Question
Hi all,
I've been uploading to Froogle for quite some time... but this is a first. I'll post it as follows:
December 2005
Welcome to the eighth edition of Froogle News, which offers news, tips and other relevant information that will help keep you in the Froogle loop.
We've made a number of big improvements this quarter, including local shopping, a new look for Froogle, and a brand new way to upload your inventory information. We hope you enjoy all the recent changes and we look forward to offering even more improvements in the months to come.
As always, we welcome your feedback. Please send your thoughts about this newsletter and ideas for future editions to froogle-newsletter*google.com.
The Froogle Team
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In This Issue:
Local Shopping
New Features
Google Base
Tips
Your Turn
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Local Shopping
Do you have physical store locations? Now they can get customers from Froogle too. List both your online and local inventory and shoppers can decide whether to buy via your website or pick up the item in person. This could be especially useful for products that customers like to try out in person before they buy (like clothing or electronics) and items that are difficult to ship (like furniture or cars).
Here's how it works: When a shopper does a search on Froogle and clicks on the "Local Shopping" link on their results page, they'll be asked for a location, and then shown a map of nearby stores that sell their item of interest. Shoppers who visit the Froogle homepage and enter location-specific search terms like "digital cameras in San Francisco, CA" will see Froogle's local shopping results right away. For example, here are local shopping results for clothing or sofas.
To include your local store information on Froogle, you'll need to send us a local inventory bulk upload using Google Base. Please be sure that your bulk upload item type is specified as either "Products" or "Vehicles." Learn more.
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New Features
You may have noticed that Froogle looks a bit different lately. It's been a few years and we felt it was high time we gave ourselves a makeover. We think the new Froogle offers a simpler and more visual search experience, with key enhancements like clickable price ranges, brand and related search suggestions and the ability to sort results by product rating, merchant rating and even merchant name. We've also revised the seller comparison page to include sortable columns, larger product images and centralized product descriptions.
We think our new interface will help customers find your products more easily on Froogle. We invite you to explore for yourself, and let us know what you think.
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Google Base
We're pleased to announce Google Base, a new resource that enables you to easily submit your feeds (now bulk uploads) to Froogle and keep them updated. Google Base offers a variety of new bulk upload formats. In addition to the current tab-delimited format, we're now also accepting bulk uploads in RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0, and Atom 0.3. As with tab-delimited bulk uploads, you can upload in our new formats using either File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or directly from Google Base.
We've also expanded our product feed format to include some new standard fields (now called attributes). You can specify everything from quantity and unit price to accepted forms of payment and even define your own attributes. If you have product information that doesn't fit into one of our defined attributes.
Google Base will gradually replace the Froogle Merchant Center. For now, however, submitting your product info through the Merchant Center is still the best way to ensure that your products remain listed in Froogle throughout the holiday shopping season.
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Tips
New Information Types
Our goal is to organize the world's information, and that includes your contributions, whether they comprise your store inventory, a research paper on cancer receptors, or a collection of original poetry. Google Base can be used to publish virtually any kind of information on both Google's web search index and our other search applications. As with Froogle, posting any other type of information is free. Learn more about posting your information to Google Base.
Increase your web page's visibility with Google Sitemaps
As an online merchant, you understand how Froogle can help people find your products online, but you may also be interested in ways to help people find your web pages in Google's search results. Google Sitemaps is an easy (and free!) way to submit all your URLs to us and help improve your coverage in the Google index. With each URL that you submit, you can also tell us when that page was last modified, how frequently it changes, or when you've created new pages. It's a great way to help people discover more of your products through Google. Learn more about Google Sitemaps.
Find customers through Google AdWords
Advertising with Google means connecting with new customers right when they're looking for your products or services. The Google Network reaches more than 80% of Internet users.* With AdWords you create your own ads, choose keywords to help us match your ads to your audience, and pay us when someone actually clicks on them. You control every aspect of your campaigns, from how much you spend to which geographic areas your ads appear in. Learn more about AdWords.
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Your Turn
We hope that Froogle is proving to be a valuable resource in helping potential customers find your products, but you tell us: how well does Froogle traffic translate into sales for your store, and how does this traffic compare to other product search engines?
We're also looking for a limited number of partners who'd be willing to let Froogle analyze their store's click and conversion statistics, so please let us know if you're interested in sharing your site's traffic data with us. This information will be kept confidential and will be used to improve Froogle for merchants.
Please send your responses to froogle-newsletter*google.com. We look forward to hearing from you!
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Cheers
Answer
bump
Answer
Got mine yesterday.
Answer
I'm not really sure what the big difference is between Froogle and Google. It seems as though they're trying to achieve the same goal.
Answer
Empires,
The main difference is Google either indexes a product page or it doesn't. A merchant doesn't really have much control over what G decides to index and where. And even if it does, there's no telling where your product page will show up in the search results. Also, if I'm looking to buy refrigerator magnets and do a search on G, all sorts of sites will come up, everything from collector pages to manufacturers whereas Froogle is ONLY products for sale.
With Froogle, the merchant dictates which product pages are indexed, virtually guaranteeing it's placement in a Froogle search.
If I sound condescending, I'm not meaning to!
I, for one, don't have much faith in Froogle for driving traffic to our product pages. I don't really believe many people use it for buying online. Having said that, making our spreadsheet is easy and the upload is *FREE*, so I'm not going to let the opportunity pass for such a trivial duty... it takes me about 5 minutes total to download our spreadsheet and re-upload it to Froogle.
Cheers
Answer
Fiberguy, I guess the only reason to upload it is because it's free. My only complaint is that G really doesn't seem to have a direction, despite it's mega power of the search. Maybe now with them chunking out AOL and beating ICAHN to it, they'll figure out there's some heat on them. Below is some more confusing directions they're taking. Maybe I'll try the F again. Thanks.
Google Alert for: "google base"
Google Base Switches To Force All Searchers Through Jump Pages
Search Engine Watch - USA
When Google Base first launched, one of my key questions was whether people could click on a entry and go directly to the submitter's web site. Yes, you could. ...
See all stories on this topic
Google Diverts Links on Google Base
ClickZ News - New York,NY,USA
In an "experiment" with navigation, Google has added intermediate jump pages to some links on its Google Base service. Google Base ...
Some Google Base Links Diverted to Jump Pages
Marketing Vox News - USA
In what Google terms an "experiment" with navigation, it is diverting some traffic from Google Base links to jump pages that contain additional information and ...
Google Desktop Is P2P in Sheep's Clothing
Publish - Topsfield,MA,USA
... Of course, Google Base is Google's attempt to consolidate that disparate information into a centralized area. It's an ingenious idea. ...
Google Revises Free Classifieds
Mediapost.com - Westport,CT,USA
RECENT CHANGES MADE TO GOOGLE Base, a content-uploading-system-cum-classifieds service, suggest that the site is transforming from a data repository to more of ...
Whoops. Here's some links I hope...
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/051228-080130
http://www.publish.com/article2/0,1895,1906348,00.asp
http://www.clickz.com/news/article.php/3573956