Set up Google Merchant Center

Discover which parts of Google Merchant you should know and control in order to launch your first campaigns

Merchant Center lets you manage how your online and in-store product inventory appears on Google.

To get started with Merchant, you'll need to sign in here with a Gmail account.

Initial setup

Google will initially ask you to provide details of the company name, address, time zone, website, and phone number. Likewise, you must define if you sell the product on your website or in a physical store.

Connect your product catalog to Merchant

There are two ways to connect your catalog to Google Merchant Center:

• Automatically, activating the Instant upload offered by Feeds
• Or manually, as we tell you below

To upload a catalog to Merchant you must access (within Merchant) the Products → Feeds section.

There are two types of catalogs or feeds: Primary Feed and Supplemental feed. In most cases, we will only use Primary Feeds and in this article, we will only talk about this type.

When creating a Primary feed (blue button +) you must indicate to which country and language that catalog corresponds. You’ll also be asked to name or label it.

Finally, you must also indicate the placements for which you will use that catalog (Shopping ads and/or Display ads).

Next you will need to specify how you will nurture this feed. In this case and while working with a tool like AMP Feeds, you should choose the FETCH option:

In the next step you must detail the url that will nurture this catalog. To get this url, you must access your Feeds (AMP) account and when you have created your catalog for Google you must click on the Copy URL option. When you have it, paste it into Merchant:

The shortest period of time with which Google allows you to update the feed is daily, so if your catalog changes more ofter, we recommend that you activate the Instant upload that Feeds offers.

This way any new catalog you create in Feeds will appear in your Merchant account immediately, as will any changes you make to it.

Other relevant sections of Merchant

General view

In this view you can see a summary of what is happening in the rest of the Merchant sections:

• When was the last time your catalog was updated?
• How many products do you have active or unapproved
• How many products are available for Dynamic Retargeting
• A summary of the performance of your ads
• Google Communications

Products

1. Diagnostics - Analyze here the problems that your catalog or Merchant account has. Review the most common ones in this article and try to avoid any fatal errors (in red).
2. All products - Here you can visually see all the products in your catalog and their more generic specifications. You will also be able to see how many products are new (added in the last 24 hours) and how many have improvement recommendations.
3. Feeds - Here you can upload your products. See previous section “Connect your product catalog to Merchant”

Performance

This tab allows you to see the performance of your products in Google Merchant Center in a very summarized way. For a more detailed report, the "Your reports" section allows you to create personalized Dashboards that can help you have better visibility, for instance, on which category of products is performing better (according to clicks, or roas, or other metrics), what are the top sellers...

Growth 

In this section there are different programs and recommendations that Google offers advertisers to get the most out of Google Merchant Center. We recommend that you activate the “Free product listing” program so that your products appear in Google Shopping organically (without a paid campaign).

 

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