In this video, you're going to learn what Google Merchant Center is, and how it works.
Knowing this information is going to better set you up for setting up your product feed,
and Shopping campaigns to make more profits for your ecommerce store.
First, we're going to learn what Google Merchant Center is,
then we're going to learn how to set up our account together.
Then, I'm going to give you a tour of the Merchant Center dashboard
so you know where everything is, and how it all works.
Okay, what is Google Merchant Center?
Google Merchant Center is a platform by Google that houses
all the information about your products.
Everything about your product information,
your reviews, your inventory, and promotions, are located here.
Your Google Shopping ads can't run without a Google Merchant Center account,
or this information here, and when there are issues with that information,
and there often are at the start...
This is where you're going to come to diagnose and fix those problems.
You can think of Google Merchant Center as the ultimate gatekeeper for your Google Shopping ads.
You can't run Google Shopping ads unless your products are approved in Google Merchant Center,
along with your business information too.
Google needs to verify your product titles, your descriptions, your images, your pricing,
and every other part of your products before they'll show your products in Google Shopping.
So how do we set up our Google Merchant Center account?
Let's do that right now.📌
Note, you will need to have a Gmail or a Google-based email account for this.
It's a good idea to use the same email you've used for your Google Ads,
and Google Analytics accounts where possible.
Go to merchants.google.com and click the "Get started," button.
You'll see this page here...
Scroll down and enter in your business name.
You'll want to enter your trade name, meaning the name you do business as.
You don't need to put in your legal business name here.
Then put in your country and time zone.
This is where your business is registered.
Don't worry you're not locking yourself into selling to just that one country.
Then you select the option for checking out on your website.
For most stores this is just going to be
"On my website," you can always change this at a later time.
After that, you're given the option of selecting tools that you use.
Currently, there are two tools: Shopify and PayPal.
This just makes integration with these platforms easier.
I'm gonna select Shopify for this store.
Then it's going to ask us about email notifications, you can keep this as it is.
Then it's going to ask us about the terms and conditions.
Normally, we tend to not read these because life's too short,
so let me summarize what you're agreeing to.
It ties what you do here to the core Google terms and conditions,
which are actually pretty easy to read, to their credit.
You agree not to sell prohibited content...
Generally illegal things such as counterfeit goods.
Sell restricted content...
Generally legal, but controlled, such as things like alcohol.
Misrepresent yourself, or your product, or try to abuse the ad network and any of the other
million little gimmicks and tricks that Google has already seen and will simply ban you for.
You agree to let Google crawl your site,
and you authorize Google to use your trademarks in your advertising.
I'm going to accept, and click "Create account."
If you selected Shopify it's going to show you this page,
but we just want to go through to Merchant Center.
Now that we've created our account, let's take a look at the interface here.
I'm going to show you with a real account.
The first section you see when logging into Merchant Center, is the overview.
It shows the status of your products across each of their destinations.
Here we see enhanced free listings, Shopping ads, dynamic remarketing,
and their performance in clicks.
Honestly, it's not a very useful section.
Though, if you see a lot of red in these graphs then you know there's an issue.
Google also includes policy announcements here if you want to keep up on them.
The next section, products is the most useful for
actually reviewing issues and getting the information you need to fix them.
Here in diagnostics, we see the same type of graph showing you the products supplied in your feed.
Active items are those currently being displayed in one or more of your destinations without issue.
Expiring items are those that will be removed within three days,
if their information is not renewed.
All products expire 30 days after they're uploaded unless renewed.
Usually, this isn't an issue because most people opt to renew their products every day.
Pending items are those products that have been uploaded but not yet reviewed,
and approved by Google to show...
And disapproved items are not eligible to show for a reason that,
Google will detail below in the issues table.
Here, you'll see the warnings and disapprovals for your items broken down by issue.
Warnings shown with the yellow triangle icon are just that,
a warning that doesn't actually block your product's eligibility.
Only disapprovals do, which are shown with the red circle icon.
When you click "View examples," you'll see the affected items in a list.
Here we see that these products have been disapproved by Google because there's
an invalid value, in the sale price feed, for these products in our feed.
Clicking the product title itself will show you
all the information that Google has gotten from your feeds and website.
It will highlight any of the issues, for example...
Here we see that there's an issue with the sale price.
This is likely because the sale price should be below the actual price,
in this case, it's above, so it's been flagged as a disapproval. 🚩
The diagnostics page is probably the most useful and used page for me
and my team on a day-to-day basis.
Be sure to check it often.👀
Next, in the product section, we have the all products page.
It lists all the products compiled from your feeds into one place for your review.
You can see some traffic metrics such as clicks, and unpaid clicks.
