The holiday season is upon us and every ecommerce retailer is looking to reach more customers and sell more products. The latest merchant centre update has made Google Shopping an absolute no brainer for online retailers, especially if you are looking to sell in multiple countries. As of November 2019, Google Shopping is available in 50 new markets, with almost 100 available in total.
Automated Feeds
One of the newest features is automated feeds. Generating feeds can be, in some cases, a highly technical and tedious task for many retailers and ecommerce marketers. This problem has now been solved as Merchant Center can simply crawl your website and use structured data to get the most up-to-date information to get you up and running with a feed. This type of automated feed means product information that is constantly changing such as availability (in stock, out of stock), price or shipping costs is updated immediately in your feed.
Worth noting, even though automated feeds sound like the perfect solution, they rely on your product mark-up data on your site to be setup and correct (check this before using). This type of feed also offers less flexibility in how you can optimise and manipulate the data, so if you are looking to really get hands on an automated feed may not be the best option.
Once you have a shopping feed setup, the next step is to optimise and clean the data in the feed to make sure it aligns with Google’s categories and formatting. Common issues in your merchant feed might include:
- Missing product data e.g. product descriptions, shipping costs, GTINs
- Watermarked, promotional, low quality or missing images
- Excessive capitalisation or spam in titles and descriptions
- Google policy violations
- Incorrect price (doesn’t match with the landing page)
Automatically Remove Promotional Overlays
How many times have your products been disapproved because of a promotional watermark or image overlay you simply don’t have the time to remove yourself? The answer in my experience is many times. Many.
Merchant centre now has an option to do this automatically, this means more approved products, leading to more clicks and product sales! While this sounds like a win-win, once again worth mentioning new features like this tend to have bugs and can be clunky, so definitely review the image results to make sure it doesn’t remove more than just the promotional overlay or watermark as this could have negative effects on your shopping campaigns.
If you have been looking at Google Shopping as part of your ecommerce marketing channels, there has never been a better time to start selling in one of the biggest online ecommerce marketplaces.
If you are looking to start a campaign in time for the holiday shopping season or simply take the performance of your campaign to the next level, contact our Clearwater Google shopping team and start reaching more customers!
