How did you automate your Google Base feed?
We currently have one person in charge of just adding products and adjusting pricing, so he can either add 20 - 30 products in a day or adjust pricing for 100’s of items (as he’s been doing recently.) As a result, we run our Google Base feeds daily.
No, I don’t manually submit anything. I don’t create an excel spreadsheet like so many marketers still seem to do. I don’t even see it happen.
The truth of the matter is, I wrote a script years ago that pulls the data we want for our feed from our databases, creates a file, then sends it off. I don’t ever know that it happened, other than a quick email telling me a product count that was included in the file.
So how did we automate this? Well, since we run a custom programmed web store, we easily have access to whatever data we need in order to create a feed that is optimized just how we want it. We can also schedule this to go whenever we’d like because we’re running our own dedicated servers. Yes, I said plural. We run 3 web servers, a pair of database servers (replicated), an email server, and 2 google minis just to support our ecommerce efforts.
So how can you do it? Well, if you don’t have the same level of access to your data as we do (most smaller ecommerce sites don’t), then you’ve still got plenty of options. I don’t consider Excel to be a real good solution, although plenty of people still do that. In fact, I just worked on one with some friends last week through Google docs so they could see what I was doing and ask questions through online chat. But what you really need is some database access.
One of the tools I’m working on creating for doing larger numbers of submissions is a modified site scraper. If I can pull the basic data such as pricing, names and a few other basic bits of info like image urls and product url, then we can have a basis to start from without having to do the whole thing from scratch. Of course, I’d ideally like database access to create a csv file out of the information available, and for submitting a feed without logging in each time we’ll be using a feed submitter.
If you’ve got the technical know-how to do the queries and create the file out of your database in an optimized fashion, then go for it. If you want a simple submission service to upload those files, I’d recommend SingleFeed.com. I’m not affiliated in any way other than knowing Brian Smith from SES conferences, but the service is great for set and forget publishing of feeds. This is especially useful if you don’t make a lot of changes.
If you, like us, make many changes daily, then I’d recommend you get familiar with the FTP module within your favorite programming language and start writing a bunch of database queries, because that’s what you’re really going to need.
Comment by A. | January 17th, 2007
Is google base really going to be worth it in the end. Try Mr. Grabber as a tool offered on ioffer for a real tool.
Comment by Brian Mark | January 17th, 2007
Mr. Grabber’s tool wouldn’t be considered “Real” by most people. It doesn’t have enough reach for that.
Base has a lot of reach, especially when it’s shown in OneBox results. You’re talking about anyone doing a product related search on Google, which is a lot larger reach than most free services out there.
Yes, Google Base is well worth it.
Comment by Thomas | April 13th, 2007
We have an automated feed set up, but for now only one product per category can be show in the one box result, so I go in an manually ad some different key word per matching product category.
Comment by Brian Mark | April 15th, 2007
Thomas,
That sounds like a good way to do things. Even better if you can automate the changes (i.e. an exceptions table) so you don’t have to manually do things.