Setting up Merchant Center & Google Shopping

On March 1, 2018, something happened that we had been waiting for many years – Google announced the launch of Merchant Center and Google Shopping in Ukraine, although in many countries this happened much earlier. This became a new generation of promotion in contextual advertising, which opened up a lot of advantages for online retail and is already successfully working in many online stores.

Google Shopping - advertising of goods from online stores, in all possible Google platforms, from search to YouTube.

In Google Shopping, products are advertised with images, prices and a short description with a link to the product card itself, which ensures maximum conversion for online stores. It looks something like this:

Launching Google Shopping consists of several stages:

1. Setting up Merchant Center;
2. Preparing a website for online sales;
3. Passing moderation in Merchant Center;
4. Setting up all synchronizations, analytics and tagging;
5. Creating a shopping campaign in Google Ads.

* We will describe the most important points, since the interfaces are constantly updated and everything cannot be covered in one article.

Merchant Center

This is an electronic product consolidation system that simultaneously imports products from the site and exports them to Google Ads for further advertising with individual settings in a completely new Google product - the Google Shopping marketplace.

Previously, we uploaded products directly to Google Ads via a spreadsheet feed, now this is done via Google Merchant Center, which opens up a lot of advantages.

👉 More options for loading information about a product appear – brand, model, availability, promotion, promotion end date, rating, availability of reviews, and so on.

👉 Modern methods of loading are open, starting from simple Excel, ending with XML formats, downloading from a server or even API.

👉 Availability of complete information on click statistics for products, which was not available before + information on their effectiveness (CTR, conversion, behavior on the site).

👉 Synchronization with Google Ads and other services.

👉 Availability of information on the approval status of goods.

👉 Consolidation of reviews about the store and products, which is used in further advertising.

👉 Export of products to Google Ads, which allows you to create campaigns related to products, namely:

• Google Shopping campaign;
• Performance Max;
• Campaigns in the context-display network;
• Video campaigns.

👉 Placing products in the marketplace Google Shopping (analogous to the “air tickets” tab, which concentrates paid and free product offers from online stores). In the developers’ presentation, Google Shopping looks like this:

Preparing your site for Google Shopping and passing moderation in Merchant Center

To have active products in Google Ads and to be able to launch Google Shopping, you need to:

• set up a Merchant Center account;
• pass moderation;
• do all synchronizations.

The main rule of moderation in Merchant Center is that the user should be able to order the product online, pay online and receive the product at the door without leaving home.

That is why the recommendations for each site are an individual list, according to the existing characteristics of the site.

In some cases, it is simply a need to make an XML feed, in others to add online payment, in others to work with delivery and buyer rights.

To run shopping campaigns with Merchant Center in Google Shopping, you need to:

👉 Google Ads;

👉 Google Merchant;

👉 Possibility to export products from the online store to Google Sheets or XML file;

👉 Contact us.

Then our work begins. We have extensive experience with such operations, as we implemented dynamic remarketing back when it first appeared, bypassing the presence of Google Merchant in Ukraine. Now everything is more transparent, consultative and informative. We have already implemented more than 150 projects, including small projects, national projects, and even projects abroad. We are ready to provide assistance to you too!

As a result, by launching advertising in Google Shopping, you get advertising of the entire range of the online store without creating ad groups and, most importantly, with targeted traffic at a minimum price.

Google Shopping campaigns are constantly evolving, first there were standard, then smart shopping campaigns, and since the beginning of 2022 they have been reformed into Performance Max campaigns (campaigns across all promotion channels at once).

For a more detailed map of the Google Shopping launch actions, please contact the agency or leave a request below.

Order a service