Improving Google Base feed perfomance

[FrazerPart]

We've just gone live with our googlebase feed and am monitoring it's progress.

At the moment I'm sceptical as to whether it really does work in our line of business (new and used car parts) but I want to get it working manually before we then trial the MoleEnd automated solution.

From research into improving feed performance, it is recommended that product feeds results could be improved by adding the part number, manufacturer's name and manufacturer's part number to the feed.

Clearly we need to add some more Product vriables in Actinic to cover these (in the same way I added a "condition" field), but the question I have is this:-

Are there any naming conventions that we need to follow when I introduce these new part number, manufacturer's name and manufacturer's part number product variables?
Should we be using upper case/lower case for the field names and contents (I have noticed that the "condition" instructions on the Actinic KB only use lower case. Is there a reason for this or is it just coincidence?

Thanks for any help that you fellow Actinic users can offer

[AndyBorrett]

My advice you be to search for the products you are selling on Google and see what format everyone else uses.

[printerbase]

To see what other people are using in their feed file try this very useful tool:
http://dev.tomthedeveloper.com/googlebase/ca/

Peter

[FrazerPart]

To see what other people are using in their feed file try this very useful tool:
http://dev.tomthedeveloper.com/googlebase/ca/

Peter

Great Tool Peter! Thanks for the tip.

I've taken a look to see what others are using as part of their feed.
They are adding "WEIGHT", "PRODUCT_TYPE" (from a drop down google menu), "MPN" and "brand"

If I was going to manually submit this feed, I'd have to add all this data manually to Actinic as variables.
Does anybody know if the MoleEnd plug-in makes submitting this feed data easier? i.e. can you select several products all at once with the Mole-End tool and select all of their weights to be 6kg for example? Can you manually specify several products to all have the same "product_types"? And product types that are in line with those listed on the Google Merchant site as illustrated here?

http://www.google.com/support/mercha...r=160081&hl=en

I'm trying to find a way up setting my feed data up as quickly and as compreshensvely as possible.

[Duncan Rounding]

You can do a bulk catalog import to update the custom variables for each product.

[Jan]

The Mole End mash uses the data that you have set up in Actinic but it does not add data to Actinic for you. As Duncan says you can use Actinic's import facilities to add data in bulk - the Actinic flat file export format in the product mash will give you a flat file import file that you could use as a basis for import.

Regards,

[FrazerPart]

You can do a bulk catalog import to update the custom variables for each product.

...and now for my next question.

How do I do a "bulk catalog import"? Can somebody point me in the right direction?

[Duncan Rounding]

There are some sample files here: C:\Program Files\Actinic v9\Original\Common

[FrazerPart]

I'd like to also add product weight data to my feed. This has already been entered as part of the product details in Actinic.

How do I add this to the feed? Is it possible to locate the variable in Actinic and "add it's value to the feed" as I already have done with some of the newly created variables.

[Jan]

That isn't possible with Actinic but is with my Product mash plugin (using the !!Weight!! macro).

Regards,

[Mark H]

To see what other people are using in their feed file try this very useful tool:
http://dev.tomthedeveloper.com/googlebase/ca/

Peter

I used this tool when it was first mentioned, and the product match with the actual results from Google Product Search (UK) was quite close, but I tried it again today and it's completely different. Any ideas why this might be?