What is Google Merchant Center?
Google Shopping allows millions of customers to browse, compare and buy products online. This feature helps businesses reach more consumers and increase product sales.
To get the most out of Google Shopping and get optimal results in terms of clicks and conversionse-commerce companies and digital marketers need to use two platforms:
Google Ads Manager:
Which is where online stores and digital marketers manage and build all their Shopping campaigns. It allows them to monitor ad budgets and bids while optimizing campaigns using the performance insights available in their Ads Manager account.
Google Merchant Center:
Google Merchant Center is the place where businesses have their 'Google Shopping feed'. This feed will contain all the products that the business sells. Attributes can include fields such as GTINs/EANs, price, color, material description and title, etc.
Specification requirements for Google Merchant Center
If you want to use Google Merchant Center and Google Shopping, you need to format your product data by following Google's feed requirements when sending your product feed to your Google Merchant Center.
It's important to make sure that you find design guidelines that clarify how the data will be used so that Google can understand it thoroughly. While you may find it redundant to read the specification requirements thoroughly, it can be useful to do so to get an understanding of what kind of information you will get out of it.
Google Shopping feed optimization
For online stores selling goods on Google Shopping, the fastest way to increase CTR and conversions with minimal effort is to focus on structuring and optimizing your Merchant Center feed.
You may have an effective bidding strategy, but is your feed poorly structured or optimized? Then there's a good chance you won't see the results you want.
Did you know that Google Shopping ads can actually give you 26% better conversion rates at 23% lower cost per click (or CPC) compared to traditional text-based ads, but they need to be optimized properly.
Once you have submitted your feed to Google Shopping, these products will appear when a customer uses Google to search for a product, if they search for one of the products you sell. The products can appear on the main Google page or under the "Shopping" tab.
If you really want to take advantage of this, taking the time to accurately define and describe the products in your Google Shopping feed is time well spent. This will help potential customers searching for your products to find your products more easily.
