Generating and maintaining WooCommerce Google Product Feed files is important for the success of any Shopping Ads campaign. Automating your feed uploads can help you save valuable time and increase your efficiency. To that end, we discuss the steps you need to take to automate product feed uploads to Google Merchant Center.
Introduction:
WordPress powers 33.2 percent of all websites on the internet! Moreover, WooCommerce for WordPress is used by 30 percent of the top million online stores today. WordPress’s ease of use and functionality extending plugins have made it the best CMS platform today. In such a competitive scene, advertising is a sure fire way to increase visibility, boost sales and attract new customers.
Shopping Ads:
Shopping ads remain the best ad format that online retailers can use to realize their business goals. Users can search for and compare products with Shopping Ads. Additionally, they get a clear product image and a link to the place you can purchase it.
Google is continuing to make improvements to Shopping Ads. They’ve added Shopping Showcase Ads, Shopping Actions that take it a step further. Shopping Showcase Ads let you group related items together. To illustrate, when you click on Shopping Showcase Ad results on SERPs, you won’t be taken to a landing page. Instead, a catalog of similar products opens up.
Shopping Actions is a platform that helps customers turn internet browsing into buying. It features shareable products, universal shopping cart and international payment support. Additionally, Shopping Actions show up even in Google Assistant, Google Express and Google Search. To list ads for WooCommerce, you need to first generate your WooCommerce Google Product feed file and upload it to Google Merchant Center.
Merchant Center:
Google Merchant Center is a platform where your WooCommerce Google Product Feed is housed. Your Google Merchant Center account and Google Ads account can be linked. This lets Google Ads access your product data for creating and optimizing ads.
Google believes that in order to serve ads that are reliable and relevant, they need to understand what it is that you are selling. Now, this is where the product feed comes into the picture. You need to have your WooCommerce site’s product data in a format that Google understands.
As such, there are strict rules and policies regarding product feeds. Merchant Center has several methods by which you can upload your WooCommerce Product Feed files. Additionally, Merchant Center also has a Diagnostics center through which you can address all your feed problems.
Generating error-free WooCommerce Google Product Feed Files:
They say prevention is better than the cure. This holds true for Product feeds as well. Being able to generate google compliant WooCommerce google product feed files will save you valuable time. Moreover, this time can be spent on other essential tasks like optimizing your WooCommerce Google Product Feed Files.
To that end, we recommend using ELEX Google Product Feed plugin to generate the WooCommerce Google Product Feed files. Heres how it helps create error-free product feeds:
- Intuitive Mapping: The plugin lets you map your internal inventory to Google Product Categories and Attributes.
- Extra Customizability: You can create custom categories and attributes to help Google understand your products better.
- Unlimited Feed Generation: using the “Exclude by Product ID” feature you can create unlimited Google compliant feeds as supplemental feeds or for testing purposes.
- Setting refresh schedules: You can set your feeds to refreshed automatically.
- Easy Management: You can perform bulk actions on all generated Woocommerce Google Product Feed files from a single window
The plugin stores the generated XML WooCommerce Google Product Feed file on your WordPress server itself. This file is accessible via URL. This feature is of particular interest for us as this enables us to schedule feed updates with ease.
Uploading your WooCommerce Google Product Feed:
Merchant Center provides several options to upload your WooCommerce Google Product Feed files. These are:
Google Sheets: Merchant Center lets you create a new product feed file using Google Sheets and a chrome add-on. The sheet does have valuable information regarding the format Google expects including informative examples and guidelines. Finally, changes made in the Google Sheet are fetched by the Merchant Center.
But it severely falls short in terms of functionality. It’s just too much of a pain to maintain a Google Sheet powered product feed especially if your site has frequent sales or has an exhaustive product list.
Manual Upload: Google recommends using the Upload method if you’re new to Merchant Center. You’ll need to simply upload the feed file in Merchant Center for this. Above all, keep in mind there’s a 4GB size limit if you’re uploading your product feed file. Google supports
- Direct Upload
- FTP Upload
- SFTP Upload
- Upload via Google Cloud Storage
Content API: Content API is a powerful option that Google offers to upload your feed files. Additionally, it lets apps interact directly with the Merchant Center permitting efficient handling of complex inventory data. Also, the API lets you do everything Merchant Center can, but programmatically. Some uses for Content API are:
- Account management automation,
- complex tax and shipping settings management
- Advanced Product management
Scheduled Fetch: This is the method we are going to use for uploading our feed files to Merchant Center. It lets us specify the URL of the feed file instead of uploading it directly.
Automating your WooCommerce Google Product Feed Upload:
Heres how you automate product feed uploads using Merchant Center’s Scheduled Fetch option:
- First, log in to your Merchant Center account.
- Afterward, under the products tab and products, you’ll find the Feeds section. Then, click on the big blue plus to add a new feed. Then, give it a name and choose your country and language.
- In the next window, you’ll see the various options available for feed uploads. Choose Scheduled Fetch.
- In the final window, you can set when and how often Merchant Center Fetches your WooCommerce Google Product Feed. You can set it to coincide with your feed refresh schedule that you’ve set using ELEX Google Product Feed Plugin. Click on continue.
You can have Google fetch your feed immediately once you’ve configured Scheduled Fetch. Afterward, any and all inventory changes will reflect in your WooCommerce Google Product feed file as it gets refreshed by the plugin. After the refresh, Merchant Center fetches the file on your server via URL and your feed data is updated.
Conclusion:
While Shopping Ads are a great way to realize your business goals, there are stringent rules to be followed. Providing accurate data in the form of product feeds to the Merchant Center is a crucial step in this process. Additionally, Google recommends uploading latest feed files multiple times throughout the day. By automating product feeds you can ensure your feed stays fresh and error-free. To that end, we have gone over the steps you can take to automate product feed uploads to Merchant Center with the help of Merchant Center’s Scheduled Fetch and ELEX Google Product Feed plugin. You can find more information about the plugin here.