Your product feed is your backstage production to your wonderful Shopping ads. Once your feed is optimized and ready to go, you’ll need to connect it with your Google Merchant Account so that it can get to work and your campaigns can go live.
Uploading your products via a feed rather than manually one by one will save you a ton of time and energy. It allows you to do things like optimize and make edits in bulk. We’ll guide you through 3 different ways of uploading your feed, depending on what your needs are and what kind of feed you have.
If you’re using a third party feed management solution like DataFeedWatch then you’ll just need to connect your feed once and have peace of mind knowing that it will be updated once you make any changes.
Adding products to Google Shopping involves several steps.
A Merchant Center product feed is a critical tool for your eCommerce business, as it serves as a file containing comprehensive information about your products and the base for your Shopping ads.
The product feed includes various required attributes, such as title, price, ID, description, link, image link, availability, GTIN (UPC or barcode), MPN, and condition. Ensuring the inclusion of these attributes in your feed is crucial for the approval and visibility of products within Google's platform.
The optimized Google Merchant Center feed is essential for running successful Shopping or Performance Max campaigns and can significantly impact the overall success of your business.
You can upload your product data through Google Merchant Center, businesses, enabling its utilization in Performance Max and Shopping ads.
The easiest way to add products to Google Merchant Center to advertise is to upload the product feed, which contains information about all your products, to the platform.
The process of uploading your data feed offers three options:
Who is this method for? This method is perfect for merchants of all shapes and sizes who have created their feed on something like Google Sheets or are using a third party management tool.
Requirements: A URL that contains your feed
Google Sheets
Here's an example of what a feed created in Google Sheets could look like:
Make sure you change the settings so that it’s able to be read by anyone who has the link.
DataFeedWatch
Once you’ve finished mapping your feed, a feed URL will be auto generated. This is the link you’ll want to copy.
After you select the language, the 'Destination' option will appear as well. You can pick which Google Products you want to advertise on like Shopping ads and Free Listings.
This is just to help distinguish it from other feeds in your account. It doesn't need to match the file name and will only be seen inside your account.
You can name your feed file whatever you like here, but the file URL needs to be copied and pasted exactly.
Decide on your:
Giving login details is optional unless you've set up a password protected feed.
Your feed will be processed automatically anyway, but if you don't want to wait you can choose the 'Fetch now' option for the first processing.
Who is this method for? This method is best for merchants with very few products, or for those who rarely need to make adjustments to their feed.
Requirements: A file located on your local drive that is 4GB or smaller
Potential drawbacks: You need to upload a new file any time you make changes to your feed. So it could work for someone who has a few products, but for most merchants it could lead to headaches.
Go to the shop of the feed you want and find your Google Shopping channel. Make sure that your feed is fully mapped and ready to go. Its status should be ‘OK’.
Under the Options tab click the down arrow and choose ‘Export Output Feed to File’
Go to the ‘Products’ tab and then to ‘Feeds’. Click on the blue plus button to add a new feed.
Fill in the settings for:
Choose a name for your feed that will help you identify it among your other feeds. It’s just an internal name that doesn’t need to match your file name.
Pick the ‘Upload’ method for how your feed will be connected to Google Merchant Center.
Choose if you want to upload it right away and hit ‘Continue’. And that’s it!
Who is this method for? This method is a great match for all merchants, especially those who are interested in making several daily feed updates.
Requirements:
FTP connections are a way for computers to communicate and transfer data. The data in question here is your feed file.
Google gives you the opportunity to set your FTP account up right in Merchant Center.
You can do this in a couple of ways:
If you’re using DataFeedWatch then you’ll be able to run a Feed Review after making any changes. It will check for any errors or warnings in your feed and give you an overall health score.
If not, you can check it in Google when you’re uploading your feed. Choose the ‘Upload as a test’ on this screen to test your feed before it goes live.
Either way, you should fix any errors and warnings before your feed goes live in order to keep your Merchant Center account healthy.
Google requires you to update your feed at least once a month, but we recommend you do it much more frequently. Once a day works well for a lot of merchants, but if you have a feed that’s changing many times a day, then multiple daily feed updates is the best path for you.