How to use Google Shopping to get Local Sales

Google changed the game today, making its Google Shopping tool the daddy for retail SMEs and businesses selling locally.

When people search for things these are the pictures that appear at the top of the search results and link through to retailers sites and points of purchase. Google Shopping compares prices, etc., but now it also adds local retailers on a map and highlights who's closest to you.

Searchers can navigate to the Shopping tab, click the 'nearby' filter, and voila. They can also, and this is a far more common way of searching, add the phrase “near me” or “nearby” after whatever it is they're looking for and get localised 'crap on a map'. Brilliant for mobile searches and more and more important in modern times when people are shopping more and more locally and provenance and 'food miles' are more valued by future customers.

This is great, but actually getting your products onto Google Shopping just got super important and it's a bit of a hidden art. Here's how to get your business up and running in a few easy steps, with just an afternoon of playing in Photoshop and fiddling with your product data (depending on how many products you've got, obviously).

Step 1 - Join Google Merchant Centre.

Adding products and the whole process is done here. It's actually a pretty simple interface and this is where you add your products. Managing shopping campaigns is done through Google Ads, because they want your ad dollars, but more on that in due course.

Step 2 - It's all about the visuals, and I really can't stress this enough. Have nice imagery or die trying. Google Shopping is a visual experience, like Pinterest for bargain hunters, and this is what's going to make your artisan bath products, widgets and spares, Danish home office furniture, local history DVDs, value veg boxes, or reproduction whatever stand out from the crowd.

Google Shopping uses the images on your website to 'create' listings, so it's these images that you need to fluff appropriately for the platform. Google has it's own image guidelines which are well worth following - give them what they want, Google knows best. You will have to consider this during photography as well. A basic guide is:

• Use even and clear lighting. For small stuff, you should probably invest in a light tent and a couple of teeny spots. They're buttons on eBay and some traders offer custom kits just for this purpose. A YouTube video later you'll have all the skills you need to use it properly.
• If it's something like clothing show it in situ. People buy clothes more if they see them 'on body'.
• Avoid overly complicated and madly coloured backgrounds. Go for white, plain grey or anything light. Keeping the product up-front and clear makes Google happy.
• Show what you're selling at the right scale - it should be around 90% to 75% of the total image. You're not selling set dressing. Keep the product dominant.
• No major image additions like watermarks, dissolves, blur, fancy frilly borders or whatever. Keep it super simple.

Step 3 - Set up your feeds.

With everything ready to rock it's time to get busy with Google Merchant Centre.

Next, click on Products > Feeds, and then on the blue “+” icon. Add your country and native language so that Google knows which initial demographics are going to see your wares. There's no point me going over all the particulars of how to do this when so many others already have - Google itself has a really good section on this, here. Just make sure all your input fields are full.

Step 4 - Link this account to your Google adword account.

Yes, they want your money. Google Shopping, like liberty, is not free.

At the top right-hand corner in your Mechant centre click on the three vertical dots, then click 'Account linking'. If you've not got an AdWords account, you can make one from here. If you have,  click on 'Link account' and enter AdWords customer ID. If you need to know where this is sign in to your Google Ads account then click the help icon at the top right corner - you'll find your 'Customer ID' at the bottom of the menu. Sorted.

Step 5 - Create a campaign.

In your Merchant Center account you should then be able to click on 'Create Shopping Campaign'.

Give it a campaign name, a location and daily budget. When you press 'Create' you’ll be asked to carry on via your Google AdWords. You can also do this directly in AdWords if you like, just open your Campaigns tab (on the left) and click that blue “+” icon, than pick 'New campaign'.

Again, Google has a really painless how-to on the topic, here, which will save me waxing lyrical.

Step 6 - Place some bids on your Shoping campaign.

In settings, you’re asked to select a bidding strategy and set a campaign budget. Go on. Spend some money. Google has a Bid Simulator Tool that's actually quite a lot of help here, and shows how any changes will impact on your ad performance. This gets pretty involved when you're trying to get the best bang for your buck, but there's some good tips here.

Step 7 - Targeting and scheduling.

More important stuff. Pick the places you want your ad to target, but be sure to only target places you ship to or where you're actually located.

You can change the Target and Exclude settings under 'Under Location', but the default's usually good enough. This going to be especially important for the new map settings to get folks ready to come in-store to pick up that bargain today.

Next set the start and end dates of the campaign. Rocket science it ain't. 

Step 8 - Create Ad Groups.

The final step is to create campaign ad groups. It's these that determine what sort of ads are going to be run and how you’ll organise the bids for them.

There's a couple of types - Showcase Shopping (multiple items as part of a sort of catalogue style ad that showcases your overall business, working on cost per engagement) and Product Shopping ads (for a single product, working on cost per click).

Click 'Save' and you've made your first ad. It's actually surprisingly simple.

It takes a bit of time and fiddling to get the best out of Google Shopping, but it's well worth the effort if you ahev a sutable product type - especially now it's local. The Ads work connect sellers and buyers in a unique and efficient way, right at the top of the search results if your bid is strong enough. It's compaetative, but a good solid place for ad spend dollare, especially now it's rolled out it's new map functionality.

I recommend having a play. Highly. There's a tonne of Google Shopping tutorials out there, especially on YouTube, and rally no need to seek a pro-tool or agency help.

How do you go Incognito When Viewing LinkedIn Profiles?

Finally updated:

A colleague of mine at Tank was conducting some private research the other day, and asked me a question I had to think about: "How do you go incognito when looking at other peoples LinkedIn profiles?"

