Google Merchant Center Archives

Money For Nothin, Chicks For Free Just Like Google Shopping Actions

“Money For Nothing” was a smash hit from the mid-1980’s by the group Dire Straits.

As the story goes, the lyrics were inspired when a member of the music group overheard the comments from a delivery driver in the back of an appliance store as he watched a MTV music video.

The delivery driver’s comments included the classic lines from the song, “what are those, Hawaiian noises?…that ain’t workin”, and of course “money for nothing and chicks for free”.

Of course, those who know better realize the hard work needed for any performance especially a music video production.

I bring mention this song not only because it is one of my all-time favorites, but because last week Google announced that Google Shopping Actions would now be free for advertisers.

If you missed it, the announcement will affect those advertisers who have already either enrolled or have begun the enrollment process into Google Shopping Actions. For those retailers, Google Shopping Actions will now substantially reduce or even eliminate their fees.

Here was the important part of the email that many advertisers received last week:

Announcement sent from Google on 7/23/20

For those not familiar with the program, Shopping Actions are created using merchant listings inside Google Shopping. Within these listings the final payment transaction takes place through Google and Google takes a percentage of the sale rather than charging per click.

Earlier this year, I dedicated an entire article to Shopping Actions, which you can read here if interested – Google’s Shopping Actions – Changing The Landscape.

As a quick summary of that article, before last week’s change, Google would charge merchants 12% – 15% to process an order through Google Shopping. Once Google processed the payment, they would send merchants the order information through the merchant’s Google Merchant Center account.

To be eligible for Google Shopping Action, merchants would apply for the program and control their eligible product listings through Google Merchant Center.

Merchants participating using Google Shopping Actions have two options

First – you can enter their your payment processor and pay 0% commission. This will need to be done by February 21, 2021 to continue to serve ads using Google Shopping Actions.

Second, continue to use Google’s payment processor through 2/21/21 and pay a flat 5% commission.

Although good news for existing Google Shopping Action customers (either active or who have started the process); the Shopping Actions program is now closed until further notice for retailers who have not yet applied.

What is now available to all retailers is the ‘free’ clicks inside Google Shopping that Google announced in April of this year.

If you don’t know what the free clicks, check out this article – It’s Back To The Future With Google’s Free Shopping Ads.

However, the free clicks are just like that rock band getting their money for nothin’ and their chicks for free. Although, it looks quick and easy to take advantage of this free traffic, it is still going to take a work.

Free clicks and paid clicks inside of Google Shopping as well as Shopping Actions clicks are all determined by which products a merchant uploads into their Google Merchant Center account.

The process of opening a Merchant Center account and submitting products to Google Merchant Center is where many advertisers especially those new to using Google Shopping may get confused.

It is also where I can help. I have dedicated the first section of my new book, Make Each Click Count Using Google Shopping, to properly configuring Google Shopping. Right now, you can immediately download the book for $5.96 and make sure you get started with the proper foundation.

In addition, I have recently created a new Facebook Group, Make Each Click Count Facebook Group. It is FREE to join and will give you immediate access to myself where I can answer any questions regarding the setup of your merchant account.

Click Here to request to join the Make Each Click Count Facebook Group.

In fact, there are some questions others have asked in there that might be useful for you to check out as well:>

Remember To Stay Safe & Keep Healthy,

Looking for More Information on Google Advertising?

Check out the all new The Academy of Internet Marketing (www.theacademyofinternetmarketing.com), the premier online marketing destination trusted by small to mid-sized eCommerce businesses serious about substantially growing their online sales. In addition, The Academy of Internet Marketing includes exclusive access to me, author of the Make Each Click Count book series.

If you have the dedication and are ready to take your online sales to the next level, then The Academy of Internet Marketing was created for you. It provides the tools in the form of knowledge of what works today. Join us and discover for yourself what makes us special. Together we will grow your business!

Happy Marketing!
Andy Splichal

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Andy Splichal is the founder of True Online Presence, author of the Make Each Click Count book series, host of the Make Each Click Count podcast, founder of The Academy of Internet Marketing and certified online marketing strategist with twenty plus years of experience helping companies increase their online presence and profitable revenues. To find more information on Andy Splichal, visit www.trueonlinepresence.com or read The Full Story on his blog, blog.trueonlinepresence.com.

Populating Merchant Center with Proper Data

After your Merchant Center has been approved and you have completed the appropriate settings for shipping, tax, etc. it is a critical time. A time that will play a major part in determining your success using Google Shopping. It is time to create your plan for populating your product data inside Merchant Center.

You will soon discover that having well formatted data is going to be essential in order to properly segment campaigns inside the Google Ads interface.

Updating Product Data in Merchant Center

To get started you need to submit the products to Merchant Center that you want to have eligible to appear in Google Shopping. When submitting your products, there are four options:

Google Sheets – You make all of the changes manually to the product data using a Google Sheet. These changes are automatically applied to your account once uploaded.

