send them all (all that are marked displayable and orderable), to Google Base. Google Base is the engine that now powers Froogle, will also be delivering specially formatted product results to the top of the normal Google search engine results, and promises to power more applications to come from Google.

This Google Base feed is an XML summary of product information, including name, item # / sku, description (without HTML formatting), price, URL to the product on your website, and the "primary" product photo.

Go to the Total Blue System Admin Area, select the Catalog module, and go to the Google Base Export link. There you can initiate a feed to Google Base as often as you like. We recommend this be done whenever you have a number of new products added to your site, or change product prices or photos of existing products. Note: you'll need to have a Google Base account beforehand, and will be prompted to login to Google Base the first time you do this.

We see this as one more way to broaden the exposure of your product line to web shoppers. See an example of products from our client Red Oxx now appearing on Froogle.