By leveraging Google Ads wisely, you can improve your store’s visibility online to a great extent. With this, you can make your business known to a much larger audience and also enhance your sales.
The Google Shopping Feed helps you to list your products to your online audience whenever they make a relevant search. But to be able to show up in such searches, you first need to design your feed appropriately.
Google Shopping Feed has several requirements that need to be updated in a certain manner. Let’s discuss all of these requirements in detail. Keep reading to know more!
What are the Google Shopping Feed Requirements?
As you must know, your Google Merchant feed is where you upload all your product details. When users make a Google search, key matches show up in the organic listings.
On the Google Merchant Center, you can add all details of your products, ads, specifications, and other details. However, it is crucial to share all your information as per the set guidelines.
Google Merchant Guidelines to Follow
- You should advertise only products available to customers for purchasing directly:
This means that you can only advertise products that you sell in your store. These cannot include affiliate ads or pay-per-click links to items.
You cannot link ads either as a member of the Affiliate Advertisement Beta or as a Comparison Shopping Service (CSS). All links that you promote in Shopping Advertising must lead buyers to a page to purchase the same product.
- You must always use an official language:
While selling your products in any country, ensure to use the official language of that specific country. There are also options to advertise in more than a single language, so you can cater to multiple different countries by communicating in their official languages.
Remember to always add product-specific data for each language you choose to advertise in, as well as links to the respective landing pages.
- Ensure that your customers know about your return and refund policy:
Your store’s returns and refunds policy should be easy to find on your website. Your policy should clearly explain the procedure and conditions to raise a ticket for returns and refunds.
This policy must highlight the steps one must follow, the acceptable time frame for returns, and other necessary information.
- Always collect user information responsibly and securely:
While collecting user information, always follow this three-step mantra to ensure user privacy.
- Collect personal information, such as credit card details only on an SSL-protected page
- Never sell the contact details of your users
- Always seek permission before using user data or photos in advertising
- Ensure to verify and claim your website URL:
To assert ownership of your store you may have to validate it by certain steps. This is simply to prevent anyone else from making claims to your domain. For this, you’ll need to be able to edit your website’s HTML or upload files to your server to check your URL.
Also, note that you must share accurate contact details of your store on the website. There must also be clear instructions on payments and billing.
Lastly, you should pay attention to check out Google’s specific policies on advertising and any additional Merchant guidelines before setting up your ad campaigns.
Understanding Product Data Specifications for Your Feed
Even when you upload your product data into the Google Shopping feed, you will have to abide by certain specifications. There are design guidelines that clarify how to apply the data so it becomes easily readable.
Here’s a look at them in detail:
- Product IDs
Every unique product must be mapped to a unique product idea. This ID must remain the same in any data that you update. Product IDs should consist of only valid Unicode characters.
Pay attention to avoid any invalid characters such as powers, features, or private area characters. Also, this product ID must be standardized for the same product in different countries or languages.
- Title
For your product’s landing page, you must carefully think of a title. It’ll help to first identify your product and then find a matching title for your landing page.
Things to remember – never include promotional text. Also, to distinguish between variants highlight features like color or size.
You can also make other customizations based on the product categories. For example, you can add an age rating at the beginning of the title for books and novels.
- Description
As the name goes, the description of your product will tell your customers all about it. Here, you shouldn’t include links to your shop, sales statistics, competitor data, or other products and accessories.
You can talk about what the product is, its features, materials, etc. Use line breaks, lists, or italics to format your description and beautify it.
- Product Links and Image Links
This includes the link to the landing page of your product. An important point to remember is that the link must be secure, meaning it must begin with ‘https’ and must comply with certain regulations.
You must also link the product’s main image with a URL. This URL will be then crawled by Google for the image. Use only your actual product’s image and not other inaccurate images.
You will also have to follow certain formats like using non-animated media or GIF(.gif). You must stick to JPEG (.jpg/.jpeg), PNG(.png), BMP (.bmp), and TIFF(.tif/.tiff).
Things to avoid – do not submit images larger than 64 megapixels or a file bigger than 16 MB. Don’t scale up a picture or submit a thumbnail. Also do not include advertising text, watermarks, or borders.
- Product Price & Availability
If a customer considers buying your product, they must be aware of the exact price with all added taxes or fees. You must display the price in the currency of the country of sale on your website where it is very clearly visible.
If you are selling products in multi-packs or bulk, add the total price of the minimum purchase quantity, bundle, or multipack. For the US and Canada specifically, do not include tax in the price.
You also don’t want your customer to make a purchase and then be disappointed if the product isn’t in stock. So, make sure to update product availability on a real-time basis.
- Product’s Brand
Stating the brand will make it easier for customers to identify a certain product and find them in search results. If a product is manufactured in-house, add your company’s name as the brand name.
In other instances such as if you sell white-label products or custom jewelry, you could use your store name as a brand name. If any product does not have a brand name, submit the name of the manufacturer or supplier under the Brand Attribute.
Note – Never add values such as N / A, Generic, No brand, or Does not exist in the brand attribute.
- GTIN
While adding GTIN always exclude spaces or dashes. Only submit valid GTINs as defined in the official GS1 validation guide. For compatible products: submit a GTIN and a brand from the manufacturer who built a compatible product.
For multipacks use the product identifiers that relate to a multipack. Likewise, for bundles use product identifiers for the main product in the bundle. If you offer additional customizations such as engraving, submit GTIN and use this bundle attribute to let customers know that the product includes customization.
Optional Attributes for your Feed
You can also add several other attributes besides the required ones mentioned above. These include additional image links, the expiration date of products, sale prices, product categories, etc.
These are based on your preferences and how you like to organize products in your store’s feed.
Using Your Product Data To Build an Optimized Shopping Feed
Your products will only pop up in searches if Google can crawl through the feed and pick the right set of data. For this, it is extremely important to carefully curate your feed and add just the right information.
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Reach out to us in case of any queries and we will always be happy to help!