Schedule fetch – You host a data feed file on your website and schedule a time for Google to fetch updates from the file. Once the fetch occurs, Google applies updates to your products in Merchant Center.

Upload – This is the most common. With this method you keep the file and schedule a regular upload into your merchant center using SFTP, FTP, Google Cloud storage or a manual upload.

Content API – The Content API for Shopping enables merchants to automatically upload product listings using an API connection.

The Process of Submit Products

Unless you have just a handful of products that rarely change in terms of inventory and pricing it typically is not viable to manually create and update a product feed.

The good news is that there are many 3^rd party Data Optimization Companies that specialize in getting data from your website to Merchant Center. The bad news is how do you know which data optimization company is a good fit for your company and for your needs.

The better a data optimization company is the easier they are going to make the process for merchants of taking data in their website and easily customizing that data into Google’s different fields.

Here are currently the different fields that are supported in Google Shopping. Not all the fields below are required, but the more fields that you populate the better Google is going to be able to match your products to relevant customer searches.

Being able to populate all or at least as many of these fields as possible is why using a 3^rd party data optimization company is usually an essential addition to your Google Shopping efforts.

Image if you have 5,000 products and after spending hours creating your initial upload you need to make changes to just a couple of these fields. It would take a long time, right?

Changes can be done using a data feed optimization company in a matter for seconds or minutes instead of hours.

Most fields are not required. Only 13 fields are currently required to have products approved in Merchant Center for non-apparel items and 20 fields are required for apparel items.

Note, some of the required apparel fields are only required in Shopping Actions not to be approved in Google Shopping. For information on Shopping Actions see my article – Google’s Shopping Actions – Changing The Landscape.

Choosing a Data Feed Optimization Company

Now that you have discovered why it is a good idea to partner with a data optimization feed company, how do you select which company is right for your business?

Typically, the price of this service can range from twenty dollars to hundreds of dollars per month so choosing the right company is going to depend on a few things:

Are you planning on using the data feed company to send your product feed to other comparison-shopping engines other than Google Shopping? Since Google Shopping is the largest comparison-shopping engine, typically all companies are going to have this feed well structured. The difference with the more expensive companies usually will be in how well they can structure the feeds going to other Shopping portals.
How does their system allow you to manipulate your data feed? The main purpose of using a data optimization company is to be able to easily populate your data feed. No matter what company you select there will be a learning curve; however, make sure you get a full overview as learning how to manipulate and submit your feed is essential.
Make sure you know how the company charges. Some data optimization feed companies charge additional based on how many products you have. Once you reach a certain number of products the monthly charge may start increasing.
Support is key. There is going to be a learning curve. Make sure whatever data optimization company you select offers full support in helping you get started as well helping with questions maintaining the health of your data feed moving forward.
Make sure you can easily review your feed. As time passes, you are going to want to be able to export your feed. With some data optimization companies that use an API, I have found that this is not possible.
Don’t sign a long-term contract! There are so many data optimization companies out there that don’t require a long-term commitment. There is no reason to be locked into anything other than a month-to-month agreement.

Working with Your Data

Once you have selected a data optimization company, the first step is importing your products into their system. It is within the data optimization company’s system, that merchants will format their feed and manipulate the data populating as many of the fields above as possible.

Remember, the more fields you populate the more effective Google will be in matching your products to related customer inquiries.

Also, start thinking about how it makes sense to segment your products. Google provides the custom label fields in order to help their advertisers segment their data.

The custom label fields serve no other purpose in your data feed other than to organize your products, so feel free to enter whatever data you want that will better help you segment your campaigns.

For more information on custom labels including ideas on how to effectively use, check out my article – Segmenting Product Data – Develop Your Plan With Custom Labels.

Submitting Your Feed

Assuming that by now you have already claimed and verified your Merchant Center and have completed your tax and shipping settings the last piece of completing your merchant center is submit your first product feed.

To begin submitting your first data feed you will need to navigate under Products in the left-hand menu to ‘Feeds’ and then click on the blue plus button under Primary feeds.

Next, you will select your country of sale, the language for the content of your feed and the destination in Google that you wish your products eligible to appear. As a default Shopping ads are checked, for information on how to have your products eligible to appear in Shopping Actions see my article – Google’s Shopping Actions – Changing The Landscape.

Then, you will name your Primary feed and select the input method. The input method is going to depend upon your data optimization company, but most likely will be the Upload option.

If you select the upload option, you will enter the name and type of file exactly as it will appear coming from your data optimization company. In order to be successfully processed, this must be exact.

In addition, you can upload your new file manually on this page to test if it will be accepted.

Now that your feed is created there are a couple more items that you will need to format before your feed will be successfully submitted.

First, you will need to provide your data feed optimization company the ability to connect with your Merchant Center account. To do this you will need to provide them with your Merchant Center SFTP or FTP login credentials. To find these credentials, click on the wrench icon in the top tool bar and choose ‘SFTP/FTP/GCS’ under ‘Settings’.

Depending on how your partnered data optimization company connects, this is where you will be able to find the needed credentials.

