In this video, you're going to learn how to set up your product feed for Google
Shopping campaigns using the Google sheets method.
Now, before setting up your feed
in this way you're going to need to set up your Google Merchant Center account.
This means creating your account, verifying your business, adding your business information,
and adding your shipping settings, and your returns and refund settings.
Now, I have videos on every single one of these things you need to do to set up your account.
I'll leave a link to those videos down below.
We have all these videos because we actually made a full free Google Shopping course on our website.
These videos are just part of that, before this one right here you're watching right now.
These videos teach you everything about setting up,
optimizing and scaling your Google Shopping campaigns.
I'll leave a link to that down below,
but go and set that up and then keep going through this video.
Let's set up our Google Shopping feed with the Google sheets method.
Let's go, first, log into your Google Merchant center account by going to merchants.google.com.
On the left-hand side click on "Products" and then click on "Feeds".
If you don't see the feeds in the menu item, just click on "Create new feed".
Click on the plus sign here to create your feed.
Change the country of sale to the country you're selling to.
Make sure the language is out of the content of the feed, we'll put English here.
If you're selling to multiple countries you can click "Add",
to add in the other countries you're also selling to, with the same feed.
Finally, we'll select our destinations here.
This is where our ads are going to show.
We have Shopping ads, but we also can have free listings as long as
they're enabled in Merchant Center programs.
I'll leave a link below to a video where we show you how to get your free listings set up.
Once done, you'll then see the option to add the
new destination here for the free Google Shopping listings.
Then click "Continue".
Feed name - this doesn't have to be perfect but good enough for us to reference later on.
I like to add in the country code, and then Google sheets feed.
So "AU Google sheets feed".
Make sure that Google sheets is selected and click "Continue".
It's then going to ask you to sign in.
Click "Allow".
It then asks you to either use an existing Google spreadsheet or create a new one.
Usually, you just use the first one "Generate a new google spreadsheet from a template".
Click "Create feed", click "Allow".
In this case my browser actually blocked the pop-up, make sure to allow pop-ups.
I'm going to try again.
It'll then take you to this page here, or it'll take you to the feeds page.
We can then get back to this page by clicking on the feed and then click "Access google sheet".
This is the template that Google provides and where we add our product information.
Now it has some columns already there, because it's a template,
and that's great but we're now going to import our product information and assign it to each column.
Getting our product information is going
to be different depending on what ecommerce platform you're using.
I'll show you how to do it with Shopify, but you'll have the same process with WooCommerce,
Magento or whatever you're using.
Open up your Shopify dashboard, go to products on the left hand side.
Click on "All products", and click "Export", click "All products", and we want a plain CSV file.
Click "Export products".
It's then going to send our product information download to our email address.
It may take a short while depending on the size of your product's catalog.
Once you receive this email, just click the link you'll then be able to download,
and then you want to open up that file.
You'll then download a CSV file.
You can open this CSV file in Microsoft Excel, but you can also just drag this into Google
Drive and Google will convert it to a Google sheet, and let you access it right there.
Pretty neat.
So, I'm going to go to drive.google.com and then drag in the CSV file into Google Drive.
I can then right click it, and open with Google sheets.
So, now we have our product information.
If you're not using Shopify there's definitely a way to download this information in the same way
depending on what ecommerce platform you're using.
You can now follow along with the next steps as we organize this data.
First, let's go back to our product feed Google sheet.
We're going to create a new tab, and we're going to rename it "Product info".
Go back to the product information download, select everything, copy and paste into your sheet.
It now looks something like this.
I like to do this to keep it as a separate tab, so we have a saved copy
of the product information, if we ever need to reference it later.
I'm just gonna adjust the columns they're smaller so they don't wrap around.
Now, we need to match this product info into the columns that Google provided us
in the template on the first tab.
We need to do this, because Google only reads these columns they don't understand
Shopify's columns, so we're going to copy and paste columns over and match them up.
It's a bit of a manual process but it shouldn't take long.
Let's first open up the tab, our original template, and delete these first rows here.
Now, we're going to go back to the information downloaded from Shopify.
Select the products and paste them into our sheet.
Now, what I like to do is, select all the rows at the top and change their color to yellow.
This is because I want to make sure we can keep track of which ones are required by Google,
so they don't get mixed up with the Shopify columns.
This will make sense in a moment.
Now, one-by-one we're going to cut and paste these yellow column headings
over onto our Shopify column headings, replacing each one.
Basically, just follow what I do here.
I'm using command, or Ctrl+X, as a shortcut.
You can just right click, and cut, and right click, and paste.