This is actually pretty simple, and I see it all the time in my 'Who's Viewed Your Profile' area. It's strange, but I think we all view the words "This member chose to be shown as anonymous" with a degree of suspicion and annoyance, but people do it for a variety of reasons. While it does niggle me that I pay to see who'd been looking at my profile and this is easily circumnavigated, I do see why some folks (especially recruiters and researchers working via their private profiles) might want the benefits of a little smoke and mirrors.

nothing to see here - just passing through

Anonymity isn't natural for social channels. Visibility and transparency drive ad revenue and promote engagement. As a consequence, the ability to do things like this are often hidden away and not as easy to find as we might like. As such, you'll not find this information easily unless you go looking for it:

Click the 'Me' icon (the little round picture) at the top right of your homepage then select 'Settings & Privacy' from the drop-down, to get to your settings page.

Under 'Privacy' tab there are a few interesting options worth exploring, but the one we're looking for in this instance (scroll down a bit) is under 'How others see your LinkedIn activity'. Click on the 'Change' prompt under the Profile viewing options.

Select what others see when you're viewing their profile'. You'll then get 3 options like below.

Pick an option - normal, enigmatic, or full-on spy - and it'll autosave.

Bear in mind, this is your settings from now on. If you want this to go back to how it was you'll need to reset this using the same process as last time. Remember, LinkedIn is about connections. Keeping your profile like this, long-term kinda defeats the object.

EDIT:

Here's a little extra something that came about after sharing this on Twitter, by Trever Faden.

Try InCognito. It's a nice bit of kit if you've a need for stuff like this.

PS: If you'd like to connect with me on LinkedIn, let's do it.

How to Unfollow Contacts on LinkedIn

LinkedIn can be a proper mare sometimes. It's so stable, doggedly reliable, but the interface can be a pig if you're looking for something specific. After a month of job hunting last year I need to purge a bunch of agents who are still spamming with the latest positions.

You wouldn't think it'd be rocket science to unfollow people, but it was a bugger to find. So much so it's worthy of a blog post.

To start with, on the main horizontal nav, go to 'Network>Contacts' in the drop-down (as below, but you can access this from the Home page as well).

From here you'll be directed to the main Contacts Page. Just scroll down a little and you'll see a large white area with a couple of drop-downs of filtering options. These include 'Recent Conversations', 'Last Name', 'First Name' and "New' (as in, new contacts). You can also filter by location, the companies you manage pages for, tags, job titles (handy in my case) etc.

Then once you've got some filtering sorted - and no offence to anyone in the pics above, I'm just using them as an example and not unfollowing any of these loverly peeps - head to the small drop-down under each that says 'More', and then click on 'Remove Connection'. It'll ask you if you're sure, just to be certain.

Not hard, but the devil to find if you don't know. For a couple more LinkedIn tips you could try "How to Automatically Post Content to LinkedIn and Google+", "Targeting Companies With LinkedIn and Facebook Social Data", and "How do you go Incognito When Viewing LinkedIn Profiles?".

Hope this helps someone :)

How to Stop Facebook Making that Bloody Annoying Noise

It started a few weeks ago and it's been driving me mental. It took me ages to track down what it was. Facebook has started testing a new feature called "Being Really Annoying". Normally reserved for platform or algorithm updates, Facebook now offers an extra level of irritation with an intermittent auditory assault every time someone engages with one of our posts.

Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh!

To me, and anyone else who works in community management, this sounds like machine gun fire.

This isn't rolling out for everyone just yet. Gee, I guess I'm just lucky. When it comes your way, trust me, you'll be wanting to disable it ASAP. Thankfully that's not difficult to do:

Go to 'Account Settings > Notifications'.

Click 'View' on the tab that says 'On Facebook'...

...then unclick the box that says 'Play sound when each new notification is received', press 'Save Changes', and relax.

NB: It might not go off at first, if (like me) you have multiple tabs or accounts open. You will need to do this for any alts. if you have any (I know I do, for old legacy billing with certain clients).

How to get Admin Status on a LinkedIn Page for a Company you Don't Work for.

Ok, this took a bit of finding so I'm putting this down in one place for posterity.

A client came to us, as they do, and wanted me to revamp, update, admin, and share content messaging and links on their outdated LinkedIn Page for them. There's a lot you can do with Company Pages nowadays and their's was lookin' a bit 2011.

life's too short to have to go looking for LinkedIn tutorials

Last time I did this was a while ago and I logged in via the clients personal profile, and technically that's against LinkedIn terms and conditions, but I'd noticed that Hootsuite now has engagement functionality for LinkedIn so I rationalised it must be possible to access a Company Page as an admin even if you don't work for the company. Turns out that's true, obviously, but it took some investigation worthy of the pen of Conan Doyle to find out how. For some reason no one was making the knowlege easily searchable, so here's the skinny:

You need to be an admin of a Company Page to add fresh admins, so you need to get an existing company rep to do this for you (but at least you can send them these instructions).

• Before starting this exercise you'll need to be connected to the person who you want to make admin of your Company Page.
• When you're logged into LinkedIn, go to your Company Page - either go to 'Companies' at the top of the homepage and use search, of hover over 'Companies' in the navigation at the top and look for your Company Page (before the divider, in the drop down).
• When you get to the Company Page, click 'Edit' (in the blue box in the upper right).
• You'll see the 'Designated Admins' section, top left of the editable options, and as you begin to type the name of a connection that you want to be an admin, they'll appear in the list of options and you can select them.
• Click 'Publish'. Boom.

No messing around with having to have an email addresses on the same domain as the Company Page etc. Hope this is of use to someone, this is one for the long-tail search, because damned if we could find this info easily when we needed it earlier today.