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Creating your data feed for Google Merchant Center
Mar 16th, 2018It takes time and effort, but a properly managed data feed is a must for online retailers – by the end of this post, you should be able to create your own, or at least download an example feed sheet.
What is Google Merchant Center?
A Google Tool, Merchant Centre allows you to upload your brand’s products and data to make it available for Google Shopping and other services. In order to advertise specific products in SERPs (see below), you will need to: have a Merchant Center account, upload your product data, and create a Shopping Campaign in Google Ads.
Sign in or sign up
To begin with, you’ll need to log-in or sign up to Google Merchant Center (GMC). The latter involves a few simple steps – including naming your store, agreeing to the T&Cs and verifying your site through either uploading an HTML file to your site, placing an HTML tag in your header, or via your Analytics or Google Tag Manager account.
We can leave Merchant Center there for the moment, because we won’t need it again until we upload our data feed.
Creating a data feed
While it’s possible to create an XML feed, we’re going to create a spreadsheet for ease (specifically Google Sheets – which I have literally done nothing but bang on about for weeks).
There are eight main types of data, each split into a fairly extensive variety of attributes. While not all of the following are compulsory, we’re going to list the ‘Basic product data’ below. You can find a full list of the data sets and attributes here.
Basic product data
Attribute Name | Formatting Guide | Overview of Best Practices |
---|---|---|
id [id] |
Required Your product’s unique identifier Example Syntax Schema.org property
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title [title] |
Required Your product’s name Example Syntax Schema.org property
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description [description] |
Required Your product’s description Example Syntax Schema.org property
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link [link] |
Required Your product’s landing page Example Syntax Schema.org property
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|
image_link [image_link] |
Required Your product’s main image URL Example Syntax Schema.org property
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additional_image_link [additional_image_link] |
Optional An additional image URL for your product Example Syntax
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mobile_link [mobile_link] |
Optional If different from your desktop page, your mobile-optimised landing page URL Example Syntax
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With these attributes in mind (and the other required attributes listed over at the Google Support site linked to above), you can now start to build out your data feed. The attribute names go in the column headers, with relevant data in the cells below. Any required fields not filled in will cause the associated product not to appear in Shopping results.
Once the data feed spreadsheet is filled in, you can look to upload it to Google Merchant Center. First you’ll need to return to GMC, select ‘Products’, then ‘Feeds’, then click the plus symbol to upload your data as a primary feed.
This will bring up a wizard – the first being ‘Basic information’ which asks you to select a ‘type’ for the feed, a target country and a target language, as well as offering a tick box to include the feed in ‘Shopping’.
Step two is for the feed name and input method. Having completed the data feed setup in Google Sheets means you can select your sheet by highlighting the ‘Google Sheets’ option from the list.
The third and final step is to select an existing sheet and upload your feed.
In order to check your data, you can preview the list and their status by selecting ‘List’ from the ‘Products’ menu. Check carefully for errors.