Section 3.1: How to Create Your Product Feed

What is a product feed and what are product fields?

In this video, Sam shows you how to link your Google Merchant Center account with your Google Ads account, a mandatory step to start running your Google Shopping campaigns.

What is a product feed?

A product feed is a file that contains all the data that Google uses to categorize your products and show them in the Google Shopping ads.

It's a file or bridge between the products shown on your website and what actually gets shown in the shopping ads.

The product feed contains all the information about your products. It's like a giant table of data all in a file that Google can understand.

You can imagine that your product feed is like a giant table with all your product information.

Here's a simplified example. Right here.

You can see that we have the columns id, title, description, price, and link. Under this first row, we can see that we have two different products with their information under each column heading.

This is a simplified version. The feed that we're actually gonna build out with our videos is a bit more complex, but this gives you an idea of what it looks like.

These columns are each called product fields, some are mandatory, and some are optional. It's our job to fill in these product fields.

Some will get pulled from our Shopify store automatically, and some we will have to enter manually. Let's go through the mandatory fields for your product feed right now.

Number one id, this is the unique identifier for your product. You can use your SKU or a random number. It doesn't matter too much. Next, we have the title. This is one of the most important fields for your product feed. Google gives your title the most weight when it's deciding who to show your products to.

We'll learn how to optimize this in a later video.

Next, we have the description. This describes your product, and you can often have the same description as what you have on your product page.

Next, we have the link.

This is your link to the product page for that product. With Google Shopping campaigns, you have to send traffic to the product page for that product, not the homepage or another page, the product page.

Next, we have image link. This is a direct link to the image of that product. It doesn't need to be the image that we already have on our product page. We can adjust this to an image of our choosing if we want to optimize our click through rates.

Next, we have the price. Obviously, this is the price of our product. It must match what's on our product page and what people pay when they check out with our product.

If you're not using a product feed, this is one of the things that can cause disapprovals. This is because people forget to update their product feed when they update their price on their website.

Next, we have availability. Availability is the last mandatory field. This is whether your product is in stock or not. If your feed says the product is in stock, but your website says it's not in stock, then you're going to have a problem, and Google will probably disapprove your product.

Make sure to keep this updated or use a dynamic feed, which we'll learn about in the next few videos.

There are also some other fields that are mandatory, but only in specific scenarios. One brand. This is the brand of the product. You can put your brand or the actual brand of the product. This is mandatory for every store.

That is not selling movies, books, and musical recording equipment. In most cases, you will need to add the brand. Next, we have condition. This is whether your product is new, used or renewed. You only need to add this if you're selling a used or renewed product.

Next, we have the color. This is the color of the product and is mandatory for apparel. It's used in Brazil, France, Germany, Japan, the UK and the us. Next we have the size. This is the size of the product, like small, medium, large.

It's used for all products under the categories of clothing and shoes in Brazil, Germany, France, uk, Japan, and the us. Next we have age group. If you're selling apparel, then you'll need to put this in for your products, same as the others. This is required for Brazil, Japan, France, Germany, the US and the uk.

Next we have gender.

This is also for apparel, and you'll need to put in the gender of your product if you're selling to Brazil, France, the us, uk, and Japan. Okay.

Next we have the shipping weight. This is the actual weight of your product. Google Merchant Center uses this to provide accurate pricing based on your shipping settings.

It's mandatory for products where the weight of the product is going to influence the shipping price that the customer pays.

Next, we have adults. This is just mandatory for products that are only appropriate for mature audiences.

Most stores don't have to include this. And lastly, multi-pack. This is mandatory when you bundle products together and you're selling to Australia, Brazil, Czechia, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, the UK and the US.

They're the mandatory fields for product feeds. There are a lot of optional fields too. We'll go through the optional fields that we'll need when we actually set up our feeds. In the next videos, just to know, ideally, you want to add as much product information as you can to your feed.

Don't just add the bare minimum and what you need for the mandatory fields. We want to add as much as we can to inform Google about what our products are so they know who to show them to.

Resources

📘 ID [id] ➤ Read here

📘 Title [title] ➤ Read here

📘 Description [description] ➤ Read here

📘 Link [link] ➤ Read here

📘 Image link [image_link] ➤ Read here

📘 Price [price] ➤ Read here

📘 Availability [availability] ➤ Read here

Add Your Comments & Questions Below

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Owen

1 year ago

If we have 1 product that can be called multiple names, for example, a self-defense alarm or a personal safety alarm, should we combine the keywords in 1 product, or should we separate them into 2 products and 2 landing pages, optimizing for 2 different keywords?

Admin

Jo Vucic

1 year ago

Reply to Owen

Unless the keywords and intent is vastly different, I would keep everything under one product. 150 characters in the title should be enough to describe the product for both use cases.

Mihir

5 months ago

Amazing Course and Info. Thanks A lot!!

Free Google Shopping Course

Section 1: Foundations of Google Shopping

Section 2: Google Merchant Center Setup

Section 3: How to Create Your Product Feed

Section 4: Creating Google Shopping Campaigns

Section 5: Optimizing Google Shopping Campaigns

Section 6: Fix Unsuccessful Campaign & Store

Section 7: Bonus Lessons

What is a product feed and what are product fields?

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