What is Google Merchant Center?
Google Shopping allows millions of customers to browse, compare and buy products online. This 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 conversions, e-commerce businesses and digital marketers need to use two platforms:
Google Ads Manager:
Which is where online retailers 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 on their Ads Manager account.
Google Merchant Center:
The Google Merchant Center is the place where businesses keep their 'Google Shopping feed'. This feed will contain all the products that the company sells. Attributes can include fields such as GTINs / EANs, price, colour, 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 you want to send your product feed to your Google Merchant Center.
It's important to make sure you find design guidelines that spell out how the data will be used so Google can understand it thoroughly. While you may find it redundant to read through the specification requirements thoroughly, it can be useful to do so in order 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 your 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 optimised? Well, chances are 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 submit your feed to Google Shopping, these products will appear when a customer uses Google to search for a product, if they are searching 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, it's well worth taking the time to really accurately define and describe the products in your Google Shopping feed. This will help potential customers searching for your products to find them more easily.
