Among the search and product comparison services, Google Shopping is certainly one of the most popular of all. In fact, advertisers have the advantageous opportunity to create and publish advertisements aimed at promoting products and services.

The latter can be conveniently purchased online within the Google SERP and in the display network. Basically, Google Shopping is an excellent marketplace where thanks to advertisements of an advertising nature, the demand, made up of users and potential customers, can easily meet the offer, i.e. companies, businesses and e-commerce portals that sell online. .

In this short guide we will also see how to create the feed in PrestaShop for Google Shopping campaigns.

Google Merchant Center

What is Google Shopping for?

Google Shopping proves to be of crucial importance for your business, because it allows those who surf the internet and are looking for a specific item to find the products that are part of your commercial offer. The articles are shown directly in the search results.

How does Google Shopping work?

The Search Network is the most important distribution channel in relation to Shopping Ads. Along the same lines as what occurs for textual ads, those relating to shopping are activated when the user enters a search query. In relation to the campaigns carried out on the search network, the query will activate an advertisement only if there is an offer relating to a specific keyword.

The operating logic of this mechanism, in fact, is based on ad auctions that compare the ads that have won the auction, because they have proved willing to offer more.

For Google Shopping, however, the functioning mechanism of the offers does not rotate on the keyword system, since the decisive element is constituted by the products that are part of the catalog. The Merchant Center on Google Ads makes them available. Participating in the numerous auctions is your product catalog. It will be up to Google to best interpret the multiple queries typed by users, highlighting only and exclusively the relevant products, i.e. those suitable for publication.

Against this scenario, the ad of the product you sell online will appear within the results page.

What are the main benefits of Google Shopping?

Focusing on Google Shopping is an excellent opportunity for your business, especially if you want to give a boost to your online sales and to be able to count on an increase in qualified traffic on your website. Anyone who finds you through Google Shopping has a clear idea of what they intend to buy. For this reason, there are all the conditions for obtaining a conversion. The most coveted is certainly the online purchase. However, subscribing to the newsletter and social pages should also be frowned upon for the fate of your business, since you begin to create a relationship with the customer who is potentially interested in what you sell.

Thanks to Google Shopping, your business can :

  • attract users looking for a particular product, present in your catalog. For this to happen, you must opt for paid campaigns, strictly connected to the search for the product;
  • check in detail the correctness of the information of your articles, using the Product Feed;
  • compare the various online stores. Potential customers can check the search results where the product they are interested in is being sold and then make their purchase decision; the photo of the product, the location of the shop and, of course, the price affect the final choice;
  • Google Shopping ads appear next to classic search results, but are separate;

Why is integrating Google Shopping with your e-commerce platform crucial?

For the fate of your business, it is of fundamental importance to start on the right foot. Integrating a resource of the caliber of Google Shopping into your e-commerce portal allows you to give greater visibility to the products of your commercial offer.

To do all this, you need a Merchant Center account , which is a tool that allows you to upload both data relating to your store and information relating to the products you sell to Google.

These will then be available for Google Shopping ads and will allow you to manage the product feed, i.e. a document formatted in relation to the requests made by Google. Generating it is very simple, since the procedure is automatic, following the installation of the plugin in your e-commerce portal.

What are the necessary requirements?

In order to activate the Google Merchant Center account and, consequently, to make sure that your e-commerce portal complies with the guidelines imposed by Google, it is good that:

  • the sale of your items takes place directly;
  • the conditions relating to the sale and availability of the items and, in the eventuality, of the returns are clear;
  • the legal requirements relating to the collection and storage of data are fully respected.

Only under the aforementioned conditions, uploading the first feed to Google Merchant Center will be feasible.

Note that the Google Merchant Center feed is nothing more than a simple data file, usually in xml or spreadsheet format, where the information of your articles is organized. Google needs to read it so that your online store can participate in auctions without any major hitches. Similarly, this is the primary source of more valid information than Google is happy to create the shopping ads.

Keyword, title, description and type of image are not taken seriously in Google Shopping. The real decisive discrimination for the purpose of the appearance of the ads is the automatic combination of the elements, taking into account the information present in the fields of the Product Feed.

Among these, the following should be mentioned:

  • Product Title : link present at the top of the advertisement. Its purpose is to allow Google to identify the keywords linked to the products of your e-commerce portal, in relation to the search queries typed online;
  • Product Image : product photos must comply with the requirements of Google Shopping ads, so that they can then fulfill the role of specific URLs on the website;
  • Product Category : it is not information that appears in the advertisement. It is used by Google only to categorize products.

As keywords cannot be counted on in Google Shopping for ad activation, it is very important to optimize your feed. Only in this case, the performance of the campaigns conducted on Google Shopping will prove to be a harbinger of positive results.

If the feed is optimized, advertisements will be activated for relevant search queries. In this case, the chances that those who surf online decide to click on the ad and, in the event of generating a conversion on the website, such as online purchases, will rise considerably.

Creation of the Merchant Feed: what to do?

The first step to complete is to create a main feed. This is the data source that allows Google to launch the creation of shopping ads. The language, the destination, the countries of sale and the methodology for entering the Merchant Center feed must be entered. The feed, as already highlighted, can be created in spreadsheet or by stp or ftp. The main CMS-based ecommerce platforms have several plug-ins to create the feed for Google Shopping. Additionally, there are several SaaS services such as Datafeedwatch or Bindcommerce.com , which can help us with this.

By uploading your feed to the Merchant Center, your Google Shopping campaign kicks off.

Creating the Merchant Feed with PrestaShop?

PrestaShop presents different solutions, to export and synchronize your products to Google Merchant Center in a simple way. There are many plug-ins dedicated to the feed, the most valid are the following:

Product Catalog (CSV, Excel, XML) Export Pro

Product Catalog (CSV, Excel, XML)

It is a PrestaShop module that allows you not only to create the Feed Merchant, but the feeds for almost all similar services such as: Trovaprezzo.it, Criteo, Idealo, Kelkoo, Webgains, etc .. It is not easy to use, but it is highly versatile and suitable for many exports, even for internal catalog checks through convenient export to Excel.

Google Merchant Center (Google-Shopping) for PrestaShop

Google Merchant Center (Google-Shopping)

A PrestaShop extension completely dedicated to Google Merchant Center . The module exists in two versions, a basic and a pro. Both allow you to manage the feed for Google Shopping in a complete way with many functions designed to improve our ADV campaigns to the maximum and reduce export errors. The module is strongly indicated when you have large catalogs and you need to decide which products to include in the data feed, for example if we have products without MPN and EAN-13 , we could not export them avoiding errors that can lead to the suspension of the Google service.

PrestaShop Marketing with Google module

PrestaShop Marketing with Google

The module is developed directly by PrestaShop, it does not allow the scalability and configuration of the modules listed above, especially the exclusion of certain products, but it is easier to use and configure by those who do not have particular experience with Google tools. If all the products in our catalog meet the GMC specifications, and above all they have EAN-13 and / or MPN and Brand, this module is great.

You can view the following video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUl1NuYISJY for more information about the PrestaShop Marketing with Google module.

Author: Loris Modena

SENIOR DEVELOPER

For Ind Loris Modena , owner of Arte e Informatica , he began working in the IT sector in 1989 as a system engineer in charge of the maintenance and installation of IT systems. He started programming for the web in 1997 dealing with CGI programming in PERL and then moving on to programming in PHP and JavaScript. In this period he approaches the Open source world and the management of Linux servers.

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