Google Partner

Optimising Your Product Data in Merchant Center

Posted on: July 22, 2024

Paid Media

James Hawkins

Rings

Your product feed is one of the most important pieces when it comes to ensuring your Google shopping or performance max campaigns are set up for success. It’s important to make sure your data is up to date and includes all necessary attributes, and that the attributes you do have are optimised as much as possible. 

There are many ways to go about this, and each of them will have their pros and cons. 

Generally speaking, updating this on your website will be the best solution, as it tends to leave less opportunity for issues to arise during the processing of the feed. Having said this, there may be times where your developers are busy, there are technical restrictions, or a range of other reasons

Third-party tools such as datafeedwatch or feedonomics are great in this case, as they allow you to add to, or make changes to, your product feed before sending it to Merchant Center. The downside here is that these are an additional expense in your marketing costs.

Assuming you don't have access to these tools, and can't make changes to the website, optimising your product data in Merchant Center is a great option. 

Let's look at three ways you can do this. Depending on what changes you are trying to make, you may find one option better than the others.

1. Automatic Improvements:

Automatic improvements are used to help ensure certain data in your feed is accurate and meets Google requirements. These automatic improvements can be set up for the following attributes: 

  • price 
  • availability 
  • stock
  • images 

Turning this feature on where necessary can help save you from product disapprovals.

Automatic improvements are made up of 2 sections:

a blue price tag

Automatic updates

  • Price: Adjusts product pricing when the feed does not match your website
  • Stock: Automatically sets products to in stock/ out of stock when the feed does not match your website
  • Condition: Adjusts a condition when the condition does not match your website

Automatic image improvements

  • Automatically removes promotional information from your product images, and ensures your products meet Google's requirements.

It’s generally worth using automatic improvements on most accounts, but they can sometimes cause issues when they overwrite attributes you have adjusted with rules or incorrectly identify data on your website.

How to set up automatic improvements:

  • Select the settings cog in the top right-hand corner 
  • Select ‘Automatic Improvements’
  • Select your desired improvements from each section

2. Supplemental Feeds:

Supplemental feeds are additional feeds which you can add to Merchant Center to either add additional data for products, or overwrite existing data.

I find supplemental feeds to be the easiest way to make adjustments to your product data. These feeds can be uploaded in many of the same file formats as you would use when uploading your primary feed, but for the most part, Google Sheets tends to be the simplest.

How to use a supplemental feed:

  • Navigate to the feed section in Merchant Center
  • Under supplemental feeds, select add supplemental feeds.
  • Follow instructions to add your supplemental feed.
A SMEG mixer

Things to remember:

  • Supplemental feeds match your primary feed based on ID. Ensure you include the ID column in your supplemental feed, and that it matches the IDs for your products in Merchant Center
  • Always ‘Fetch’ your feed once after uploading, even if you are using a schedule. By default, the feed won't fetch upon upload, which can leave you scratching your head as to why it isn't working. You can do this by pressing the ‘Fetch’ button after clicking on your supplemental feed.

An example use case:

Google is giving you a warning for 5 different products because of ‘Limited performance due to missing identifiers’. Additionally, one of these products has a poor title and you would like to set a new one for it.

You have collected the missing GTINs from these products and written a new title. You want to upload them to Merchant Center. 

In this example, your sheet may look something like this. In this case, your GTIN will be added to these 5 products, and your current title for your stand mixer will be overwritten with the one in your supplemental feed.

idgtintitle
WDN064SLDUK8017709328436
UKSEL1721F8017709294724
TSF01GRUK8017709282034
TR103BL8017709237332
SMF03BLUK8017709269234Smeg SMF03BLUK Retro Stand Mixer - Black

3. Rules:

Similar to supplemental feeds, rules inside Merchant Center are a way for you to make adjustments and additions to product data based on criteria you set within the rule.

I find rules to be the most useful when I am trying to make changes to attributes that I will want to automatically update when new products are uploaded. But there are many other situations to use them as well.

