So why is it a “secret”?

Historically, it has been quite difficult to get Google Shopping set up, and it was almost certain that you’d need to hire a company that specializes in running shopping feed programs. While I still highly recommend seeking out experts with specialized experience here, it is actually quite possible to begin this process on your own. Here’s how:

First, you will need to open a Google Merchant account within Google. If you already have a company Google Adwords account you use, I would use the same login credentials to open the Google Merchant Account to keep your accounts and management process streamlined.

Once you set up your account, you will need to verify and claim your url, create your product data automated feed and launch the store.

Here is some in-depth information on how you can set up your Google Merchant Store.

Once you are running a Google Shopping program on your own or through a provider, there are some great opportunities available for advertisers that are on Google Adwords and are also running Google Shopping.

Google Product Extensions

Product Extensions are an excellent way to enhance your existing AdWords ads. It’s a great tool to increase click through rates and drive more sales.

Product Extensions are based on your product feed. They will show in a plus box under your regular text ad on the search results when the search query typed in by the user is related to one or more products on your Google Merchant Center account.

This is a core reason to  keep your product feed updated with as much information as possible about your products. The more complete and updated your feed is, the higher the chances your Product Extensions will display with your text ad.

Just like a normal text ad, your Product Extensions ads are also charged on a CPC basis, which means you will pay the same price per click regardless if the user clicks on your text ad or on one of your Product Extensions.

You can track Product Extension metrics on a campaign level through your AdWords interface. Here, you can view impressions, clicks, CTR, cost, AVG position, conversions etc. You can also track Product Extensions revenue using Google Analytics, but you will need to add a unique tracking code to your destination URL on the product feed. This way, you can identify revenue that came from clicks to your Product Extensions versus your text ads.

Setting up Product Extensions on your AdWords account is quite simple. Once you have your product feed uploaded to your Google Merchant Account center, just click on a campaign and click on the “Ad Extensions” tab. Once there, just select the “New Extension” button and choose your product feed.

Keep in mind that if you are running Site-Link Extensions simultaneously for the same campaign, your Site-Link Extensions are more likely to show than your Product Extensions as they have a higher priority in terms of extensions rankings. Sometimes both extensions will display at the same time but it doesn’t occur very often.

So, if you really plan on gathering accurate data from testing Product Extensions, make sure you disable all other extensions for that campaign.

PLA’s – Product Listing Ads

Product Listing Ads campaigns are fairly easy to set up, and you can manage them through your Adwords interface or Adwords Editor just like any other campaign. PLA campaigns, unlike your normal text ad campaigns, are not keyword-based. Google will choose to show your ads based on the quality and relevance of your product feed.

This means you want to make sure your product feed includes as many details as possible about your products, such as product name, description, color, size, images, price, etc. Make sure that your destination URLs are updated constantly and are taking your customers to the correct product page.

Even though your PLA campaigns are not keyword-based, it’s important to understand how different products and categories are performing. The best way to do this is to split your campaign into Ad Groups. One best practice to employ when creating Ad Groups to your PLA campaign is to separate them according to the product labels column on your product feed. This will allow you to easily manage your bids and ads.

To set up the Ad Groups with the product labels, just click on one of the Ad Groups and go to your “Auto targets” tab on AdWords. Once you’re there, you will want to click on the “Add product target” button and select “Add a group of products.”

From the combo box below, you will choose “adwords label” and on the input box just type the name of the label. Click on validate, and a green check sign should appear. That means your label is set correctly.

Now, just repeat the process for all of your Ad Groups. If you get an error message saying that your label is not validating, it could be that you have your product label name typed incorrectly or that you have too recently uploaded your product feed. It often takes up to 48 hours for a new feed to be available to validate your labels.

Now that you have your campaign set up and ad groups in place and validated, you must also create Ads for your PLA campaigns. PLA ads are a bit different from your regular text ad copy.

A PLA ad consists of a single line and only allows up to 45 characters. So you want to make sure you create a very concise and direct message. If you offer free shipping or some type of discount, make sure you state that on your ad. You can also run multiple ads per ad group.

Here is an example of PLA ads for “adidas shoes”

As you employ these tactics, continually test messaging and visuals to determine what works best for your brand and products within the Google Shopping arena. I hope to have demystified this rather easy-to-deploy channel, as it is a prime opportunity for incremental traffic and competitive leadership in the search space.

Do you have any Google Shopping “secrets” of your own? Please do reach out and let me know what is working for you, or where you’d like to see guidance in future columns.

The problem surrounds the transfer of FeedBurner accounts to a new platform (and a new URL). Many FeedBurner users saw their feeds go dead when switching to the new platform; some received 502 or 503 server error codes. Google doesn’t seem to specifically explain the problems, but says the problems are associated with the migration of so many publishers to the new platform.

“Although we came across many of these issues during our testing phase, in reality we knew a lot of these challenges would not fully surface until we released at scale, which we now have and are dealing with as high priority issues within Google.”

If you’re thinking the AdSense for Feeds blog is an odd place to talk about FeedBurner technical problems, Google apparently agrees. They’ve also announced a new blog, feedburnerstatus.blogspot.com, which becomes the official place for technical updates about FeedBurner. The second post there, in fact, offers more information about the 502 error message problem.

1. All Official Google Blogs Feed

Google launched the Official Google Blog back in April 2004 (the first post seeking job recruits has since been deleted). Since then, the company has gained over 30 or more product and language-specific blogs.

Posts like last Friday’s great year-end recap from the Google Webmaster Central Blog don’t always make it to the main Google Blog. The same is true for other official Google Blogs like Inside AdSense or Inside AdWords.

