Some Tips Doing Amazon Affiliate
1. Reviews
Might be kinda hard on a fake site, but you lot are BH's so need I say more?
The largest increase in traffic we saw from Google Products was when our first review was picked up by the Google spiders. We did not for a while after launch, give our customers any way to review us. This was purely due to the speed that things were moving, and constant slurry of new tasks and problems emerging, meant that this crucial element was left by the wayside for some time.
Your online brand is almost as crucial as the traffic that follows it, and if you are missing one, then you are certainly missing out on traffic. Implementing a simple solution is quite easy, and there are many websites that you can invite your customers to post on regarding their experience which are regularly spidered by Google. Some well-known ones are http://www.trustpilot.co.uk/, http://www.reviewcenter.com/, http://dooyoo.co.uk/.
Once Google has some reviews pertaining to your website, you will then start to see an indication of how many Google has found next to your product listings in the search results. The more customers leave you good reviews, the better, obviously.
The day that Google found our first review, which was a 5 stars, we saw an immediate increase of traffic of around 35%, which is quite massive! Reviews in Google Products help you 2 ways, it pushes you up in the relevance of the returned product results, and of course, gives potential customers some confidence in this 'new entity'.
Unfortunately, the traffic increases per review are not linear, and upon your 2nd, 3rd, nth, you may only see a percent or 2%, of course this is still excellent, but its the very first one that we found made a huge impact.
2. Product attributes
I'd imagine most of you reading this article think these are fairly obvious, after all, without them potential customers won't see any products listed in the results that they can purchase from you. I can almost hear what many of you are thinking, "All I need is price, title, a description, a picture, and maybe some form of product ID right?" Wrong, not if you want to maximise your exposure, they are the bare minimum and you should strive to include as many product attributes as you can.
When investigating Google Base data from the API to see what our competitors were submitting, we were very surprised to see that many of the merchants that submit products to Google, some of them fairly big players, were only including a very small subset of the total number of attributes available for a large number of items, and you can bet a dime or three that they most certainly have the information to fill them. Don't follow their lead, fill them where ever possible.
We continued to add more attributes over time as we grew our data set on the products we had in our database, coupled with monitoring in our resulting traffic and relevance as we did so. Below is a small list of the more beneficial attributes that you should include attribute data for where you can, aside from the required fields that Google specify:
Brand, MPN, Quantity, Shipping, Manufacturer, Shipping Weight, Author (books)
All of the above combined included in our feeds where possible added around 3% to our resulting traffic.
Another moderate boost was made by matching Google's taxonomy as close as possible and including that data in the feed also, this can be quite a time consuming task if you have a large site with lots of categories, so make sure you've had a stiff coffee and in a good mood before you decide to do this.
You can alternatively not match Googles taxonomy and let Google work out where it should be placed itself. This is not the route we chose to take so unfortunately I can not provide much information regarding any potential difference between matching and not.
Google made a critical change on the 1st May of this year and gave a lot of extra weight to any product information that included a GTIN, otherwise known as a UPC/EAN/ISBN depending where you are in the world and what you are selling. I can not stress enough how important this field now is, omitting it can drop your relevance in search results by a very large factor indeed.
Finally, if you are struggling to find attribute information for items you are wanting to list, we are in the process of creating a simple web tool & API that will allow queries against our large and still growing database of product information that you can access without limits, for free of course, as we are nice :) If you like an email when these tools go live, pop a mail along to dev@ebitsi.com
3. Out of stock
I've been unable to find any general consensus on what the common practice is regarding items you have listed that you now have no stock of. That is whether to leave them listed with Google and modify their attributes to signify so, or whether to remove them and re-add later.
We discovered that leaving items that are out of stock submitted, compared to items removed, made no difference with regard to our general traffic or relevancy as far as we could tell.
However we did find, that re-submitted items when we had new stock, could take up to 24 hours to be re-included in the search listings, as opposed to simply setting the items attributes to show a positive stock, which took typically an hour or less to be re-included.
4. Feed update frequency
We all know how much Google loves new, fresh current content, and with this in mind, you should update your product feeds as often as possible. Don't just upload a new feed once a month, keep it current, update your stock, price and any other details as often as possible.
At eBitsi we schedule new feed uploads on a daily basis to ensure that all of our products listed are as up to date as possible. You can put together a simple cron job to do this, or use 3rd party scheduler utilities to run your script at a set time during the day.
5. Non-current & incorrect data
Following on somewhat from the previous topic, you should attempt to avoid any non-current/incorrect data in your feeds. By this I am referring to examples involving out of stock items, or price changes you have had to make, update your feed as soon as possible.
Google takes a view of incorrect pricing, claiming in stock when in-fact not, as a undesirable practice of attempting to increase your traffic and relevancy. Your feeds are monitored and Google will pick up on it, continue doing so and you risk having your feeds disapproved and you are then dead in the water.
Another effect of this, and probably worse than putting Google in a bad mood, is frustrating any potential customers that have come to your site only to find the price is way off, or you now have no stock.
Incorrect data can be harmful also, you won't be penalized by Google in the way of a disapproval, but you could affect your rankings in the product search results if you have fields with incorrect data in. If you do not have any data for a field that meets Google's requirements, it's best to leave it blank.
Hope its useful to some in the mean time while I'm catching up etc.