The last thing that generally causes an initial feed to fail is the merchant not selecting their ‘Default currency’. This is the type of currency used to sell products included in the feed.

In order to select, click on your feed name and click on settings. Under ‘Default currency’ you select your correct currency and save.

That’s it. Your feed should now be successful submitted into Google Merchant Center. Google can take up to 72 hours to first process and approve your items, so you will need to be patient. Soon you will be ready for the really fun stuff – setting up your campaigns inside the Google Ads interface!

Final Word

Creating your Merchant Account and formatting your corresponding data feed is going to take some work. However, given that products advertised in Google Shopping are producing some of the highest returns on investment it is most likely worth the work.

As competition grows for advertisers using Google Shopping, it is going to take more than just sending a partially developed data feed and bidding the same for each item in Google Ads in order to be successful.

However, by fully developing your plan with your data feed you will gain an immediate advantage over your competitors.

For those of you with a large number of product offerings or product offerings that change frequently it will be essential to partner with a solid data optimization company. Use the list above in this article to determine the right fit and don’t delay. Customers are out there actively searching for your products and you want to make sure they can find you!

Positive Keywords – A Better Way To Control Unwanted Searches

Unwanted Searches –

One of largest obstacles in achieving profitability for many advertisers using Google Shopping is the presence of unwanted keyword searches. Even profitable Shopping campaigns are not immune to wasted ad spend due to the nature of Google Shopping.

With Google Shopping the advertiser does not select their keywords as they do with their Search campaigns. Instead Google uses their proprietary algorithm to match a user’s Google search with an advertiser’s product ad. In order to match an advertiser’s product ad to serve inside Google Shopping results, Google uses a combination of keywords found in each product’s title and its product description. Then, Google uses a real-time auction based on an advertiser’s bid compared with other advertisers’ bids who have matching products to determine which order (ad rank) items appear in Google Shopping.

For the most part, this works well for advertisers as the keywords in the title and description determine when a product is eligible to appear, and the amount of an advertiser’s bid determines the order.

It also saves time for advertisers. Once a data feed is approved in Google Merchant Center, products can begin running inside the Google Shopping platform within minutes.

In fact, it is so easy to launch a new Google Shopping campaign that it can be quite dangerous in terms of budget for the novice Google marketer.

For those advertisers wanting to optimize their campaigns for profit, the most effective tool in being able to eliminate unwanted searches is the proper use of negative keywords – see my article ‘The Art of Adding Negative Keywords‘.

Negative keywords can be applied at the ad group, campaign or multi-campaign level with the use of a negative keyword list. However, properly optimizing with negative keywords by using the search terms report can be a never-ending task of find and remove with the constant discovery of new unwanted search phrases.

A Better Way

For accounts that have products that are highly brand oriented there is an easier way to eliminate approximately 80% of unwanted search terms without the constant adding of negative keywords.

Interested?

It is called Positive Keywords.

One of the most effective strategies that I use for many of my private clients who are brand centric, this strategy relies on a couple of things:

The Proper Segmenting of Google Shopping Campaigns.
The Use of Priority Settings.

Properly Segmenting Google Shopping Campaigns

With best-practices, Google Shopping campaigns should be subdivided just like you do with Google Search Campaigns meaning into a subset of like products. Since Google Shopping products rely on your data feed being supplied to Google Merchant Center this is going to take some advanced planning and correctly implementing that plan when formatting your Merchant Center feed.

However, by properly segmenting your campaigns advertisers will be able to more easily control unwanted searches with negative keywords as well as be able to better optimize bids for product ads based on historical data.

For additional information on optimizing product bids plus a FREE download, see my article ‘Effectively Optimize Google Shopping Based on Your Past History, Nothing More’.

Properly Using Campaign Settings

When configuring a Google Shopping campaign, Google allows for the use of priority settings of high, medium and low. Priority settings like the name implies takes priority over bids in determining which product Google serves from an advertisers account.

The priority settings kick-in if either the same product is in 2 different campaigns or if 2 different products in 2 different campaigns have a title/keywords that matches a Google search query.

Here is a quick written illustration:

Campaign A has a Priority Level of Low and contains product XYZ with a bid of $0.50.

Campaign B has a Priority Level of Medium and also contains product XYZ with a bid of $0.05.

Google is going to always display the product XYZ from Campaign B with the bid of $0.05 instead of from Campaign A even though the bid for the same product is 10X higher in Campaign A because of the priority level setting.

For detailed information on formatting your Priority Settings, read my article ‘Knowing Your Priority Settings in Google Shopping’.

The Positive Keyword Strategy

Here is how the priority keyword strategy works.

I set a product group containing many related products typically products grouped by manufacturer brand to high priority at a very low bid, say $0.01 in an initial campaign – Call it Campaign A.

Then, I create another campaign containing the same products at either medium or low priority and use a significantly higher bid, say $1 – Call this Campaign B.