Clicks are those that you paid for in Google Ads,
and unpaid clicks come from your free listings, which we'll talk about in another video.
This can be a useful page for monitoring the status of your catalog as a product list view.
However, it's not terribly useful for checking in on performance.
Note that you have a few available columns that you can add to the table here.
Finally, in the product section, we have the feeds page.
At the top here, we have the primary feeds.
This is where you add your feed, and once it's added, where you'll review it.
Click the feed title to review when it was last processed,
and then reprocess the feed if you've made changes to it.
In the settings tab, you can control the countries of sale for the feed,
rename the feed itself, adjust the encoding, and delimiter settings...
I suggest you don't unless you're advanced enough to know what you're doing here...
Set the schedule frequency for fetching the file,
set a default currency for the feed, and set an ID rule.
Speaking of rules, the final tab is for setting up feed rules.
It's not necessary to know what feed rules are at the start,
but we'll leave some links to some resources below so you can learn more about them if you'd like.
Going back to the feeds page, below primary feeds we have supplemental feeds.
These include supplemental feeds, which again we'll cover in another video,
and we'll leave some links below this one, and a product inventory feed.
This is for local inventory if you have multiple stores and need to
supply different product information for each.
The next section in this side navigation is for performance reporting.
We open up here a dashboard page to see a graph showing
simple traffic metrics for our free listings.
While this may be of use to someone somewhere,
I've yet to meet that person so we'll be very brief here.
You can segment this report by product, brand, or category here...
And you can further create your own reports and dashboards in this section.
Again, this is not an area I've seen put to great use by anyone,
so I've elected to not spend too much time here as part of Merchant Center,
as I don't believe it's a critical part of what you need to learn, grow and profit.
Let's now take a look at the marketing section.
First, we see the promotions page.
This is where you add new promotions that will apply to the products in your feed.
Promotions can either be added as feeds or added as structured promotions,
starting here with this "➕" button.
Promotions are an important part of a successful Google Shopping Campaign,
so we'll keep this page in mind for the future.
Google's own data shows that not only do promotions lead to more clicks overall
for your ads, but they tend to improve click-through rates at an average of 28%.
We have a full video guide for setting up promotions for your Google Shopping Campaigns.
I'll leave a link to that guide down below and you can go access it right after this video.
This Shopping ads page is relatively new to Merchant Center.
It lets you start a new Shopping Campaign straight from Merchant Centre.
⛔ I do not recommend doing this ⛔
You still need a Google Ads account no matter what because that's where you pay Google its invoices.
So, the only thing you'd be doing on this page is launching a Shopping campaign,
without the additional settings and options available to you, if you did it from Google Ads.
It just doesn't make sense to do it this way,
as this leaves too much to Google, and they can just waste your budget.
Let's now look at the growth section.
In the growth section, Google tries to offer you information to help you optimize.
For many stores that we work with, I don't see great value in most of these pages.
So, if you don't see anything useful here don't worry you're not the only one.
The first page we're looking at here is the opportunities page.
If Google wants to make recommendations for your account and campaigns, it'll post them here.
For the price competitiveness page,
you'll need to agree to Google's Market Insights policy before getting access.
Once you do, you'll see how Google believes your
product prices stand against similar product benchmarks.
I urge caution when looking at this data, as Google can
terribly miscategorize products sometimes.
However, if you are selling commonly available products that have GTIN numbers,
then you may get some great information here.
For the best sellers page, again,
you'll have to agree to the Market Insights policy to view this data.
Here, Google displays the top-selling products according to country and category,
which you can adjust using these filters.
This can be useful information if you're in a heavily competitive
category and need to know what's currently popular.
Finally, we have the manage programs page.
It lists all the available programs that you can enlist for your marketing.
Including, free product listings, Shopping ads, dynamic remarketing, customer reviews,
free local product listings, local inventory ads, promotions, product ratings, and market insights.
We'll be discussing these in other videos.
Just know that this is the page where you can access and learn more about them.
I would suggest you make sure that shopping ads, free product listings,
and dynamic remarketing are enabled.
Do this by clicking on the gear icon and following the steps outlined to you.
That wraps up our navigation walkthrough of Google Merchant Center.
With the familiarity you now have,
you're ready to explore its settings and optimize it for your own store.
Now, if you're watching this video on YouTube it's
actually part of our free Google Shopping Course on our website.
We show you how to set up, optimize, and scale your Google Shopping Campaigns,
100% free, there's no sign-up required.
I'll leave a link down below, you can go check out the rest of the videos in our course.
If this video was helpful, please hit the like button and let us know in the comments below.
Anyways, thanks for watching guys.
I'll see you in the next video, bye for now.