Google Shopping Updates 2017

Google rolls out new product updates.

September was a busy month with several Google Shopping updates coming out, just in time for merchants to prepare for the holiday season.

New Google Merchant Tools

Google Merchant Center has released new tools for merchants, upgraded feed rules and is suggesting high-value opportunities for merchants.

Probably the biggest change is changing the terminology and structure of their feeds. They have renamed their regular shopping feeds to Primary Feeds and introduced Supplemental Feeds.

Primary Feeds 

Think of it as your normal shopping feed that allows you to remove and add products from and to your feed. If the primary feed includes all the required data from Google Merchant Center, then it can be the only feed you submit to Google.

If the primary feed doesn’t include all the required data, or you want to enhance this feed with additional data, you can use the supplemental feeds.

Supplemental Feeds

They are used to enhance existing data from the primary feed. It cannot be used as the main data source, but it has to be connected to the primary feed through the id attribute. Moreover, it cannot be used to add or remove products from the feed.

You can use supplemental feeds in addition to your primary feeds to:

  • add or modify promotional information
  • add or modify custom labels
  • replace values
  • add GTINs

Primary feeds and Supplemental feeds are under Products>Feeds(new) in your Google Merchant Center Admin account.

Google Merchant Opportunities

Are created to help advertising retailers improve their feed data and campaigns with tailored recommendations.

Until now, merchants had the Diagnostics tab where they could see all the items that were not compliant with Google’s requirements.

Now, they’ve taken everything a step further and added the Opportunities tab. With opportunities, retailers can see where they can improve the campaigns, which products can be modified and how these changes will impact the overall shopping costs.

The opportunities highlighted at this point are limited to a few product data and campaign recommendations, but we should expect to see more in the coming months like:

  • Product data opportunities: missing GTINs, missing gender, missing age group and mismatched prices;
  • Campaign opportunities: budget raising and bid lowering.

 

Other upgrades to the Merchant Center suite include:

  • team-based Merchant Center accounts with Admin and Standard users
  • new feed rules
  • changed processing notifications to send emails only if the valid items in a feed drops by 5%

Expand internationally with a single source feed

One of the major hassles for the merchants, who want to sell internationally, is creating dedicated feeds and landing pages for the countries they want to sell in.

Not anymore.

Merchants can now sell in 21 out of the 37 Google Shopping countries by submitting a single English master feed. Some of the countries that accept English feeds are Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Netherlands, New, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey. Here you can find the complete list.