How not to miss out? Last November, Google finally gave me an address for a Google Reader feed that consolidates all their various blog posts into one. That got more public exposure from Google itself at the end of December, as part of the A year in Google blogging post. But plenty of people probably still aren’t aware of it.

Stay up on all the official Google posts easily by getting the feed. Read posts to the All Official Google Blogs Feed here; get the actual feed here.

2. Google Press Releases

Aside from Google Blog posts, Google makes its press releases available via feed. Sometimes releases have news that’s not on the corporate blog. Usually, the releases come out well after you’ve already read news of some Google development. The press releases read like, well, standard press releases. Still, it can be handy to get the official PR line direct from Google.

Read releases here; get the press release feed here.

Unfortunately, feed posts don’t link you to the actual release but rather to the top of the press release page. Still, it’s just an extra click, and you’re there.

3. Google Blog Search Feed

Stay up on what people are saying about your blog using a Google Blog Search feed. Enter your blog URL into the main search box at Google Blog Search. The box will come back filled in like this example for Search Engine Land:

link:http://searchengineland.com

Next, change the "Sorted by" default to "Sort by date" using the link at the top of the right-hand side of the results. Now you’ll have Google Blog Search set to catch all the latest backlinks to you.

Want the feed? Look on the left-hand side of the screen. Find the Subscribe area in the left-navigation column like this:

Pick either the Atom or the RSS option to get these matches sent to your feedreader. Matches are also offered via email.

Unfortunately, Google still doesn’t allow you to get backlinks minus backlinks from your own site. Remember, you can also do this using words. Just enter the words you want to monitor, and then you’ll get Google Blog Search matches sent to you via feed.

4. Google News Search Feed

There are several ways to get news results from Google via feed. Want the top stories on the Google News home page? Look on the left-hand side, and you’ll see links for RSS & Atom feeds.

I’ll make it easier. Get the RSS feed for Google News home page stories here; Atom feed here.

Want the top stories from any of the key sections, such as Sci/Tech? Go to the section, then look on the left-hand side and use the RSS or Atom feed links. They’ll be in a box like this:

Want to craft your own feed? Just search for terms you are interested in, such as google. After you search, use the RSS or Atom feed links on the left-hand side of the screen, in the same box style as shown above.

5. Gmail Via Feed

Want to get Gmail messages in your feed reader? Google makes this available. Follow the instructions from Google on getting Gmail via feed here.

IMPORTANT! DO NOT MAKE THIS FEED PUBLIC IF YOU USE A WEB-BASED SYSTEM LIKE GOOGLE READER OR BLOGLINES. If you make the feed public, people can see the subjects and descriptions of your email. More about this from Google here.

6. Google Video Feeds

Google lets you keep up on the Top 100 new videos on Google Video via feed. Down at the bottom of the Google Video home page you’ll see this:

That About RSS link leads here, which gives you this rundown on feeds from Google:

Aside from the most popular videos, you can also see the latest videos for sale via the feed option page.

7. Google Base Feeds

Sadly, you can’t do a search on Google’s shopping search engine Froogle and monitor product results. But Google Base which lists many products gives you a bit of a work-around. Do a search for a product, such as this:

speed racer

Change the sort by option at the top of the results to "Most recent post date." Now look over in the upper right-hand side of the page. See the RSS link with an icon like this:

That’s the feed!

8. Google Groups Feeds

Want to monitor posts at a Google Groups list, such as Google Webmaster Help: Crawling, indexing, and ranking. Go to the group you like, then scroll down to the bottom. Then click on the orange XML button at the bottom like this:

That provides feed options like this:

9. Google Personalized Home Page

OK, this one is more about giving Google feeds than taking them. Want to see the latest on anything every time you go to Google? The Google Personalized Home Page lets you add a feed from anywhere, to turn the site into a master feed reader.

Sure, there are better services to use (NetVibes is great). But you’re likely at Google anyway. Why not stay in touch while there? To do so, pick content from the Homepage Content widgets and feed directory by browsing, by searching (for example see how we show up) or use the "Add by URL" option to add any feed (including those above!)

10. Google Web & Other Search Feeds

I’m cheating here. Google does NOT allow you to make a feed to monitor web search results. They’re way overdue for this. Instead, use Yahoo or Live Search to monitor web searches, as described below.

At Yahoo,  search for something like this. You should see the orange feed icon show up in the address bar of Firefox or the toolbar of IE7.

Alternatively, view source, then find the rel="alternative" section like this:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Yahoo! Search results for search engine
land" href="http://api.search.yahoo.com/WebSearchService/rss/webSearch.xml?
appid=yahoosearchwebrss&query=search+engine+land&adult_ok=1">

At Live.com, it’s the same. Do the search, then look for either icons in your browser or view source and find the section like this:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=search+engine+land&amp;format=rss" />

The part in bold is the feed address.

Clearly life would be much easier in both places if some type of feed URL was placed on the search results themselves. But, at least they’re actually offered!

Standardization Within Google

The need to standardize a way to help readers know if a feed is offered has been debated for years. The emergence of the standard feed icon at the end of 2005 has helped (for more, see here and here). But Google provides a microcosm of the issue, how even within one company, standardization has yet to come.

Look at the screenshots above, and you’ll see feeds offered with orange XML icons, orange standard feed icons, with the words "RSS" and "Atom" and even Bloglines and My Yahoo buttons used.

At the official Google Blog, they say site feed and offer an Add To Google button:

But at that "all Google Blogs" page in Google Reader, it’s only a Google Reader button offered:

On the one hand, that makes sense. You’re at Google Reader. But these are also pages shared with those who don’t use Google Reader, so the standard feed icon might also be good.