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Google Merchant Center – How to upload feeds

Google knows how to push your business growth by creating successful ads and listings for your business’s products. However, the success of these ads revolves around how well you submit your product information. Google Merchant Center uses your product data to match your ads to the relevant searches, thus it is important to submit this data in the correct format. We have a list of steps below to teach you how to do just that, for your convenience

Before you even start

A large and powerful search engine like Google needs to regulate what is posted and pushed to its users. For this reason, Google has a set of rules and limitations specifying what you can and cannot advertise or do on their platform. To use Google Merchant Center programs, you will have to make sure your business complies with a list of their policies and requirements. These include:

  • Shopping ads policies
  • Landing page requirements
  • Tax rate data requirements
  • Shipping rate data requirements
  • Checkout requirements and best practices
  • Currency and language requirements.
  • Delimited format.
  • XML or API.

 

Create product feeds

Creating a feed begins with going on your eCommerce platform’s dashboard and creating a feed. For instance, on the Magento 2 platform, you would select Catalogue, followed by Feeds and then profiles.

Catalogue → ‘Feeds’ section → Profiles.

You have the option of using pre-made templates when creating your feed. As you’ll see, the feed comes with basic settings which are adjustable while you create a feed or at a later stage.

Steps to set up product feeds

The Magento 2 platform that Digitrade is built on can create feeds for different shopping engines, for example, Amazon, Google Shopping, and Facebook. In this instance, we are setting up a Google Shopping feed.

  • These steps are also relevant for the creation of Facebook feeds, because Google and Facebook use the same feed format. Feel free to test it out for both platforms.

There are 7 steps to follow when making a feed on Digitrade’s eCommerce Solution, namely:

  • #1: Set up general settings
  • #2: Exclude irrelevant categories
  • #3: Rename your categories
  • #4: Upload basic product information
  • #5: Add optional product information
  • #6: Schedule your settings
  • #7: Upload to Google Server

 

Step 1: Set up general settings

General settings are first to need configuring, as they define the product feed you are creating. Under this step, feed creators can specify the following:

  • Feed Name
  • Filename
  • Status(where you activate or deactivate feed)
  • Store View (choose the store view to take attribute values from)
  • Price Currency(Useful for multistore configuration with different currencies for each store as it automates the assignment of currencies accurately)
  • Exclude Disabled Products, out of stock products and invisible products(Enable to exclude any of the above from feeds)

Step 2: Exclude irrelevant categories

The Google feed creator lists numerous categories that apply to a wide range of products out there. For accurate deployment of your product ads on Google, you need to carefully review the category list and exclude categories that are irrelevant to your feed.

Step 3: Rename your categories

Match your requirements to Google’s requirements by setting the essential Google Taxonomy source (list of categories Google uses to departmentalise products). This also has an autocomplete feature, which allows for the easy renaming of categories.

Step 4: Upload basic product information

Decide on the specific basic attributes you want to display on your feed. The solution automatically fills all fields for you, while also allowing you to make changes that suit your products/offerings. You can alternatively skip to the next step if you’re happy with the attributes automatically put into the fields below.

Step 5: Add optional product information

Now you get to choose the optional attributes you want on your product feed. At this step, a list of attributes that depend on what exactly you are selling pops up. Here is where you answer Google’s requirements that are set according to the types of products you are exporting and the location of your store. Understand that this means attributes in this section will continuously change each time you change your attribute tags.

Step 6: Schedule your settings

This feature will ensure your feed is always up-to-date according to your desired settings. You can choose to have your feed updates take place manually or automatically by schedule. If updates are happening automatically, you get to specify the day(s) and time(s) when the feed updates occur.

Step 7: Upload to Google Server

At this point, your feed is almost ready to be uploaded, but you first must configure your Google Merchant account setup. This is done by:

  1. Adding a new feed on your Google Merchant Centre account.
  2. Choosing the Upload option and renaming the file with the corresponding name from Step 1.
  1. Going to Settings and selecting SFTP/FTP/GCS, then Generate, which sits next to

After all, this is done, return to Step 7 on the Magento dashboard and set the Enable tab to Yes.

Now you can enter the data from the Google Merchant dashboard, then choose either the FTP or SFTP upload method in the Protocol tab. All that’s left is to click Save and Start Generation, then watch the automatic upload and processing of your product feed.

Congratulations, now you know how to create feeds for Google using our Digitrade Solution’s Magento 2 platform and Google Merchant Center. To start implementing it into your business, contact us and learn more about our Magento based eCommerce solution here.

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