Google Merchant Center

In layman’s terms, Google Shopping is essentially a customized search engine that is specifically designed for, you guessed it, shopping! Google Shopping allows users to directly compare and analyze various products from a wide variety of different suppliers and businesses and directs them to where they can be purchased and for how much.

It is also integrated to some degree with their main search engine, meaning that relevant searches can also trigger Google Shopping results to be included at the top of those organic search results, these are known as Product Ads. Using Google Shopping can be a great way of driving sales through your website and it can be easily managed and altered through the Google Merchant Centre.

It works in a very similar way to Google’s more “traditional” PPC advertising platforms and has a similar goal in that it gives you an additional chance to gain traction with those users searching for similar products. However, you pay for these prominent positions every time somebody decides to review your particular product and click on the ads, regardless of whether or not they actually buy anything!

Essentially the Google Merchant Centre acts as the foundation on which these two products are built, without Google Merchant Centre you cannot upload your products and the relevant information about them to Google Shopping. This then leads on to an inability to run Google Product Ads. As an eCommerce business, it is essential that you familiarize yourself with both the principle behind the Google Merchant Centre and how it actually performs in the real world.

Once you know you products meet Google Specifications, its time to get your products uploaded. You will need to ensure that your product feed file is ready to be uploaded to the Google Merchant center beforehand. This is done essentially by going into the Shop settings on the Top Menu in your Google account, clicking on Product Promotion, and the Google Merchant Centre.

From there you will then see a prompt asking you to click to upload your product feed. This will then begin the process of uploading all of your products and the relevant information to your Google Shopping page (this can take a considerable amount of time depending on your internet speed and the number of products that require uploading).

The last thing you need to do is to set up your Product Listing Ads. Google has released a whole series of videos on how you can best set up and optimize your Product Listing Ads. The general idea behind it, however, is that you integrate your AdWords campaign into your Google Merchant Centre.

From there it is very much the same as setting up an Adwords campaign, in that you create different ad groups for each search term and place the products you want to drive the most sales in for that category and set your budget and bid on how much you want to pay per click. The major difference in Product Listing Ads and Adwords is that Adwords ads are sorted to which will be displayed first by their quality score. Whereas with Product Listing Ads, the only metrics by which your products are displayed are by your daily budget and your bid.