Setting up the Google Shopping feed is critical
The feed setup with Google Shopping is the key to success, as it directly influences which search terms your products appears for and what
your ads look like in Google’s results.
Your product feed is essentially a file that contains unique information about the products that you want to sell, formatted in a way that
Google Shopping can read and understand e.g. product name, image and price.
Unlike Google Ads, you can’t pick the keywords your Shopping Ads show up for. With Google Shopping, Google crawls your feed and the content
of your landing page to determine if any of your products are relevant enough to appear for a search query (see ‘buy plants NZ’ example
above).
There are essentially two ways to setup your shopping feed.
-
It can be done manually, via the Google Content API for Shopping ads, by entering product information into a spreadsheet that follows
Google’s specifications.
- Or you can use an extension, plugin, app, or service that automatically imports product data from your e-commerce platform.
Bear in mind if the information on your spreadsheet differs from what is on your product page then Google will suspend your Shopping ads.
For example, if the landing page on your website displays a price that is different to the price on your spreadsheet, your campaign will get
suspended.
As such, we support Google’s notion to rather not use the manual spreadsheet approach outlined in 1 above, unless you only have a few
products and the product details (e.g. price) seldom change.
An automated feed between Google Shopping and your e-Commerce platform is the best practice way to go, though does need specialist support
to setup and manage. Especially if your site has hundreds of products it wants to advertise on Google Shopping.