Within the high priority Campaign with bids set at $0.01 (Campaign A), I add negative keywords for the branded terms as well as other high converting search terms.

What this does is allow Campaign A to filter out keyword searches with the use of negative keywords at a bid of $0.01. The keyword searches that direct to Campaign A are typically keywords with a low chance of converting.

Thus, this strategy allows only high-converting, brand specific traffic to be eligible to serve product ads in Campaign B. This greatly increases the conversion rates, CTR and overall profitability of Campaign B allowing you to increase bids and increase your Search Impression Share.

Now Campaign A, with its bid of $0.01 will still get a small bit of traffic and some of that traffic may even convert. When a keyword term converts in Campaign A, you can view the ‘Search’ terms report located within the ‘Keywords’ link on the left menu to add this keyword as a negative keyword to Campaign A. When you add a keyword negative to Campaign A, it will allow future searches for that converting keyword to be passed through to Campaign B.

This strategy works well to significantly improve the conversion rates and the CTR, which also will increase the quality score of products ads in Campaign B. Increasing the quality score of products ads will work to benefit advertisers by helping lower their average cost-per-click regardless of bid.

A product ad with a high-quality score often may be shown in front of a competitor’s PLA ad in Google regardless of bid, thereby increasing overall profitability even further!

Google regardless of bid, thereby increasing overall profitability even further!

Non-Theoretical Example

One of my private clients sells t-shirts and hats and one of their biggest selling brands is John Deere. For there John Deere Shopping campaign, we have found that keyword search terms containing John Deere convert while there are hundreds of other search terms that do not or at least do not profitably.

Therefore, by using the Positive Keyword strategy we can filter out all keyword searches that do not contain John Deere from the John Deere Campaign.

Campaign A – We will name ‘Positive Strategy – John Deere’ and add all John Deere product ads to this campaign with a bid of $0.01 and set the priority level to high. We will then add the negative keywords as a phrase match “John Deere”.

Campaign B – We will name ‘John Deere – Standard’ and add all John Deere product ads to this campaign with a bid of $0.50 and set the priority level to medium.

Since both campaigns have the same products all Google searches where these products would be eligible to appear will be sent to the Positive Strategy – John Deere campaign unless those searches contain the keyword term “John Deere”.

Positive Strategy – John Deere campaign has a bid of $0.01 which allows us to filter out all the unwanted keyword searches that we were receiving non-specific keyword searches from John Deere – Standard at the cost of $0.01 per click!

With the positive keyword strategy in place, John Deere – Standard will now receive traffic from search terms ONLY with the term John Deere in them including terms such as ‘John Deere Hat’, ‘John Deere Shirt’, Etc.

See how it works!

Last Word

Using Positive Keywords is most effective when advertising brand centric products or with enough historical data for an advertiser to absolutely know which keyword search terms do and which do not convert.

By using Positive Keywords an advertiser needs to make sure they are not eliminating substantial traffic that has the potential to generate significant profitable sales.

In addition, advertisers need to make sure all steps are properly completed when setting their priority levels, bids and negative keywords. If there is an error in the way settings are configured, the Priority Keywords method will not have the desired results.

You also will want to monitor your Positive Keyword campaigns for conversions as you will want to add to negative keywords in the Positive Strategy campaign if the campaigns receives a conversion.

Finally, even after Priority Keyword method is running properly it will still be necessary to monitor the keywords driving traffic and most likely continue to add negative keywords to your main campaign, just not as many:>

Looking for More Information on Google Advertising?

Check out the all new The Academy of Internet Marketing (www.theacademyofinternetmarketing.com), the premier online marketing destination for small to mid-sized ecommerce businesses serious about substantially growing their online sales plus exclusive access to me, author of Make Each Click Count, The TOP Guide To Success Using Google AdWords.

If you have the dedication and are ready to take your online sales to the next level, then The Academy of Internet Marketing was created for you. It provides the tools in the form of knowledge of what works today. Join us and see what makes us special and together we will grow your business.

Complete Access To The Academy of Internet Marketing For $1

If you are ready to take your online advertising to the next level, I welcome you to take a trial. It only costs $1 for access.

Happy Marketing!
Andy Splichal

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Andy Splichal is the founder of True Online Presence, author and certified online marketing strategist with more than a decade and a half of experience helping companies increase their online presence and profitable revenues. Find more information on Andy Splichal visit www.trueonlinepresence.com or at his read his blog, blog.trueonlinepresence.com.

Using Supplemental Feeds in Merchant Center

Most often one of the least understood pieces of advertising using Google Shopping is the continuous updating of product data to Google Merchant Center.

Far too often I have found when reviewing a retailer’s Google Ads account, they setup the Merchant Center; linked it to their Google Ads account and then never or almost never looked at it again. These accounts are often riddled with product disapprovals and inaccurate information.

Although your bidding optimizations are going to take place inside your Google Ads interface, it is critical to keep the data in your Merchant Center up to date. In addition to being accurate, there are tools that savvy Google advertisers use to effectively managing product data.

