“En attente d’évaluation“, c’est le statut des tous nos produit sur Google Merchant Center depuis fin novembre. Évidemment, ce statut est meilleur que “refusé”, mais quand nous avons transféré notre fichier nous avons eu l’espoir de voir nos balances électroniques sur Google Shopping avant Noël 2010.
Notre situation ne semble pas être unique: il y a plusieurs posts de marchands inquiets sur les divers forums d’aide de Google. Sans forum spécifique pour Google Merchant Center, les réponses des collaborateurs de Google ne sont pas très utiles, mais un des marchands a publié le 04.01.2011 une réponse reçue par e-mail:
Le lancement de Google Shopping a rencontré un grand succès. Les ouvertures de compte ont été nombreuses, ce qui a rallongé les délais d’évaluation de chaque flux. […] Votre flux sera évalué dans les prochaines semaines.
C’est donc l’évaluation manuelle et le success de Google Merchant Center qui ont causé les délais. Il serait une bonne idée pour Google de publier cette information de forme plus visible pour éviter d’être inondé avec des messages de marchands préoccupés par le délai.
As you can see, most of my visitors where looking for , which is a pet supply franchise chain. That’s because I blogged about how badly ‘s Luxembourgish website sucks. Not only is it configured in a way that omitting the “www.” will get you nowhere, even if you make it to their website it’s difficult to locate their biggest store unless you know where to find it on a map (or keep zooming out). This quickly became the most popular post on my blog (pathetic, I know) which means that I’m obviously not the only one who had trouble finding what I wanted on their site.
So here’s a quick reminder of the very basic content you should put on your website (examples are geared towards a brick and mortar store).
The 5 friggin’ Ws – things you should definitely put on your website
Let’s simply take the well-known 5 Ws from journalism and reinterpret them from the perspective of a website visitor looking for information (which should also get us pretty close to the perspective of a search engine trying to determine your website’s ranking). Apparently these basics are so obvious that they’re often forgotten (either that or many people just have no clue of what to put on a website).
Who?
Who are you? Example: We’re “Zombie Megastore”, Luxembourg’s leading store for all you zombie needs.
What?
What exactly is it that you do? Example: We carry a large selection of… well, maybe I shouldn’t have chosen the zombie store example. Anyhow, here’s where you list the things customers can find in your shop so that 1. they’ll find you when searching for your city + a certain item or brand on a search engine and 2. they don’t have to call and ask if you sell product XYZ item before taking the trip to your store.
When?
Opening hours. If you’re closed on certain days, put this on your website. If you’re closing your shop for vacation, put this on your website (yes, I’m looking at you, Luxembourgish shop and restaurant owners who like to take long summer vacations).
Where?
Your address (you might want to include your phone/fax number, email, link to contact form, etc.).
Why?
This is the place where you might think you’ll have to come up with a wonderful story to justify why you’re doing what you do (“when my grandfather turned into a zombie, I realized there was no shop where I could buy thinks to make his… uhm… ‘life’ just a bit better”). That’s cute, but I suggest staying with the customer perspective and just answering the old basic “why should I buy from you”-question. It can be as simple as “we are the biggest store for zombie supplies in the entire state”.
That’s it, the basics. Of course a website can do much more than just answering these questions, but not answering them means you’ll lose potential visitors/customers every day.
I discovered this when receiving my first Google Adsense check from Google’s bank in Germany. This sort of intra-EU payment might have been “cutting edge” a century ago. Nowadays it’s just odd and annoying, because I have to leave the office during the very restricted opening hours of my bank to cash the check, which costs me €15 in fees (or about a week of Adsense revenue). Someone at Google should look up Regulation (EC) No 2560/2001.
El Reg thinks Google’s business model is meltdown proof – if Google needs more revenue, they can just come up with a way to display your ads more often. While I still think Google Adwords is great marketing tool for almost every business, I agree you have to keep a close eye on your campaigns.
Some checkboxes you might consider turning off in your campaign settings:
Search Partners? Why wouldn’t I want Google to show my ads on sites like Google product search, ask.com and aol? Well, because they’re showing on ebay, too, even though Google doesn’t mention this in Adwords help.
I asked Google last year and got this reply:
“Our global search network includes Google Product Search, Google Groups, and search sites such as AOL, Ask.com, ebay.com/ebay.de and shopping.com.”
An no, you can’t chose certain sites, it’s all or nothing.
In our case, “nothing” was the right choice. Ebay customers are not our target market and we actually stopped selling on Ebay years ago. Why would we want to display ads there?
Instead of throwing tons of money at Google Adwords, we restricted spending to a sensible level, redesigned our main online shop and invested some time into SEO. The result? December turnover increased by 50% in comparison to last year while costs for Adwords decreased by 57%.
After almost one month of collecting data with Microsoft’s new adCenter Analytics (beta)*, I wanted to have a closer look at the many detailed reports today (and then – of course – blog about it). Turns out I’ve been collecting largely useless data because I had failed to exclude parameters like “?gclid=…” and Microsoft Analytics diligently counted all clicks coming from AdSense as calls to different pages. Stupid me, the option is right there at the top of the management view:
*Why didn’t I use Google Analytics like everyone else? Well, sometimes I’m a maverick, too. 😉
Update March 2009: Since Microsoft decided to pull the plug on Analytics, I won’t be posting anything on this topic anymore. Their announcement and the comments contain links to lots of alternative web analytics solutions.
