Marketing your online store can be a challenging task, but with the right tools and strategies, it can become an effortless process. One of the most popular channels for marketing in the digital space is Google Shopping ads. These ads display your product ads with images when a user searches with a relevant query on Google. They are visually appealing and offer updated information, making them highly effective in enhancing conversions. In this article, we will discuss the basics of marketing your WooCommerce store with Google Merchant Center.
What is Google Merchant Center?
Google Merchant Center is a platform offered by Google that online store owners can use to upload and maintain their product information. It also provides options to link your product data with other Google services like Google Ads. With Google Merchant Center, you will have better control over your marketing efforts using Google services.
Benefits of Google Merchant Center
Setting up a Google Merchant Center account offers several benefits to online store owners. It is important to understand these benefits so that you can make full use of it.
1. Helps to make your products available for Google Shopping ads
One of the most obvious benefits of creating a product feed for Google Merchant Center is that you will be able to make your products available for Google Shopping ads. These ads are different from text ads of Google that require you to select a set of keywords for your products. To display your products in shopping ads, you need to create a feed of your products in the specified format and upload it to Google Merchant Center. Then, you can link your Merchant Center account with Google ads and set suitable bids. Based on the search query and relevance of your feed, Google will display your product ads to its users. This will hugely improve the visibility of your store and products and will help you acquire new customers.
2. Integration with other Google services
Google Merchant Center acts as a perfect platform to help you make your product information available to different other services of Google like Google Ads. You can also get specific insights from Google Analytics to create better marketing strategies.
3. Link product reviews
The product feed on Google Merchant Center allows rich data including product reviews so that users will have better knowledge about the product ads they see. Being able to readily see product review data can help users make purchase decisions. You will also be able to collect regular feedback from customers by making the review process automated.
4. Helps to feature local products
Sometimes, when you have a physical location for your store, you can even create a specific product feed for Google Local Inventory ads. This has the potential to market your products that are available only in the store location.
5. Shopping actions
In the US and France, users will be able to directly make a purchase from Google using specific devices. You can submit your Merchant Center Feed to Shopping Actions if it is relevant for your store.
6. Promotions and Remarketing
You can display deals and offers associated with your products to ensure better conversion rate. Google Merchant Center offers an option called Merchant Promotions to help you display the available discounts with your products. You will also find relevant remarketing strategies of Google extremely useful to improve conversions as well as customer loyalty.
How to link your WooCommerce store products to Google Merchant Center?
As mentioned above, Google shopping ads do not work based on specific keywords that you target. Instead, Google will display your products when it gets relevant queries. Therefore, you need to ensure that your product feed is relevant and up to date. Google has very stringent guidelines detailing how product information should be organized in the feed. This is to ensure that Google can understand your products well so as to display them when it gets relevant search queries.
So, one of the first steps of marketing your store using Google Merchant Center is to create a product feed. You can create it manually by using a Google Sheets template that you find in your Merchant Center account. Alternatively, you can use a tool to create an accurate feed in a required file format and then upload it.
WooCommerce Google Product Feed plugins
If you are using WooCommerce platform for your online store, there are several plugins that you can use to create and regularly update product feed to your Merchant Center account.
1. ELEX Google Product Feed Plugin
With the help of this plugin, you will be able to upload a Google Product Feed to your Merchant Center account. The plugin provides an option to map Google categories and product attributes with respective categories and attributes on your WooCommerce store. You can even set rules and conditions for attribute mapping while using this plugin. It also helps you set refresh schedules for your product feed, so that any change in your store will also reflect in the product feed.
Here’s a quick look at the ELEX Google Product Feed plugin’s features:
– Create one or more product feeds in XML, TSV or CSV formats, which you can upload to your Google Merchant Center account.
– Create daily, weekly or monthly refresh schedules that will help you ensure that your product feed is synced with your store data.
– Include product variations in your feed to help users find your products when they use search queries with those attribute values.
– Map your WooCommerce store categories with Google categories.
– Add additional product attribute fields to make your product feed richer.
– Selectively exclude products from the feed.
– Manage multiple product feeds easily with easy options to delete or download them.
– Reliable support team.
If you don’t want to include variable products in your feed, you can try the free version of ELEX Google Product Feed plugin.
2. WooCommerce Google Product Feed
This extension helps you generate and update product feed to Google Merchant Center from your WooCommerce store. In addition to Google Product Feed, you can also create a feed for Bing as well as for Google product reviews using this extension. It supports more than 50 attribute fields and ensures that your products present rich data to Google. You can create custom additional fields as per your requirement. The extension is compatible with several popular plugins like Product Bundles, Brands, Composite products, etc.
Features of this plugin include:
– Create real-time product feeds to provide the latest product information to Google Merchant Center.
– Easy mapping options to link WooCommerce product data with Google’s required fields.
– Create custom fields to capture additional data required by Google that is not available by default on WooCommerce.
– Supports bulk imports using WooCommerce importer.
– Flexible for customization with WordPress filters and actions.
– Extensive documentation.
3. WooCommerce Google Feed Manager
If you want to create a Google product feed of less than 100 products, this free product could be a great option for you. The plugin will create a product feed automatically by including all the fields that Google has made mandatory. In addition, you can modify the feed as per any specific requirement of your business or location. The plugin is quite simple to install and set up so that even new WordPress users will be able to work with it. Moreover, it will help you optimize the feed so that your products get better visibility through Google Shopping ads. Also, it ensures that the feed is updated in real time when any changes are made to your product information.
The premium version of Google Feed Manager plugin will be suitable for your store if you have a large number of products.
The free plugin includes features for:
– Easily map WooCommerce product categories with Google categories with the help of templates.
– Optimize your feed by making appropriate improvements to make your feed richer.
– Automatically update your feed by specifying refresh schedules.
– Advanced filters to selectively exclude certain products from the feed that you generate.
– Simple installation process and dependable support.
Get better visibility for your products through Google Merchant Center
As we have discussed, Google Merchant Center provides a great platform to make sure your products reach more customers and markets. It will help you integrate with other Google services such as Google Ads as well Google Analytics. One of the essential steps to getting your products listed on Google Shopping ads is the creation of an accurate Google product feed.
When you have a WooCommerce store with a large number of products, you can use one of the above-mentioned plugins to automatically generate a product feed. These plugins will help you make sure that the feed is updated at regular intervals to avoid any mismatches between your store and the feed. Hopefully, the basics of marketing your WooCommerce store using Google Merchant Center are clear in this article. Leave us a comment if you have any queries.