One of my favorite tools that I use for my private clients is the use of supplemental feeds.

Getting Started Using Merchant Center

Before you can begin advertising using Google Shopping, you need to first properly configure your Google Merchant Center.

For those new to Google Shopping, properly configuring your Merchant Center includes verifying and claiming your store, setting up tax and shipping information and of course submitting products.

For a complete review of all the initial steps along with the ongoing reviewing of errors and disapprovals that are sure to happen once you have submitted your products, review my article – There Can Be No Google Shopping Without A Google Merchant Account.

However, this article is written for those who are already running an approved product feed and wish to customize the feed without making changes to the original feed.

If that doesn’t quite make sense, no worries? I am about to explain.

Merchant Center Feeds

When uploading your products into Google Merchant Center, you will use the feed section of your Merchant Center account. This section is split into two sections: Primary Feeds and Supplemental Feeds.

The Primary Feed section is where you send the primary feed. The primary feed contains all the data that advertisers use to list and optimize their Google Shopping campaigns formatted into a delivery method that Google accepts.

There are quite a few options for an advertiser when submitting their primary feed.

First, you need to select your country of sale, then the language and finally the destination of where you want your products ads to be eligible for display. The options include Display ads, Shopping ads, Shopping Actions (when activate) and Surfaces across Google.

Next, you name your primary feed and select how you are going to provide the feed to Google.

Options for providing the data to Google include:

Using Google Sheets – Merchants create a Google Sheet to hold the data and manually update the sheet as needed.
Schedule a Fetch – Merchants host the feed on their own server and schedule a regular time for Google to fetch the feed from that location.
Upload – (the most common used) – Merchants typically using a 3^rd party data optimization company to automate and format the data along with scheduling a regular send.
Content API – (the second most commonly used) – Also typically done through a 3^rd party data optimization company. This method transfers the data through an API connection directly into merchant center.

Once you decide on how to get the data to Google, you then need to name the feed and create the initial feed. Some of the settings such as the Default Currency setting will need to be properly specified in order to have the feed approved by Google.

Supplemental Feeds

Once your primary feed is up and running with products being approved, advertisers may feel the need to update data for a subset of the products in the feed without updating the entire primary feed.

If that doesn’t quite make sense again, no worries. I am about to again explain.

For the example below, I am going to demonstrate using a supplemental feed to exclude some of the products from being eligible to appear in Google Shopping ads.

Besides being able to exclude items, you can update products using a Supplemental feed for any of the over 50 fields supported by Google Merchant Center.

Supplemental feeds are particularly useful to merchants with thousands of products that are being submitted when they only want to edit a subset of those products. Using a Supplemental feed allows information on a large feed to be overwritten with data in a smaller, easy to manage Supplemental feed file.

One of the ways I use supplemental feeds for my private clients is to exclude a small subset of products from being eligible to appear in one of the four supported shopping channels – Display ads, Shopping ads, Shopping Actions (when activated) or Surfaces across Google.

Other times a Supplemental feed may be useful is when it is not possible to map custom labels for some reason inside a primary feed or for that matter any of the other 50 supported fields that need to be changed for a subset of the primary feed.

In this example, I’m going to use a supplemental feed to make some products ineligible to appear within Shopping ads using a Google Sheet.

Creating a Supplemental Feed

The first step is inside Merchant Center to navigate to Products, then Feeds and click on the blue ‘Add Supplemental Feed’ link.

You will then name the feed and select the method for which you would like to submit the data to Google Merchant Center. For this example, I’m going to use Google Sheets.

Google Sheets is like Excel; however, instead of storing the file on your computer it is stored under Google’s cloud storage. Google sheets therefore do not take up any storage room and best of all Google sheets are absolutely free to create, use and modify. A Google sheet simply attaches to the same Google account that you use when accessing your Google Ads Account.

In order to create a Google Sheet, you first will want to name your Supplemental feed with a name that helps you recognize the purpose of the feed and then choose how you would like to deliver the data to Google.

Then, you will select whether you want to generate a new Google sheet or select an existing Google sheet.

Since I am creating from scratch, I’m going to select a generate new Google sheet and click on continue.

You will then want to select the primary feed that you will want to override data in with the new supplemental feed and select continue.

Google will then automatically create your supplemental feed along with a link to open the feed.

Once you open the Google sheet using the blue ‘Open’ link under in the Input method the Google sheet will open, and you can manually add data to the file.

When adding data, you will want the first row to be the header row. This row should contain id in the first column (this is what Google will use to match the data in your supplemental feed with the data in the primary feed). The next columns will be the header for the supported fields that you want to override in the primary feed using the new supplemental feed.

For this example, I am using Excluded_destination in order to tell Google that certain items should not be eligible to appear inside Shopping Ads.

Note, in this example, I’m overriding only one field, excluded_destination, but you can override multiple fields at the same time using a supplemental feed. In order to do so, you need to add additional columns, where the header row contains the field you wish to override with the data underneath.

