Of late, Google has rolled out a few updates for its Merchant Center with the aim to simply how retailers get their product information on Google properties.
Discussed here the new features, including Surfaces across Google, multi-country feeds, image improvement tool, and more.
The recent updates, announced by Google ahead of the holidays, are likely to be a boon to global retailers. Of late, the technology giant has introduced new interface- and navigation-specific features for its Merchant Center with the sole aim to simplify the way retailers get their product information on Google properties for the upcoming holidays.
Here’s is quick look at some of the newly introduced features in Google Merchant Centre and how they can help global retailer marketers expand their reach and gain the attention of holiday shoppers:
- Multi-Country Feeds: When launched in 2017, multi-country feeds was available in 37 countries. With 50 new markets added recently, this figure now stands at 95. According to a leading tech firm, 70% of global consumers make at least one cross-border purchase. Multi-country feeds allow marketers to promote their products and fetch better qualified leads by putting their products in front of global Internet users, who chiefly rely on Google for product searches.
With the addition of 50 new markets, it’s now easier for retailers to boost their global reach. You can now showcase your products globally using multi-country feeds, which enables you to target several similar language-speaking countries at a time using just a single feed in that particular language.
For instance, product information in German can automatically be shown in other German-speaking nations like Switzerland and Austria while setting up location and shipping targeting in a shopping campaign.
To let your products appear in all relevant locations, it is important to configure shopping and set up targeting correctly for Google Ads campaigns for each country you deliver your product to. Note that your shipping settings should be in line with your Google Ads location targeting settings, including ‘Location of Presence’ (LOP) or ‘Area of Interest’ (AOI). If these steps aren’t taken prior to running the campaign, your products will not appear in the additional countries you want to showcase your product.
- Automated Feeds: Effective November 2019, automated feeds is now available in all Shopping ads countries. Retailers can choose to allow Merchant Center to crawl their website for schema structured product information and extract it to create an initial feed.
If your website has structured product data, you can easily see the feed option of “Website Crawl” in Merchant Center while creating a new primary feed. According to Google, crawled feed data is going to be refreshed regularly on the basis of the traffic your website would receive from Google.
- Automatic Image Enhancements: According to a study, Google is the most preferred choice among consumers to research products they want to purchase. Furthermore, it is revealed in a Google survey that nearly half of digital shoppers bank on product images when deciding whether to make a purchase or not. So, now you know how important your product images are!
The image enhancement update will surely bring a sigh of relief to many retailers as it might curb chances of their products images getting disapproved for a variety of reasons. To help you avoid image disapprovals, Google will now attempt to remove promotional text automatically in your product images once you turn on ‘automatic removal’ tool in Google Merchant Center.
It is suggested to review the updated images to check if the changes are satisfactory. The tool may make mistakes like leaving a part of promotional text or removing an important section of the product image. In case you are not happy with the changes made by the tool, you may need to upload a new product image.
To activate automatic image updates, choose ‘Automatic Improvements’ within the ‘Tools’ dropdown menu at the top-right corner of Google Merchant Center. Next, select the toggle within the ‘Image Improvements’ tab and click ‘Save’.
- Free Product Exposure with Surfaces across Google: With the roll out of this new update, Google has started showing product information from its Merchant Center in areas outside of Shopping Ads. Free to merchants, this feature is known as Surfaces across Google, which is presently available in India and the U.S. only.
It is to be noted that if your website has structured data markup, your products are automatically eligible for rich product results. Using Surfaces across Google, any retailer can upload their product feed on Google Merchant Center and choose to allow their products to appear on Google platforms, such as Google Images and rich product results.
In Google Merchant Center, you can find this feature within the ‘Growth’ under the program list on the right side of the page.