Google Merchant Center - Feeds

Google Merchant Center (GMC) is like an online warehouse where you can add your products and use them in your advertisement. There are many ways to add products and we will go through each option in this writing

List of Contents

• Adding Feeds
  • 1. Adding One
  • 2. Adding Multiple
    • 1) Google Sheets
    • 2) Scheduled fetch
    • 3) Upload
    • 4) API
• Feed settings, rules
  • Settings
  • Rules

Adding Feeds

1. Adding One

This method is adding items one by one. It is simple and user friendly but it is not fit for large amount of items. 

▶ Target country and destinations

Sepcify the country your are targeting and language. A destination represents a program that will use the feeds

Identifiers specify the group of items and they required for certain countries such as The USA

▶ Product Data

Fill in the details of the item

▶ Price and Availability

▶ Detailed Product Desription

▶ Shipping, Tax, and Returns

Click 'save' when you are finished

2. Adding Multiple

Select 'add multiple products'

Choose country and language

There are four ways to add feeds. Type in the feed name and select a preferable option

1) Google Sheets

Choose 'Google sheets' and click 'continue'

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※ You can also set a schedule to automatically fetch the sheet

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Click 'Access Google Sheets' to open the sheet

Basic parameters are as follows. It is better to minimize the number of parameters (Necessary parameters are different from country to country) so we will remove some

These are necessary parmeters (Only when ship and currency are set in GMC account)

Let's see how we can populate each parameter using a ecommerce site as an example

▶ id

This is item identifier and you can usually find this in the URL of the item page

 

▶ title

Represents the name of the item. Just copy the name of the item on the page

 

▶ description

This is the details of the item

 

▶ link

Represents the page URL of the item

▶ condition

Three options: New / Refurbished / Used

 

▶ price

This should include the price and the currency. E.g., 'USD 000.00'

 

▶ availability

Options: In stock / Out of stock / Preorder / Backorder

 

▶ image link

You can get this by right clicking the image you want from the website and selecting 'copy image address'

※ If, for some reason, you cannot right click, open the developer tool and copy the source path (make sure you test this URL by inserting it on a browser and searching)

 

Example (Items in red are required)

After adding and saving (automatically saved when you click) all the items click 'fetch now'

You can change setting for the feed by going to 'feeds'

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2) Scheduled fetch

This option automatically fetches the file on a specified schedule. Select 'scheduled fetch'

Type in file name (For SFTP, FTP, or Google Cloud Storage, the name here should match to that of original file name),  and set up frequency, time, tiem zone. Enter the file URL (supported protocols: http, https, ftp, sftp). Type in user name and password if you are using them

3) Upload

This is a manual way of uploading files. Supported formats are: .xml, Google Sheets, .txt (TSV), gz, .zip (compressed TSV, XML), .bz2 (compressed TSV, XML).

 

Maximum size for a feed is 4GB

For SFTP, FTP, or Google Cloud Storage, the name here should match to that of original file name. If you you were to use 'upload a file now' option you can use any file name

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※ Separators can be changed in feed settings

※ .txt example

eg.txt

0.00MB

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4) API

Uploading feeds is manual set up, this means whenever there are changes you have to submit an updated verison of your feed. API is automated way of adding feed that reflects any update in real time. Another advantage of this way is that it is possible to update individual feed too.

 

For this to work, you need to send your feeds to Google API. The size limit of a request is 1MB

Feed settings, rules

You can change the rules and settings for a feed

Settings

Select 'feeds' and choose the feed

Click 'settings' to change settings

Rules

You can also use rules to change the name of attributes or set a default values for an attribute. This feature is useful when you want to use feeds from other supplier with different set of attribute names

 

To specify the attribute name, use the following format: feed name followed by the attribute name

myFeed.stockstatus

Select 'feed rule' -> '+' 

Choose 'processed attributes' for existing attribute name or 'custom processed attribute' for attribute names that are not included the list of Google feed attributes names

▶ Set to (Linking feeds from other supliers)

Select 'set to' and specify the attribute by manually specifying or choosing from the existing attributes names

myFeed.stockstatus

 

▶ Extract

Uses a certain value that matches the keywords you specified as the value of an attribute you choose

 

Select 'extract' and specify the attribute by manually specifying or choosing from the existing attributes names

myFeed.stockstatus

 

Enter the keyword by line by line

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※ With advanced options you can add more conditions

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▶ Take latest

For the price and date, when there are many feeds and each feed has a different value for the attributes, we can tell GMC to fetch the latest value

 

Select 'take latest' and specify the attribute by manually specifying or choosing from the existing attributes names

myFeed.stockstatus

 

So far, We have seen how to add feeds in Google Merchant Center

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References

https://support.google.com/merchants/topic/6324338?hl=ko&ref_topic=7294998 

제품 데이터 속성 - Google Merchant Center 고객센터

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dq2VlBbqTL4 

Feed Rules

https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/7450276?hl=en 

Set up feed rules - Google Merchant Center Help

Content API

https://developers.google.com/shopping-content/guides/quickstart

시작하기  |  Content API for Shopping  |  Google Developers

https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/7052112?visit_id=638146082563142810-3247254529&rd=1 

*제품 데이터 사양 - Google Merchant Center 고객센터

https://developers.google.com/shopping-content/reference/rest/v2.1

Content API for Shopping  |  Google Developers

Scheduled Fetch

https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/1219255?hl=ko 

예약된 가져오기를 통해 피드 제출 - Google Merchant Center 고객센터

File Upload

https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/160567?hl=ko#zippy=%2C%ED%85%8D%EC%8A%A4%ED%8A%B8%EC%8A%A4%ED%94%84%EB%A0%88%EB%93%9C%EC%8B%9C%ED%8A%B8-%EB%98%90%EB%8A%94-%ED%83%AD%EC%9C%BC%EB%A1%9C-%EA%B5%AC%EB%B6%84%EB%90%9C-%ED%8C%8C%EC%9D%BC

제품 데이터의 파일 형식 - Google Merchant Center 고객센터

https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/188477?hl=en#zippy=%2Cdirect-upload%2Csftp-upload%2Cupload-via-google-cloud-storage 

Upload a feed - Google Merchant Center Help

로봇.txt

https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/6098185?hl=en 

How to fix: Desktop page not crawlable due to robots.txt - Google Merchant Center Help

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9012289

URL 검사 도구 - Search Console 고객센터

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/robots/intro

robots.txt 소개 및 가이드 | Google 검색 센터  |  문서  |  Google Developers

https://search.google.com/test/rich-results

리치 검색결과 테스트 - Google Search Console