After the Google sheet is saved for the Supplemental feed to take effect, you are going to have to go back to your feeds and click on the Supplemental feed you just created.

Once opened, you will need to click on the ‘Fetch Now’ link in the upper right.

Once you click the Fetch Now link, Google will import your data and override product data in the original primary feed. Give the feed a few minutes to populate and you should see how many records were successfully populated.

As you can see above, all 27 items that we added were successfully populated!

Checking That Everything Is Working

In order to check to see if that the Supplemental feed has taken affect, you will want to click on ‘All products’ link in the left tool bar and then you can filter by one of the ids in your new Supplemental feed.

If you click on the item, all the details for this item as stored in Google Merchant Center will display.

For the purpose of our example, we can see right near the top that the item no longer is appearing on Shopping ads. However, if you changed other fields in the primary feed, you will need to scroll down on the page to see how different fields are now being displayed.

That is it. Congratulations you now have another highly effective tool for being able to quickly manage the data in your Google Merchant Center!

Last bit of advice

Knowing how your Google Merchant Center pulls in product data is essential to gaining a huge leg up on your competition. Although, all the bidding is done within your Google Ads interface, only products that are approved in your Merchant Center will become eligible to appear in your Google Shopping campaigns.

If you are not checking your Google Merchant Center often, you could be doing yourself a real disservice in terms on not monitoring new disapprovals and other issues that will inevitably arise within Merchant Center.

Providing strategically formatted data to Google Merchant Center makes it much easier to control product listings and allows for the best chance for success using Google Shopping.

And now that you know how to quickly control a subset of your products using a Supplemental feed, you have an effective way to manage your products including showing which products are and are not eligible to appear within different channels.

Looking for More Information on Google Advertising?

Check out the all new The Academy of Internet Marketing (www.theacademyofinternetmarketing.com), the premier online destination for for small to mid-sized e-commerce businesses serious about substantially growing their online sales. Plus exclusive access to me, author of Make Each Click Count, The TOP Guide To Success Using Google AdWords.

Now included within The Academy of Internet Marketing is a video tutorial detailing the creation up a supplemental feed as described in this article.

If you have the dedication and are ready to take your online sales to the next level, then The Academy of Internet Marketing was created for you. It provides the tools in the form of knowledge of what works today. Join us and see what makes us special and together we will grow your business.

If you are ready to take your online advertising to the next level, I welcome you to take a trial. It only costs $1 for complete access for 2 full weeks.

Happy Marketing!
Andy Splichal

About The Author

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is Author2.jpg

Andy Splichal is an online marketing strategist with more than a decade and a half of experience helping companies increase their online presence and profitable revenues. Although this blog focuses on driving profitable traffic through Google AdWords, True Online Presence offers additional services for lead generation as well as other proven marketing strategies customized for each client.

There Can Be No Google Shopping Without A Google Merchant Account {updated 1/14/20}

For many eCommerce merchants, Google Shopping is essential to their online sales strategy and new customer acquisition. With Google search ads becoming ever more expensive, many retailers are finding their best ROI opportunities with the implementation of properly optimized Google Shopping ads.

In order to fully optimize, advertisers adjust their Google Shopping product bids and segment their products within the Google Ads interface. For best-practices and effective strategies on optimizing Google Shopping within the Google Ads interface review my articles: Adjusting Google Shopping Bids For Individual Products, How Segmenting Google Shopping Campaigns Can Boost Profitability and Top Tips To Optimize Google Shopping.

However, before products are eligible to appear in Google Shopping products must first become eligible to appear. For products to become eligible to appear, they must be properly formatted and approved inside a Google Merchant Center Account.

In addition, for advertisers wishing to advertise their products using Google’s Shopping Actions Program, creating a Merchant Center account is also required for participation.

The Basics – Google’s Merchant Center

A Google Merchant Center Account is an account that Google requires merchants open before they can have their products eligible to list within Google Shopping or Shopping Actions. It is where merchants upload their full product data containing information on the products, they wish to advertise within Google Shopping network.

In order to get started, new advertisers need to create an account by visiting www.google.com/retail/solutions/merchant-center/ and clicking on the ‘Get Started’ button. When creating a new account, advertisers will be required to supply the name of their store, Website URL and whether the website contains content as defined by Google.

Next, an advertiser will need verify and claim the URL for the account they create.

In order to claim a website, owners have the options of adding some HTML code to their metatags, using information in their Google Analytics tags or information contained in their Google Tag Manager. Any of the methods will work and therefore it is left to the discretion of individual advertisers to select which method they prefer.

Once the tags are implemented, advertisers can quickly determine whether the process of claiming and verifying worked and if successful the site will change status to being verified and claimed.

In addition, an advertiser can determine if their account has been successfully claimed and verified at any time, by clicking on the ‘Account Settings’ link under the Settings link (wrench icon) in the top menu.

Once an advertiser has claimed and verified their account, they will have full functionality throughout the account. However, to properly manage their Google Merchant Center Account, advertisers will need to understand the layout of where different options and settings are located.

