Having your products submitted to Google Shopping gives you one more traffic channel that can bring you potential customers and increase conversions.Moreover, you can use your feed for creating Dynamic Remarketing campaigns in AdWords.This article will give you an idea of how to create and use feeds. So let’s begin.
1. Create a Google feed
Firstly you should generate a Google shopping feed. You can do it manually but if your inventory is extensive, it will be extremely time-consuming. However, if you run your store on a CMS, there is a chance to find a feed module for it. For example, here is one for Magento. Such extensions can save you when it comes to generating feeds containing all your products.
When creating a Google feed you should bear in mind some rules as well as know which fields are required and which are only recommended. You can find the specification here but it’s quite huge. So to make a long story short, here is an outline of important product info that each Google feed should contain:
- ID – it is a unique identifier of each item from your store. This field plays a key role if you decide to enable dynamic remarketing.
- Title
- It should not be too long, so remember about itif this field is created automatically.
- Google merchant category (required only in certain situation, see more on the link above).
- Link pointing to the product page on your site.
- Image link
- Condition(new, refurbished or used).
- Availability (preorder, in stock or out of stock).
- Price – don’t forget to include currency here.
- Brand – in most cases this field is also required.
- Unique product identifiers. They are required from 16 May, 2016 onwards. You can find more about them at https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/160161#types .
Before proceeding, make sure all the data you add in the feed is accurate, otherwise your product listing will be disapproved.
2. Add the feed to your Google Merchant account
Once your product feed is ready, you can submit it to Google Merchant Center. Before doing that you must consider how your feed will be updated in the future in case you’ll need to change some prices, titles or add/delete products. There are 2 options:
1.Manual. It can be doneby uploading a new file from your computer at any time.
- Automatic. Either Google Spreadsheets or your server can be used. In the first case you make changes in Google Docs and they are automatically applied to your feed. In the second scenario you upload the feed to your site, indicate its path and choose the time when Google Merchant Center should fetch it.
The choice of the option depends on your store, quantity of products, frequency of needed updates as well as your preferences. For example, if your inventory is quite flexible, with new products appearing and old disappearing, I would advise you to go for an automatic feed update.
3. Use the feed to increase sales
Here are two main ways how you can utilize your newly created feed.
First of all, you can list your products in Google Shopping by creating a corresponding campaign. Once the products in the feed are approved, they will be accessible to people searching the products you offer.
What is more, you can use the feed for Dynamic Remarketing. It means you will be able to target people who already visited your site, thus they are potentially interested in your products.Implementation of Dynamic Remarketing may seem complex but it’s worth it. Here is a quick overview of how it’s done for retail businesses:
- update your AdWords or GA tracking code;
- add ecomm_prodid parameter to your site, it should match the items IDs found in the feed;
- link your AdWords and Google Merchant accounts;
- create a remarketing list if you decide to use this targeting method;
- set up a Dynamic Remarketing campaign.
Here is a full guide by Google.
Final thoughts
As you can see, just a simple thing like a product feed can give competitive edge to your products, especially if you are selling clothes, electronics and things like that. So if you still don’t have a feed, what are you waiting for?
