When you want to start advertising your WooCommerce products on Google shopping ads, you will need to start by creating a product feed that includes a list of product information that you’d like to promote through Google Merchant Center. A product feed is a file that includes a list of product information that you’d like to promote through Google Merchant Center. You’ll have to assign attributes to each of your products once they’ve been added. The pieces of information that identify a product are referred to as attributes. It is easier for potential customers to find your products if you provide the necessary and suggested attributes to appropriately describe them. Currently, the product feed file formats supported by Google Merchant Center are .gz, TSV, CSV, XML, .zip, and .bz2. This article will walk you through the process of setting up a WooCommerce Product feed in XML files if you are an eCommerce retailer looking to boost your online exposure by increasing product visibility. The main advantages of a product feed in XML are that it is easily readable and highly compatible with many websites and the chances are that your website already has an XML file containing all its content. Second, XML files make it much easier to include multiple values for an attribute. The only disadvantage is that you may need some technical knowledge to generate an XML file, but we will explain how to do it in a few simple steps in this article.
What exactly is an XML file?
An XML file is a file that uses the extensible markup language to organize data for processing and transfer. Attributes, tags, and text can be found in an XML file. The structure of the data is provided through tags. An XML file is essentially a conventional text file that uses specific tags to specify the file structure and how it should be saved and transferred. Once the data is stored by XML, you can manipulate the content for multiple devices and marketing platforms including but not limited to Google Merchant Center.
To put it simply, Google Merchant Center is Google’s own marketing platform that assists you in getting your store and product information into Google and making it available to buyers across Google. This implies that when customers search on a Google property, including Google Ads and other Google services, they will be able to see information about your store and the products that you offer that match their search. And, in order to have your product information uploaded to Google Merchant Center, you must first create a product feed that includes all of your product information and attributes. To do so, we’ll be using the ELEX WooCommerce Google Shopping Plugin, which will assist you in quickly creating an XML product feed.
You can easily map your product attributes to Google attributes and product categories to Google categories, and the plugin also assists you in setting up cron jobs that will keep your product feed up to date with updated information on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis as per your needs. You will also have the choice to map all of your products or go ahead with individual products based on the rules you set.
You can download the plugin by clicking here.
You can also try out the plugin’s functionality by downloading the free version.
You can read this document to know how to download and activate the plugin.
Let set up an XML WooCommerce Product Feed
Once the plugin is installed and activated, you will see a Google Shopping feed tab on your WordPress sidebar. Under the Google Shopping Feed tab, click Create Feed.
Step 1. Generic Settings
Under generic settings, you need to add all of the basic information about the feed like the project name you would like to assign to the feed, you can add an optional project description for ease of identification, the country you are selling out of, whether or not you would like to include product variations, whether or not you would want to export the product feed without unique product identifiers like brand, GTIN and MPN can be set by toggling the ‘auto identifier exists’ on or off. You can also set a default product category for all your products. Next comes the most important part where you need to select the file format of the product feed. The available options are XML, TSV, and CSV. Since we are specifically creating an XML file, we shall go ahead with XML. You can also set a refresh schedule from right here on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, as required.
Step 2. Mapping Product Category
Here, you must map your categories to Google categories. Check the checkboxes for the categories you want to use in your product feed after you’ve selected the applicable Google Product Category. Simply enter a matching Google category into the box, and a list of related categories will be provided for you to choose from.
Step 3. Mapping Individual Products
If you wish to map specific products to your product feed rather than full product categories, simply begin typing the required products to be mapped with Google Categories in the text box, as well as the appropriate Google Categories for mapping to the specific products. Check the boxes for the categories you wish to utilize for your product feed after selecting the appropriate Google Product Category.
Step 4. Mapping Product Attributes
After you are done mapping product categories you need to map your product attributes to google attributes. Each Google attribute must be mapped to your default Google and custom WooCommerce attributes. Any product attribute can be appended or prepended with other attributes to map with Google attributes. You can also add conditional formatting to the attributes to tailor your product feed to your specific requirements. You have a lot of flexibility with the plugin when it comes to how you want to structure your data for the feed. It’s also simple to set up your data according to your store’s needs and generate a feed.
Step 5. Filtering Options
In this step, you can set conditions to determine if a product will be added to the product feed or not. You can filter products based on stock quantities, the number of products sold, and you can also only include featured products in your feed by checking the featured products box. Here the option of excluding certain products from the feed is also available.
That’s about it! You can click ‘Generate Feed’ to create the product feed. Then, under the generate feed tab, all your updated products will be available. To view the generated XML feed you can click ‘View Feed’. We hope this post provided a thorough explanation of how to set up a WooCommerce product feed in XML files. If you have any questions regarding XML product feeds, please let us know in the comments section below.