Exploring Google’s Merchant Center Layout

Each Merchant Center account uses a left-hand menu that includes the following options: Overview, Orders (if Shopping Actions is enabled), Products, Performance (if Shopping Actions is enabled), Marketing and Growth.

Overview

The overview is a dashboard containing a quick snapshot of the account. Although, for new merchants the dashboard will be blank, for existing merchants the dashboard becomes an important snapshot into the health of the account.

For advertisers with account history, the dashboard will display a summary overview of their products including a graph displaying active products, expiring products, products awaiting review and disapproved products for Surfaces across Google, Shopping Ads and Shopping Actions (if enabled). In addition, the dashboard will show a graph displaying the account’s paid click history as well as Google announcements.

Orders

This link will only appear for merchants who have been approved to have their products appear within Google’s Shopping Actions.

Within the orders section, merchants will find orders from Google Shopping Actions that are Pending, Pending Delivery and All Orders (history). The Orders link also contains historical return data again for Google Shopping Action orders only.

Products

The Products link is going to be the most used of the links within the left-hand navigation. Within the Product link, merchants can access ‘Diagnostics’, ‘All Products’ and ‘Feeds’.

Diagnostics – This section shows advertisers any potential issues with products within their submitted data. Diagnostic information can be viewed based on destination (dynamic remarketing, shopping actions, shopping ads or surfaces across Google); although shopping ads is the default view. In addition, the diagnostics data can be viewed by the Country ads are served as well as by specific Feed.

Reviewing the Merchant Center’s diagnostics is essential in determining which products are eligible for display in Google Shopping and/or Shopping Actions. These insights are NOT available in the Google Ads interface and is one reason that reviewing the Merchant Center Account on a regular basis is highly recommended.

Diagnostics will provide the number of items currently disapproved, awaiting review, expiring and active. In addition, the diagnostics link contains information on the status of the account, feeds and individual items. If there are issues present in any of these areas, diagnostics will also generate links helpful for fixing listed issues as well as provide examples to items with current issues and the ability to download all items affected by listed errors.

In this account example, the diagnostics view contains links to affected items with errors in the feed. By clicking on the ‘View samples’ link an advertiser can determine how many of their products are currently being affected and by which issues. Note, that not all listed issues will keep products from being eligible for display; however, next to the issue Google will list if the error causes products to be disapproved or if this issue is a warning.

All products – The ‘All products’ link allows advertisers to view all of their products. They can view details on individual products by clicking on the title.

In addition, advertisers can filter and search for specific data based on Title, ID, Price, Clicks, Condition, Availability, Status, Channel, Country or Language.

The ‘All products’ link is essential to use when confirming whether a specific product is listed and what attributes for specific products have been indexed into Google’s database. This can be done through this view quickly without the need to open and review the actual data feed.

Feeds – Within the feeds link, advertisers can review current feeds as well as create and schedule new feeds. Feed types are categorized into Primary Feeds and Supplemental Feeds.

Primary feeds are used by Google Merchant Center to upload product data via text (txt) files, XML (.xml) files, Google Sheets or the Google Center API.

Supplemental feeds are used by Merchant Center as a secondary data source to provide additional attributes to your primary feeds or to provide additional data to be used within Feed Rules.

For more information on Supplemental feeds, review my article – Using Supplemental Feeds in Merchant Center.

Once a data feed has been successfully uploaded, approved products are eligible to appear within the Google Shopping network for 30 days. So, at the absolute minimum merchants will need to re-upload their data monthly. However, typically for eCommerce merchants where their product information changes, in order to stay current with data, products will require more regular uploads typically daily or at least weekly.

The process of uploading a new data feed is the easy part of getting items approved in Google’s Shopping network. More involved is creation of the actual feed. Google currently supports 46 different attributes and although not all attributes are required it is recommended that advertisers populate as many fields as possible that are relevant for their products.

Current supported attributes include: link, title, description, price, sale_price, sale_price_effective_date, mobile_link, image_link, id, brand, condition, manufacturer, mpn, gtin, identifier_exists, shipping_weight, product_type, shipping, multipack, is_bundle, adwords_grouping, adwords_labels, excluded_destination, expiration_date, promotion_id, availability, availability_date, google_product_category, color, size, size_type, size_system, material, pattern, additional_image_link, age_group, gender, adult, item_group, custom_label_0, custom_label_1, custom_label_2, custom_label_3, custom_label_4, shipping_height, shipping_width, shipping_length and cost_of_goods_sold.

Don’t worry, there are 3^rd party data optimization companies that work with advertisers for a nominal fee to set-up regular data feed uploads and populate different fields based on information currently contained within eCommerce websites.

Performance

The performance link will appear for retailers who have been approved to sell products through Google’s Shopping Actions program.

The performance view allows advertisers to keep track of retailer standards to make sure they are meeting Google Shopping Actions performance standards as well as keep track of Shopping Actions promotions.