It's up to you.
First, let's replace the ID over the top of the handle over here.
Cut and paste.
Then title over title, cut and paste.
Then description over description, cut and paste.
For the link, we're going to click on the next column,
right click and insert a new column to the right.
We're then going to cut link and paste it at the top.
We now need to add in the actual information for our product links.
This is the link to the actual product page for these products.
Of course you can go and fetch the product page URLs for your products one-by-one manually,
but I'm also going to show you a formula to speed up this process.
Do what I do here, it's going to save you a lot of time.
In the link column in the first cell, we're going to add this formula here.
You'll find this formula down below this video.
Just go and copy it, and paste it in, and then we're going to edit a few things.
Firstly, make sure that when you click this bar here it highlights the ID.
If it doesn't, just delete the A8 make sure the comma is there and then select that cell.
Hit enter to save.
Then you want to replace the domain name with your actual domain.
In my case it's Sleepy Machines.
Of course, if your store is on a different subdomain,
or you have a different .com, .net, .io make sure to edit that as well.
You now see that this actually creates a link using your domain and the ID, let's test this out.
There we go, it sends us to the product page so this is working.
You can now copy this cell by hitting Cmd+C or Ctrl+C,
selecting all the other products in your feed and then pasting.
It's now going to paste that formula, so it works for all your products.
You see how this is much faster than adding them in manually,
it should save you a little bit of time.
Next, we'll now add in the condition.
Same as before we're going to select a column,
right click and select "Insert one column to the left".
We're now going to cut and paste our condition into that cell.
Now, we just need to go down and add the actual condition of our products.
This is very easy, there are only 3 options here.
New, refurbished, or used so you just go down and paste in what makes sense for your products.
All my products are new, and yours are probably the same so, just add in new
and copy and paste them for all your products.
In 99 of cases you'll have all new products so you can just type in new, and then copy that cell,
select the ones below and paste it in to set it for all the products in your feed.
Next, let's deal with price.
We're going to cut the price column header, and paste that over the top of the variant price.
You're going to have to scroll to find this cell.
Let's do it now.
There it is 👉 "Variant price".
Paste that in.
I also want to move this column to the start of our feed, so just select the whole column,
click the top box over the letter, drag all the way to the left.
Let's put it after condition.
I also want to go back and find the "Variant compare at price" column and drag that over to.
You can hit Cmd+F and search for compare, and it's going to find that price for you.
Let's drag that over.
We're going to change the title of that column to "Sale price".
We'll come back to this later, but for now let's move on.
Let's make a new fresh column to the right of sale price.
Let's cut and paste "Availability" and put it into that cell there.
"Availability" is a field that tells Google if our product is in stock or not.
There are several different values that we could add in here: in stock,
out of stock, pre-order, or back order.
In stock is for when your product is in stock and ready to be sold.
People can buy it on your site, and you're going to ship it to them.
Out of stock means exactly what it says, you have no inventory for that product.
Pre-order is for new products that are not yet released that someone can pre-order.
Back order is when your product is
out of stock but people can back order to get it when it comes in.
Note that if you add back order you also have to add in a new column here in your feed
called "Availability date", and add in the date that it will be in stock.
What we'll do now, is go down our products and add in the availability like with condition.
We have to type this in manually, so I'm going to type in "In_stock",
and then copy and paste that down for all my products.
You see here. I've only dragged it down for these four products here
,there's no pricing for these products here, they're not actual products in our store.
This product here does have a price,
but it doesn't have a title that's because it's a variant.
So I'm actually going to just paste down the title,
I'm going to adjust that to something about the variant, which is going to be the color.
I'll also drag down the vendor, and the description.
Next, we have the image link.
This is the image that Google will show on our ads.
You can use one of the same images that are on your product page,
or you can even use a totally different image, that's not shown here.
In this case, I'm just going to save time by using our current main image.
So I'm going to cut the image link column, and paste it over the image source column here.
I'll then take that column, by clicking this top box here where the letter is,
and dragging it over with the rest of my columns.
Okay, now we have four columns left.
Let's right click above the image link column, and add in columns to the right.
I'll then cut and paste in these columns, into the new columns we've just created.
Fantastic, now we can see that there are no more columns to
be added from the template given to us by Google.
So, let's now select these top rows here, and delete them.
Okay, now we have all the columns we need.
It's now time for us to start optimizing our feed,
and adding in some of the missing column information.
We want to optimize our feed because Google wants to see
much better information here, than what we copied over from our store.
If we want to create the best Shopping campaigns possible, and make a lot of money,
we need to put this time in, and set it up right.
