Here’s how to set up your Pearl ecommerce webshop to maximise the FREE Googlebase product search, and track your results all the way back to your accounting.

How does it work?

Google can be set up to collect a product feed from your website automatically. Sign up at http://www.google.com/base/

Set up a Lead Source in Pearl

Visit Contacts : Marketing : Lead sources and create a new one for your Googlebase feed. This allows you to track incoming leads and clicks from other websites. Pearl will insert a Lead source ID into the Googlebase data, so you don’t need to set up a lead source domain. You can see from this screen shot how the sales and new leads (customers) are being tracked.

Set up a Googlebase lead source

Configure your web settings

Pearl will produce a file for Google to collect. We’ll insert the lead source tracking ID into the product landing URL so that each customer and purchase is tagged with the “Googlebase” lead source. Visit Website: Setup and open the Googlebase tab.

Set up your Googlebase URL

Next, go back to your Google Merchant Center account and insert the feed URL.

Use the filename “gbase.txt”

Google Merchant Center

Either upload the file manually, or create a schedule for Google to collect automatically:

Googlebase schedule

Enter the URL from your Website:Setup page, it will be like http://www.mydomain.com/index.php?p=gbase

That’s it! Google will soon be listing your items in search results. See the two listings here for one of our clients, “Eco kitchens”:

Googlebase search results

Users are taken directly to the product landing page. A cookie is placed on the user’s computer, and if they go on to buy online then the contact and sale are both tied to the “googlebase” lead source you created.

Googlebase landing page

Bingo! More sales and an easy way to get your items listed online. If you want to preview or edit a spreadsheet with all your products for manual upload to Googlebase, then you can find it in the Products area:

Googlebase export products to Excel

Tags: ecommerce, googlebase, website

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 9th, 2010 at 2:55 pm and is filed under E-commerce, General posts, Products. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.