Note, advertisers participating in Shopping Actions that meet top retailer status will have their items shown more often in Shopping Actions while those who consistently fall below standards may find their products eventually suspended from appearing within Google Shopping Actions.

Marketing

The marketing link contains Promotions and Product reviews. Both promotions and product reviews are free to use; however, you will need to request that they are enabled from the Google Shopping team before you see them in your Google Merchant Center console.

Promotions allow advertisers to stand apart from their competition who sell the same or similar products. A strategic way to bring added emphasis to product listings, review my article, Enhancing Google Shopping Using Promotions for details on creating and implementing promotions within Google Merchant Center.

For advertisers who collect product reviews, this feature allows their product ratings and reviews to be shown directly on their Google Shopping listing. Note, for a merchant to qualify to use product reviews they must have a minimum of 50 product reviews gathered within the last 12 months. In order to remain eligible, merchants will need to update their product reviews at least once per month through a data upload into their Google Merchant Center account.

Growth

The Growth link contains suggestions from Google to grow your account and includes Opportunities, Market insights, Shopping Actions insights (if approved) and Manage programs.

Opportunities – Lists where there may be potential opportunities to increase your traffic using Google Shopping. Examples of opportunities include fixing errors on historically high traffic Shopping ads.

Marketing insights – This view shows popular products on Google that you’re not currently advertising. In the “Personalized” view, the products are selected based on how similar they are to your most popular products and ranked based on how many clicks an ad for that product is likely to receive. Along with the products, you’ll also see prices for those products from other retailers.

The “Personalized” tab shows you products that you might want to advertise based on your current products, ranked by how many clicks an ad for that product would receive. These products are related to what you’re currently advertising.

Shopping Actions insights (for merchants who have been accepted into Shopping actions) – This view helps advertisers understand your price competitiveness on Shopping Actions and how you can win the buy-box. This view allows advertisers to filter by specific products in order to gain insight into which products they are winning buy box with Google Shopping Actions.

Manage programs – This view allows advertisers to easily manage which available features are enabled within their Merchant Center account. Currently available programs include Surfaces across Google, Shopping ads, Shopping Actions, Dynamic Remarketing, Customer Reviews, Local inventory ads, Merchant Promotions and Product Ratings.

Settings

The final option located as a Wrench icon in the upper menu is Settings.

Settings are broken into two subcategories – Tools and Settings.

Tools consists of all the settings a merchant needs to complete in order to have their account approved. These include Shipping and returns, Sales tax, Business information, Payments, Shopping ads setup, Shopping Actions setup (if approved), Customer Reviews setup and Surfaces Across Google.

Shipping and returns – where a merchant formats their shipping and return information. Information submitted here needs to fully match what is listed on the website.

Sales tax – where a merchant formats where and at what rates they collect sales tax on orders.

Business information – The business display name along with address and customer service contact information.

Payments (merchants with Shopping Actions) – payment information of where Google will send settled money received from orders placed using Google Shopping actions.

Shopping ads setup – Information regarding participation in Google Shopping ads including notices, status and product/business information.

Shopping Actions setup (merchants with Shopping Actions) – Information regarding participation in Shopping Actions including notices, status and product/business information.

Customer reviews setup – Data about the number customers who have opted in and completed Google’s Customer Review surveys.

Surfaces across Google – Information regarding participation in Surfaces across Google including notices, status and product/business information.

The Settings subcategory includes Content API, Account settings, Account access, Preferences, Linked accounts, Automatic improvements and SFTP, FTP, GCS.

Content API – Historical data for the account regarding successful and failed API calls. This is where you can create a Google API Key for your Google Merchant Center account.

Account Settings – This includes time zone and language as well as account status and where you can close your account.

Account Access – Allows merchants to grant access to their Merchant Center account to different users that they wish to be able to access their account.

Preferences – Allows merchant to adjust access levels for various users and control levels of automatic notifications from Google.

Linked accounts – Allows you to link your Merchant Center Account to your Google Ads account. This must be done prior to being able to serve product ads within Google.

Automatic improvements – Allows merchants to enable automatic item updates for price, availability and both.

SFTP, FTP, GCS – Access to SFTP, FTP and GCS settings in order to be able to upload products directly into your Merchant Center account based on these available delivery methods.

Final Word

Although once a merchant has setup their Google Merchant Center Account and have their product data automatically and successfully updating, it can be tempting to forget about the Merchant Center and fully concentrate efforts on optimizing listings exclusively within the Google Ads interface.

Optimizing listings and categories within the Google Ads interface is essential to the success of Google Shopping Campaigns. However, equally important is the regular monitoring of the Google Merchant Center Account.

For it is only within the Google Merchant Center Account that advertisers can view issues related to their product data that may prevent items from being eligible to display; learn insights regarding other advertisers and configure account information such as shipping, tax and contact information.

For these reasons, without constantly monitoring your Google Merchant Center Account it will not possible to fully optimize your Google Shopping listings.

Looking for More Information on Google Advertising?

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Happy Marketing!
Andy Splichal

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