The first thing we have is the ID.
Now, the ID is used as Google's way to track each product.
When we do our manual bidding strategy later, it's what we can use to know which products are which,
which are important if our profit margins vary between products.
I recommend keeping it either as the handle,
like we have here or changing it to something that you can easily and quickly identify.
In this case, I'm going to leave it the same here,
but you will see for these two variants that the ID is the same.
We can't have this, we need to add some sort of differentiator to the end.
So, I'm going to change this to white, and this one to charcoal.
Let's now optimize our product title.
Your title is the most important product field for Google.
Your Google Shopping campaigns will perform much
better if you spend the time to craft and optimize title.
So what makes a good title for your product?
You don't want to just have the same title as what's on your ecommerce store.
A lot of stores do this and it's a big mistake.
Look at this example - they're selling a backpack that says Liter
but how does Google know what the heck Liter is?
A better title would be "Sling Backpack in gray 40 Liters".
See how that's much more descriptive and also optimized towards
what a customer might actually search.
So first we want to do some keyword research,
see what our shoppers are searching for, when you want to show your product.
If you're selling laptops think about what your
potential customer will type in to find the laptop he needs.
All right, laptops is probably going to be in that query.
Searching for branded laptops is highly likely,
so we'll put in the brand and model in that title too.
The hard drive capacity is pretty important so we'll put that in as well,
plus does it have an external graphics card ?
Great, add that in.
How about RAM?
That's important too.
What about the processor type?
What about the screen size?
One title for a laptop completely made up and optimized might be: Dell XSP 19,
9978 Laptop, 30" FHD, Intel i1, 128GB, SSD 32GB RAM.
Do note, Google won't display the whole title but the first 35 to 70 characters,
depending on the shopping ad layout.
So fit the most important things in the first part.
The limit for the title is 150 characters.
We want to use up most of the characters, not because it might show up to customers,
but to let Google know as much information as possible about the product.
Even if the 32GB RAM doesn't show up in the title that the shoppers see,
it's still taken into account and your laptop ad might show
up when someone is searching for Dell laptops that have 32GB RAM.
This isn't a universal formula for the best title,
but there are some best practices depending on your niche and products.
With generic products you might want to put in the brand, product type, color, material, and size.
So let's say 3M Adhesive tape, Black, 60in x by 1in.
If you're selling jewelry, one title might be consisted of
brand, plus weight, plus shape, plus style, plus material.
An example might be something like your brand, 14, Yellow gold, Pendant, Classic.
For apparel you might use gender, plus keyword, plus keyword two,
plus brand, plus color, plus product time.
For anything related to sports, you'd go with brand, plus sport, plus product type, plus color.
As you can see, there isn't a universal formula and it will highly depend on your niche,
what your competitors are using, and what shoppers are expecting.
There isn't an easy way to A/B test changes, but you can change a single product title...
Take note of when you changed it, and monitor impressions, clicks,
and conversions to compare it to the previous period.
It's not a perfect method because you have to take into account a few more things
like seasonality, but until google gives us something better we can do it like this.
Optimizing titles is so important and we have a whole blog post just on this.
You can check it out with a link I'll leave below this video.
For this title here, I'm going to add in something different than a Snooze Go Baby.
Of course, this is actually a white noise machine, so let's make that clear.
This is an example I've just created for this white noise machine.
I've got the brand, what people actually searching, which is white noise machine.
People are often searching for a white noise machine that uses a real fan,
and not an audio recording.
So, I've added that in here to the title.
Sometimes people are looking for Bluetooth, as well as being travel-friendly.
So I'm targeting these keywords by putting that in my title.
You need to do this for each of your individual products.
Next, let's optimize our description.
What we'll do now is clean out our description of any HTML code that might be there.
This is what this is right here, even though Google says they'll clean it up,
I don't take chances.
I'll clean it myself ,using a tool like HTML cleaner.
I'll leave a link below to this tool.
We're just going to paste in the description for the product,
and then copy the clean part on the left, paste that back in and press enter.
In terms of the content of the description,
usually I'll just have this as just what's on the website as long as it's well descriptive.
I do have a video that goes deeper into writing descriptions for your website and product page.
I'll leave a link to that below.
The next thing I'm going to optimize is the GTIN.
This is your product identifier and it's a unique number in a database
depending on your region, that identifies your product in the marketplace.
If you create your own products, and don't have a GTIN, you can provide
a brand and manufacturer part number (MPN) instead of a GTIN.
We'll go over those in a bit.
