Google Merchant Center isn’t just for shopping ads. It’s also a key source of product information that Google draws from for displaying organic search results. And guess what? It’s also where Google’s AI systems pull information for product discovery. If you have just been thinking about Google Merchant Center (GMC) as a tool for advertising, you’re falling behind on opportunities to get your products out there in front of more people. Let’s go over a few tips to help surface your products in more places.
Put All Products in Your Feed
Many merchants restrict the products they advertise to only those that are higher margin or high ticket items. Often, this is accomplished with a product filter to exclude certain items from the shopping feed. The problem with this method is that this makes products less visible for organic and AI discovery.
The solution? It’s simple. Put all your products in the feed. If you want to only advertise some of them, use the ‘excluded_destinations’ feed attribute to specify that some products shouldn’t be put in ads. But they will still be able to show up in other contexts as free listings.
Enrich Your Feed Data
AI machine learning systems thrive on lots of data. We are moving out of an era of short keyword searches and into a future where chatbots recommend products based on a longer conversation that refines what products are shown based on more nuanced information. In order to effectively respond with the right products, these systems need as much data as possible.
Does your feed include the ‘product_highlights’ attribute? This is a list of up to 10 bullet points that are important information about your product. These are easy for AI systems to parse and understand, if you write them clearly.
What about the ‘product_detail’ attribute? This attribute allows you to put any key/value pairs into your feed. It’s an attribute that allows you to extend the normal feed specification to pass any structured information that you want. This is how you can include extremely nuanced product details that would otherwise have nowhere to go in the feed.
Most shopping feeds don’t even flesh out all of the normal attributes like ‘size’, ‘color’, and ‘material’. There are dozens of feed attributes, and most shopping feeds make use of about ten of them. If you take advantage of these opportunities to improve your feed, it will improve your products’ visibility.
Product Feeds Are Critical to SEO
Most traditional search engine optimization (SEO) firms seem to overlook the simple fact that for ecommerce merchants, product feeds running into GMC are a key SEO opportunity. And any improvements to your feed data will also improve your ad performance. This product information is the primary source Google draws on for organic and AI-surfaced search results. Google Merchant Center isn’t just for ads these days.