How to use rules:

  • Select ‘Feeds’ from the left side panel
  • Click in your feed under ‘Primary Feeds’
  • Click on ‘Feed Rules’
  • Press the blue +
  • Select the field you want to change.
  • Create your rule, and click ‘Save to Draft’
  • When returning to the previous page, make sure to click ‘apply’ if you are happy with the rule.
Clipboard

Things to remember:

  • There are a range of different options within rules to help you achieve different results. The most common ones I tend to use are:
    • set as
    • extract 
    • prepend 
    • append 
    • find and replace
  • You can filter when your rule is applied by setting conditions for each rule you set up. 
  • Conditions can be stacked using ‘And’ or ‘Or’ to help expand or refine which products your rule will impact.
  • Always remember to double-check your rule before applying it to the whole feed. You don't want to accidentally overwrite already accurate attributes.

Some example use cases:

Extracting colour

Some of your products are missing the ‘colour’ attribute, but this information is found in your titles. You want to extract the colours from the title and set this as a value for the ‘colour’ attribute. 

Below is an example of what your rule may look like. Essentially what this rule will do is look to see if your product has a value for colour. If not, it will then look within your title for any of the words you have added to the extract list. If any match, it will put these values into the colour attribute for the given product. Your original title will not be affected.

Red nike trainers
Updating your attribute values to include colours

After this rule, your attributes would be the following:

TitleColour
Nike Basketball Shoes Size 8 – BlueBlue
Nike Red Hat – Size LRed
Adidas Pink Boys T ShirtPink

Adding a brand name to your product titles

Some of your products do not contain the products' brand name within the title, although many of them do. You want to add the brand name for each product ahead of the current title if it is not already included in the title.

Below is an example of what your rule may look like. This rule will look to see if each product title includes the value from the ‘brand’ attribute in the title. If not, it will prepend the value from the brand attribute to the front of your current title.

Use rules to see if each product title includes tha brand attribute in the title. If not, it will add it to the front of the title.

After your rule, your attributes would be the following:

Previous TitleBrandNew Title
Breaknet Sleek Shoes - Women’s - BlueAdidasAdidas - Breaknet Sleek Shoes - Women’s - Blue
Nike Panda Dunk Low Retro Men's Shoe - WhiteNike Title will not change as it includes ‘Nike’
Phoenix Waffle Women's Shoes - WhiteNikeNike -  Phoenix Waffle Women's Shoes - White

Key changes to make to your product feed

There are many attributes that make up a product feed, and it's easy to get lost in trying to optimise every part of it. All of these attributes can easily be adjusted or added using both rules, supplemental feeds, or a mixture of both. Your time will initially be best spent optimising the following attributes:

Improving your product title

  • Ensure your title includes all important attributes. The order in which they appear will be based on what is most relevant to the customer. 
  • Include things such as brand, colour, size, gender, model numbers (great for appliances), and materials. 
  • Include important keywords. Examples could include ‘freestanding’ for a washer/dryer, or ‘pet friendly’ for a sofa.
Modern interior furniture set in 3d rendering

Improving your description

  • Descriptions should be detailed and highlight your products’ features, benefits, and uses.

Accurate product categories

  • Include product categories based on the Google taxonomy
  • Categories should be as granular as possible to give your products the best quality data.
  • For example:
    • Bad - Sporting Goods > Outdoor Recreation > Winter Sports & Activities
    • Good - Sporting Goods > Outdoor Recreation > Winter Sports & Activities > Skiing & Snowboarding > Snowboards

Granular product types

  • Ensure your product types are detailed. These don't have to follow any specific taxonomy, and are a great chance to feed a bit of extra information into the algorithm
  • For example:
    • Bad - Furniture > Sofa
    • Good - Furniture > Indoor Sofas > Pet Friendly Sofas > 2 Seater Sofas

Include missing identifiers

  • Ensure your products have GTINs/EANs wherever possible. 
  • If your product does not have this information, make sure to include brand, along with MPN.

There are many ways to improve your product feed, whether through changes to the website, third-party tools, or, as we covered above, within Merchant Center itself. 

As an advertiser, you want to continually review your feed and look for ways you can improve it. Your improvements can help improve both the reach of your products and the efficiency you see from your ads. It is one of the best uses of time when it comes to improving your Google shopping performance.

If you're looking for some help optimising your product data in Merchant Center, or your Google Shopping setup – get in touch with our friendly team today.

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James Hawkins

PPC Account Manager

James is an experienced paid media account manager at The Digital Maze, having successfully managed a diverse range of accounts and achieved outstanding results for clients. Outside of work, he enjoys traveling and exploring new places.

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