With spring on the way, there’s never been a better time to clean up your Google Merchant Centre. This is especially important if you use Google Shopping campaigns or Performance Max campaigns, and it can also improve your organic SEO efforts, as the quality of the feed content often drives better results, so let’s dive in:

Branding

The first suggestion that we have for optimising Merchant Centre is making sure that you add in your branding, so that customers recognise your brand easily when they’re searching. We all know that brand consistency is incredibly important, to help gain and build trust, authority and awareness so this is a great option. There is a section on the left hand side that appears when you select ‘Business Info’ which allows you to add in your brand logos and add your brand colours.

Logos do have to be approved and Google are very specific in regards to how they want the logos to be supplied and what sizes (see above). Often, we’ve had cases were the brand logos have been rejected for being too small, so we’ve used a favicon or simplified logo instead.

Promotions

It’s relatively easy to add promotions into the Google merchant centre, and that means that any offer you’re running will appear on the search engine results page and help your ad stand out against other ads and add a bit of extra edge to your product. Whether this is a short-term promotion of 10% off for the weekend or a longer campaign that offers a new customer discount or free delivery, this can be added by completing a simple form. However, sometimes you need to activate promotions before you can do this:

Step 1 In your Merchant Center account, click the 'tools and settings icon' top right (cog icon)

Step 2 Select Add-ons.

Step 3 Locate the 'Promotions' add-on card under the 'Discover' tab.

Step 4 Click Activate.

Now you'll see 'Promotions' in the left menu.

It can take a few days for campaigns to be approved so it’s a good idea to do them in advance. We’ve also had problems on big events such as Black Friday with promotions seemingly stuck at the review stage and it’s been necessary to reach out to Google - mostly they’ve been very quick to get the offers live once we’ve spoken to someone.

Missing Data

We couldn’t talk about Google merchant Centre without talking about feed optimisation as they go hand-in-hand . A good place to start is by looking at the error messages and checking the missing elements of data. The best way to do this I find personally is in Shopify where you can bring up all the products via the Google App and see all the missing data.

Here you can edit in bulk to add in things like size, colour, gender and the ever ellusive GTIN (which if you didn’t know, is simply a unique barcode). Any errors or missing data here should correspond with the ‘needs attention’ screen you’ll see within the Merchant Centre.

Title Optimisations

With Shopping and Performance Max campaigns, the information in Merchant Centre is what Google looks at to review if your products are relevant to match to what people are looking for, so the title is incredibly important.

The title that Shopify pushes through to the feed might be the best title for your website, but perhaps not the best for Google. For example, lots of companies don’t include the brand name in the product title, but ideally, this would be included in the Merchant Centre.

You can easily edit product titles just in Merchant Centre by editing the individual product. If you’ve got 1000s of SKUs, then this isn’t really feasible, unless you utilise feed rules. Now, maybe one day we’ll write a blog on this, but for now, you can find loads of information here, but it can get rather complicated, rather quickly. Another alternative would be to look at a more advanced feed solution, such as DataFeed Watch.

Delivery & Returns

Finally, Google merchant centre now incorporates delivery and returns information so it’s incredibly important to make sure that this is accurate. It takes some data from Shopify, but there are sections where you can add in how long it takes to process an order how long it takes to ship an order etc and it will add up all these dates. In most cases, we’ve found brands are over-stating their delivery times to have a negative effect. In this example, the brand below is stating 5-7 working days for delivery, but in actuality it's closer to 2-4 days.

Edit Shipping & Delivery info by clicking on the link on the left and following the steps.

To summarise we hope you found these 5 ways to optimise Google Merchant Centre useful and actionable. It makes sense to do a bit of spring cleaning every now and then, and we would recommend that you look at this every couple of months depending on how often you have new product launches. If you have a large volume of new products dropping regularly, it’s well worth making sure that everything is as optimised as it can be, to help give you a competitive edge in your Shopping listings.