You can often get the GTIN from your supplier, or by looking at the barcode that's on the product.
It's a vital signal to Google, since they will know exactly which product is provided.
You'll still have to optimize your feed, but it's going to make it a bit easier.
I don't know the GTIN for this product, so I'm going to leave it blank.
This does mean that I need to make sure the MPN, and the brand are filled in.
Let's look at the MPN right now.
The MPN is the manufacturer part number, and it's assigned by the manufacturer,
and it's unique to every product.
Someone that's searching for a "Toyota air filter", can search for a specific
MPN that's tied to their specific make and model.
So it is a good idea to provide it, if you can.
Maybe you'll ask, but what if my product doesn't have an MPN?
If you don't have a GTIN, it's mandatory to provide a brand and MPN,
but if you don't have a GTIN, and you don't know an official MPN, you can make it up.
Just be sure to make it unique to every product in your feed.
Though if you do have a GTIN, then the MPN is an optional field.
I do recommend adding it if you can, otherwise leave it blank.
Because I don't have a GTIN, let's add in one now.
I don't know the actual MPN number, so I'm just going to copy over
the SKU, or the ID, and use that instead.
I'm going to paste that down for all my products.
Next, we'll add in the brand of our products, this is going to be the actual brand of the product.
For example, if you're selling Nike sneakers, it would be Nike.
If you're selling your own products, and you are the brand, adding your brand name here instead.
I'm going to add in "Snooze", because that's the brand of the products I'm selling.
Next, we have the Google product category.
This column is for us to put in the Google product category number for each product.
Google has their own big list of categories that can help them figure out what your product is.
We need to check the list for the most relevant product category for our product,
and then paste in the code into the cell for each of the products.
To find this list here, I'll leave a link down below this video, so go check that out.
What you need to do is go through this list and search for the most
relevant product category for your products.
Of course don't go through it one-by-one,
hit Cmd+F or Ctrl+F and search through with a few keywords to find what's most relevant.
We're selling a white noise machine, so let's search for that.
Once I search for white noise, it comes up with white noise machines, as a sleeping aid, 4056.
I'm going to copy this number here,
go back to my feed and paste that into the Google products category column.
Copy and paste that down, because all the products are from the same product category.
Lastly, I want to talk about our price, and the sale price for our products.
Price is the original price of the product,
and sale price is for when we are selling the product at a discount.
It looks like this in our actual Shopping ads.
Your price needs to be in the format
like this, with the price first, and then the currency afterwards.
If you don't do this, your product will just get
disapproved and you'll just have to fix it later anyway.
To find a list of all the currency labels check below this video.
I'm going to add the currency to all the prices of my products in my feed.
Of course if you're selling in US dollars, you'd put USD.
The sale price is optional, but if you have the product marked down like this on your site,
you need to fix up this price in your feed too.
This is how you do it.
Make sure you keep the price as the original price, so it will always be the higher of the two.
If you don't have a sale on just keep it as the price, but if you do have a sale on,
change sale price to the new sale price.
So if I sell this one for 39.99, I would change the sale price to 39.99 with the currency.
If you have any products on sale, make sure to update them in this same manner.
Now, there could be some other fields that you might need to
add in depending on what products you're selling.
For example, if you're selling apparel you need to
add in things like the size and gender of your products.
I'll leave a link below to a guide on adding in these extra compulsory fields,
and you'll need to tailor your feed for your own store, if you're in one of these other categories.
It's not hard, but it just takes a little bit of extra time.
Once that's now complete we can delete these other
unused columns here to the right, and finish our feed.
It should look like this.
We now go back to Google Merchant Center,
go to "Products", "Feeds", and click on the "Fetch now" button.
Here we see our Google sheets feed.
Click "Fetch now".
Google is then going to crawl our feed and check if we did everything right .
Almost always, we'll see some products get disapprovals, warnings, or errors.
Don't worry, this is normal.
We now need to go through the process of fixing these disapprovals.
To learn exactly how we do this I'm going to share a video down below,
showing you how we fix disapprovals in Google Merchant Center.
So go check below to link to that lesson.
Guys if you're watching this video on YouTube right now,
it's actually part of our free Google Shopping course on our website.
It's 100% free, with no sign up required.
It takes you through everything you need to set up,
optimize and scale your Google Shopping campaigns.
It's jam-packed with all the strategies that we've used for years and years,
to generate millions and millions of dollars with Google Shopping campaigns.
Go and check it out, I'll leave a link down below, and if this video here was useful guys,
please give it a like, let me know in the comments below, otherwise...
I'll see you guys in the next video.
Bye for now.