Google recently announced it will begin to show product data from Google Merchant Centre in the Google Shopping tab for free in the UK and Europe.
We’ve been recently asked by many of our eCommerce or Retail clients about the recent announcement from Google that it will begin to show product data from Google Merchant Centre in the Google Shopping tab for free. This has been available in the US for a while but is starting to be rolled out across Europe and the UK from today.
Many merchant centre admins will have received this email recently from Google:
“Last year, we announced that products from data feeds uploaded to Google Merchant Centre for users in the US would be eligible to be displayed in results on surfaces like Search and Google Images, for free (learn more). For example, in the US, products are eligible to appear in these new rich clothing search results.
Today we’re announcing that the option to submit products for surfaces across Google will be available in all countries where Google Merchant Centre is launched. If you have submitted a product feed to Google Merchant Centre, products from your store may automatically appear in unpaid results on Google surfaces when these launch in your country.”
I just wanted to summarise this for people wishing to understand more. These listings will take product data from merchant centre and display free/organic listings in the Shopping tab on Google. The shopping results on the main search results page will still be ads/paid listings from shopping campaigns. Also, paid shopping results will still appear above/below these organic product listings in the shopping tab.
As Google details on its Data and eligibility requirements to show your products on surfaces across Google page, there are a number of areas you can improve your data quality, that will help add product data into your organic and paid search results across Google Surfaces including Search, Images, Shopping and the Knowledge panels.
The required fields for basic listings are:
Whereas the fields it suggests for Enhanced listings are these:
- description [description] (required for all products)
- availability [availability] (required for all products)
- condition [condition] (required for each used or refurbished product)
- brand [brand] (required for each product with a clearly associated brand or manufacturer)
- gtin [gtin] (required for all products with a GTIN assigned by the manufacturer)
- mpn [mpn] (required for all products without a manufacturer-assigned GTIN)
- multipack [multipack] (required if your product is a multipack)
- is_bundle [is_bundle] (required if your product is a bundle)
- color [colour] (required for Clothing & Accessories)
- size [size] (required for Clothing & Accessories)
- age_group [age_group] (required for Clothing & Accessories)
- gender [gender] (required for Clothing & Accessories)
- item_group_id [item_group_id] (required for product variants)
- shipping [shipping] (required when you need to override your delivery settings in Merchant Center)
- tax [tax] (required in the US when you need to override your account tax settings in Merchant Center)
We’d strongly recommend passing as much of this information to Google with your product fields as possible to improve your organic and paid results.
Recommendation
My recommendation is that you review your current product feeds and any diagnostic info in merchant centre to look at ways of improving the feed data to maximise your organic performance here, this will also benefit your paid campaigns.