In this video you're going to learn how to set up
Google Merchant Center promotions for your Google Shopping campaigns.
Merchant promotions look like this on your ads.
They make your ads stand out from competitors by taking up more space,
and increasing your click-through rates.
It's a quick edge you can get over your competitors and we're
gonna learn how to set them up in this video.
What type of promotions can you run?
There are three main types:
1. Free shipping
2. Discounts
3. Free gifts
If you already have free shipping on your ecommerce store,
this is an easy quick win that you can add to your Google Shopping campaigns.
If you're also running discounts on your store,
you can also add them in like 20% off certain products.
You can also add in bonuses like, free gifts which is definitely
going to help attract more customers to your store.
What countries can you run promotions for?
If you're selling to the US, Canada, UK,
Australia, France, Germany, and India you can set these up.
So how do we set them up?
First, we need to get approved for promotions.
This is an easy process.
Just log into your Google Merchant Center dashboard and on the left,
go to "Growth" and "Manage programs".
Then scroll down until you find promotions, and click "Enable".
We'll then have to fill out this form with our information and wait.
Let's do this together really quickly.
We're going to select the first one "I want to enroll in Merchant Promotions".
We're going to put in our contact name, a Google Ads Customer ID, our Merchant Center ID, which you
can find by going to your Google Merchant Center account and copying it from the very, very top.
Now, we need our Merchant name that's going to be the same name that's next to our ID
in Google Merchant Center.
Our Merchant URL, which is the URL of our store, our first name, our last name, our location,
and if you have a Google Account manager,
like a representative from Google, you can put them in here with their email,
as well as if you have an agency managing your feed you can add them here too.
Click "Submit", we've now applied for the promotions.
Usually takes about 12 to 24 hours to get approved.
Once we're approved, we'll then see the promotions
menu item on the left of our Merchant Center menu, underneath "Marketing".
Click this menu item, and you'll then be able to go to this page here for promotions.
Click the ➕ sign to create a new promotion.
It's going to ask you your country, then your language.
Make sure this is the same language as where you're selling to.
Then you have the destination.
This is going to be shopping ads, potentially free listings as well.
Here is where we select the promotion type, the category.
We have the discount options here.
One for an amount off like $30 off, and one for percentage off, like a 30% discount.
We then have the free gift option here, and the free shipping option here.
To start let's select free shipping.
It will then ask us what type of free shipping promotion we'll be offering.
We have free standard shipping, free overnight shipping, and free 2-day shipping.
Make sure you add what matches your store.
Keep in mind that our promotions are used to stand out from competitors and get more clicks.
If you offer free overnight shipping,
this is going to attract more traffic and be better for your ads.
Of course it has to match your store.
Let's just stick with free standard shipping in this example.
The next section asks us if there's a minimum customers need to spend,
in order to activate the free shipping.
The first box is the minimum order value like $50 to activate free shipping,
the second box is the minimum quantity of products to activate free shipping.
For example, for us
we're applying free shipping across the entire store with no other requirements.
So let's just click continue.
It then asks us for the promotion title, and promotion ID.
The title is what customers see on your ads.
I recommend something like free shipping.
The ID, I usually add the same, it's just for us to identify
it in the list of promotions on our promotions page of Merchant Center.
If you added any requirements, then you can add those notes here too, so you can differentiate
this promotion from any other free shipping promotions, you've added in Merchant Centre.
We then choose which products this promotion applies to.
You can apply it to promotions with a promotions ID.
This is something that you set up in your product feed by adding the
promotions ID above, into the field in your product feed, called promotion ID.
You can also apply it to all products, or you can set a filter to apply to specific products.
I'm going to select all products in this situation.
We then add the promo code for the promotion.
If you add the promo code here, you need to make
sure you remember to add this in your Shopify or ecommerce store settings.
If people can't use the discount code on your store, then the promotion will be rejected,
and you raise the risk meter to potentially being flagged for a Google Merchant Center suspension.
Don't risk it, set it up, and test it.
Now, if the free shipping applies to all products across your entire store,
don't add anything here, and it tells Google that the promotion applies automatically.
We can then set our start and end dates here.
Click "Create promotion", and Google will start the review process.
Pretty easy, huh?
I'm now going to run through creating a promotion for running a discount code on your store.
Going back to promotions, click "Add promotion".
Choose our country, and then scroll down to the categories section.
Choose either amount of, or percentage off.
Let's choose percentage off for this discount because it will be 10% off.
It will then show us more options for our promotion, such as whether they get
a percentage off right away, or if they need to buy other products to activate this discount.
I'm going to select buy quantity of products get a percentage off.
This means buy 1 get 10% off.
"Continue"
It then asks for the title of the promotion, and the ID.
The title is what customers are going to see,
so make sure you spend time thinking about what you write here,
For example, I'm going to add "Buy 1 get 10% off".
Then we add the promotion ID, which is what allows us to identify this promotion in our settings.
I like to add the title by replacing the spaces.
Now we choose which products this promotion applies to.
You can apply it to promotions with a promotions ID.
This is something you set up in your product feed,
by adding the promotion ID above into the field called promotion ID.
You can apply it to all products, or you can set a filter to apply to specific products too.
We then add a promo code for the promotion.
If you add the promo code here, you need to make sure to add this into your Shopify
or ecom store settings, because if people can't use the discount code on your store,
then the promotion will get rejected by Google
and you raise your chances of being suspended on your Google Merchant Center account.
Don't risk it, set it up, and test it.
If the discount applies to all products across our entire store don't add anything here,
and it just tells Google that the promo code applies automatically.
We can then set our start and end dates here.
I'm going to run this one for about 5/6 months.
We then click create promotion and Google will start the review process.
This usually takes about 24 hours or so,
so make sure to give yourself enough time before a big event like Black Friday,
or another sale day, to be prepared so it can be reviewed before the actual sale date.
If you have a lot of products, you can also set up a promotions feed.
This allows you to much more easily tell Google which promotions you're running for your products.
I'll leave a link below for Google's page on setting up a promotions feed.
That's it for setting up our Merchant Center Promotions for our Google Shopping campaigns.
If you're watching this video on YouTube,
it's actually part of our free Google shopping course on our website.
It shows you how to set up, optimize, and scale your shopping campaigns for more profits.
It's 100% free, with no sign up required.
I'll leave a link down below.
If this video was useful, please give it a like, and let me know in the comments down below.
Thanks for watching guys, I'll see you in the next video.
Bye for now.