Google Merchant Centre Integration
In order to sell your products within Google Shopping, you need a couple of things before you can get started:
- A website where you sell your products online
- A Google Merchant Centre account
- A Google Shopping Ads account
Once your website is up and running, you will want to start driving sales via Google Shopping Ads, and in order to do this, you need a Merchant Centre account to tie the two pieces of the puzzle together.
Setting Up A Google Merchant Centre Account
Setting up your Merchant Centre account is fairly straightforward, and the process looks like this:
- Create a Merchant Centre account using an existing Gmail account, or create a new one.
- Head to the Merchant Centre and click ‘Get Started’ to set up your profile.
- Enter your business information like company name and website URL.
Once you have completed this step, you can now start adding products to your account.
There are a few ways of adding products to your Merchant Centre account, and some methods are more time consuming than others.
Google Merchant Centre Feed
A feed is essentially the source that Google uses to create your Shopping Ads.
There are a few ways in which you can use manually created feeds to push products to Google Ads:
- Manually create new products within Merchant Centre
- Upload your catalog in .txt or .csv format
This is a perfectly acceptable way of creating a new feed, however it is very time consuming, and if you have hundreds of products it will take a very long time to complete.
A better way is to use an integration method so that the feed is created automatically.
Merchant Centre Integration
By using an integrated product feed, you can sync hundreds of products straight to Google Merchant Centre directly from your website.
This is done by hosting a small file within the code of your website which Google uses to pull your product data.
This is also known as scheduled fetch, since it happens automatically on a scheduled basis, usually a few times a day.
Scheduled fetch is the best way to get your products into Merchant Centre, however it does require a bit of technical knowledge to get the feed set up smoothly.
Once this is done you wont have to worry about the product feed as it will always reflect your website product data and any changes you make will be updated in Merchant Centre after a few hours.
Google will pull everything including titles, images, categories, attributes and more, meaning you don’t have to worry about manually inputting your product data.
Frequently asked questions
Yes, you cannot run shopping ads without a Google Merchant Centre account.
Depending on the market you are in and the products you sell, half a day is typical to get ads up and running.
Yes, any changes you make to products on your website will appear in Merchant Centre within a few hours.
We charge a set up fee for all ads campaigns and then charge a monthly fee for the optimisation and management of your ads.
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