Google Shopping, as we know is one of the largest and most used search engines available on the internet right now. Its wide-ranging software is a boon to an entrepreneur and should definitely be an eCommerce shop owner's best friend.
Google Shopping, where merchants can show their products, started as Froogle in 2002. After various changes and updates (and fines!) this became Google Shopping in 2012 and became a paid-for service.
So why do we care? Well, quite simply, the more channels you can advertise your products on, the more likely they are to be seen and, hopefully, purchased.
Setting Up
For your ease, the platform has added a Google Shopping Product Feed URL which can be used to automatically upload your products to your Google Merchant Account. This feature saves you a lot of time and effort, uploading products manually and updating them daily, to ensure you're not selling out of stock products and keeping their descriptions up to date.
To activate your Google shopping product feed:
Click Settings under your Dashboard menu then select Enhancements.
Move over to Google to setup a Merchant Account with Google. Once it is setup you will be able to add a Product Feed.
Product Feed
Head over to your Google Merchant Centre (merchants.google.com), select Products from the left-hand side and then Feeds from the menu.
Hit the '+' under the Primary Feeds section to get started. The first section of the form should be pre-populated for you, your country of choice and language. If not, take a moment to amend these.
Feed Name and Input First things first, enter a name that will make sense in future for ease. As you can see below, there are a variety of options to choose from in order to upload products. The one we're looking for is Scheduled Fetch as this will allow us to set a scheduled update and enter our Google Catalogue feed from your shop's admin. Then click Continue.
File and Fetch Once again, we're being asked for a name. This can be anything and doesn't affect our uploads, so just repeat what you entered above. The frequency is entirely up to you. Unless you have a very busy store, change or upload products hourly or run auctions then we would suggest leaving frequency at Daily. The fetch time again is entirely dependent on when you're at your desk uploading products. If you normally add products at the beginning of the day, then set this to 10:00 so that it's up to date for the coming day.
Set your time zone, if it's not already set, and then paste your Google Shopping Product Feed URL from your shop's admin. The URL should end "google-shopping.xml". Leave the Username and Password boxes empty, we don't need to give these. Then hit Continue.
You should now be taken back to the previous screen and see your feed information in the Primary Feed area.
Other Points to Note
As we mentioned above, Google Shopping is a Paid-For service. As such, you will need to connect an Active Google Ads (previously AdWords) account and also verify your website with Google Merchant Centre. If you don't have a Google Ads account, you can sign-up for one here. We would also suggest linking your Google My Business account too, as this will give your products extra visibility in 'local' searches.
Remember to occasionally sign in to Google Merchant going forward and check the 'Diagnostics' and 'Product Suggestions' sections for any issues, actions, tips and recommendations.