Google became more and more popular in other fields than only simple search engine, often it gives developers new tools to show their results in a more nice and accurate way. In this post, I’ll deal with Google Shopping solution, which is one of such interesting tools.
Development of Google Search Engine
See what Google looked like at the end of the previous millennium:
Do you remember that Google was once called Google! ? I didn’t. This exclamation mark was completely out of my memory. We can see how far the search engine has gone just by looking at the archaic font and the strange links on the different shades of blue background.
Google 2000
Look how the search results for the „USA” in 2000 looked like. It’s white-black-blue screen with the colored serif Google logo (which became sans-serif in 2015). The results show just the titles and descriptions of the pages. There is also little strange thing we could see at that times – it’s the path to category and some more developers – information (like the cache for example).
Google 2018
And now have a look how the same query looks like in the year 2018.
- You can read the excerpt from Wikipedia article about the USA.
- You can easily check the basic data about this country, that is, what is the area, how many people live in it, and even – what is the average life expectancy of a US citizen?
- There are flight suggestions to USA, which Google made based on data about your geographical location.
- You can read some of the latest news related to your search.
It’s much more alive, don’t you think so?
Google and shopping
And now let’s go back to the point of this post. We are still in the e-commerce store topic. Google changes and one of the basically new solution is showing product to buy on the one of Google tabs. Look how the „women leather jacket” phrase looks like in Google Shopping tab in the year of 2018.
- the picture of each product,
- its price,
- the products name (it is the first line under the price),
- the shop you can buy it in (the second line),
- number of stars from buyers’ reviews,
- if the product is sold in more than one store, Google will inform you that the price is the average of “3 stores”,
- if the product is for sale, you can see the little badge on the picture and the reduced price is in red.
This is all because of the connection between Google Merchant Center and Product Feed generated on the website.
When you type the phrase which Google understands as a product, you have an option to choose the „shopping” tab. There you can see the results from e-commerce stores Google campaign – there are exactly products which you are looking for. This is the functionality of paid campaigns. Product informations are generated on the website such as schema informations and sent to the Google Merchant Center through data-feed (generated sas .xml, .csv or .txt). This is a Spreadsheet with the product informations such as: sku, id, name, price, description and others. You can read the clear Google explanation of how the Schema is connected with Google Merchant: https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/6069143.
Google Shopping Tab
Google in the Shopping section shows you laptops with their price and the shop where you can buy them. Each of these laptop is described. When you click on a product, you will see the shops that offer it and you can compare prices.
In order for Google to display the product, the „Schema” code must appear on the website. Schema is a kind of structured data that can describe Article, Course, Event, Product, Review and others. You can read more about different Schema types on this site. The most important part is to send this created feed of product to Google Merchant Center and use it for a “base” to specific product in paid campaigns. This “base” is showed us as a product in Google Shopping Tab.
When you click on a product that has been described by more than one website (i.e. more than one e-commerce store), you can compare product price with other stores through Google Shopping System (Shopping Tab). When you want to view photos, you can view more of them because Google will show you all the pictures of product from different websites. Google will propose you similar products. You will see information about how many pieces of a given product are left in a given shop. You can save your favorite products in one place and then compare them.
Google Shopping Engine
In other words: Google does not only search for websites anymore. Google is looking for the optimal purchase together with you. You no longer have to compare products in a particular shop, because now you can add to the wishlist in one place.
Google is, of course, even more clever. It uses Schema of various content types so you can compare shops, web pages, read press releases about a given product, and so on…
Implementation of Schema
In order for your products to have such functionality, you need to implement Schema. In Magento there are paid modules, for example the one from Amasty. As is usually the case with modules – this one also contains many other functionalities. Some of them may be useful to you, but some of them may not be needed, and their installation will burden the site that loses paging speed. That is why it is good to work with developers who adapt the code to your needs. We do this as Pandagroup. If you want to implement Schema Product types in your Magento store, write/call us, we will help you with pleasure.
Google gives you tools to test your structural data. So if your website supports Schema, then you can easily check your search results on Google by typing in the test field the URL of the desired page. You will see there the name and description of the product, photos, price, number of pieces in stock, available colors, etc.
Another useful tool to check if the product page contains necessary information is Google Tag Manager. This Google functionality offers also an addon to Chrome browser shows you the implementation of JSON data and others like a tracking code.
I’ll say it like that: it’s high time you get interested in the topic because the competition has already done it or is in the process of doing it. When users get used to the „add to wishlist” store button, there is little chance that your e-shop will be chosen from the search results.
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