Google revealed it’s working to bridge the gap between two key product data sources that power its shopping results – website markup using schema.org structured data and product feeds submitted via Google Merchant Center.
The initiative, mentioned during a recent “Search Off The Record” podcast episode, aims to achieve one-to-one parity between the product attributes supported by schema.org’s open-source standards and Google’s merchant feed specifications.
Leveraging Dual Product Data Pipelines
In search results, Google leverages structured data markup, and Merchant Center product feeds to surface rich product listings.
Irina Tuduce, a longtime Google employee involved with the company’s shopping search infrastructure, says merchants should utilize both options.
Tuduce stated:
“We recommend doing both. Because, as I said, in signing up on the Merchant Center UI, you make sure some of your inventory, the one that you specify, will be in the Shopping results. And you can make sure you’ll be on dotcom on the Shopping tab and Image tab.
And then, if you specify how often you want us to refresh your data, then you can be sure that that information will be refreshed. Otherwise, yeah, you don’t know when we will have the resources to recrawl you and update that information.”
Meanwhile, implementing schema.org markup allows Google to extract product details from websites during the crawling process.
Reconciling Markup and Feed Discrepancies
However, discrepancies can arise when the product information in a merchant’s schema.org markup doesn’t perfectly align with the details provided via their Merchant Center feed uploads.
Tuduce explained
“If you don’t have the schema.org markup on your page, we’ll probably stick to the inventory that you specify in your feed specification.”
Unifying the product attributes across both sources aims to simplify data management and ensure consistent product listings across Google.
Regarding the current inconsistencies between schema.org markup and merchant feed specifications, Tuduce says:
“The attributes overlap to a big extent, but there are still gaps that exist. We will want to address those gaps.”
As the effort progresses, Google plans to keep marketers informed by leveraging schema.org’s active GitHub community and opening the update process to public feedback.
The unified product data model could keep product details like pricing, availability, and variant information consistently updated and accurately reflected across Google’s search results.
Why This Matters
For merchants, consistent product listings with accurate, up-to-date details can boost visibility in Google’s shopping experiences. Streamlined data processes also mean less redundant work.
For consumers, a harmonized system translates to more relevant, trustworthy shopping journeys.
What You Can Do Now
Audit current product data across website markup and merchant feeds for inconsistencies.
Prepare to consolidate product data workflows as Google’s unified model rolls out.
Implement richer product schema markup using expanded vocabulary.
Monitor metrics like impressions/clicks as consistent data surfaces.
Prioritize product data hygiene and frequent catalog updates.
By aligning your practices with Google’s future plans, you can capitalize on new opportunities for streamlined product data management and enhanced shopping search visibility.
Hear the full discussion below, starting around the 12-minute mark:
WooCommerce survey offers insights into the strategies that online retailers are using to prepare for Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) and why it’s important to be proactive.
Online Sales Is Most Important Sales Channel
One of the important takeaways from the survey is that 76% of respondents confirmed that their online sales are the primary revenue channel during the holidays, highlighting the importance of a high performance website that’s optimized for sales.
46% of stores answered that up to 30% of their annual sales volume happens during a combination of the BFCM and holiday period, while 24% answered that over 30% of sales occurred during that period. 8% of stores reported that over 50% were accounted for during the BFCM and holiday season.
Top Merchants Prepare Early
Interestingly, almost 20% prepare for BFCM three to over six months ahead of time, although most merchants tend to prepare closer to the holiday season. Online stores with revenues of $250K or more were 12% likelier to prepare ahead of time, with 34% preparing 3- 6 months in advance.
This is the breakdown of how early merchants are preparing:
26% prepare 1 to 4 weeks ahead
27% prepare 1 to 3 months ahead
13% prepared 3 to 6 months ahead
4% prepare 6+ months ahead
Strategies Merchants Plan To Use
Many online merchants are planning for a strong holiday season, with 26% of stores increasing inventory as a main part of their strategy.
The top strategies reported by merchants are:
Increase inventory
Marketing
Promotions
Website optimization
Email outreach was reported by 29% of merchants to be their most effective marketing channel. The next top marketing channel is organic search at 25%. Content marketing was reported by 6% and the balance is social, and search ads.
34% of merchants plan to change alter their strategies in the following ways:
26% will add new products.
24% are making marketing enhancements.
16% are making website improvements.
10% are focusing on early sales.
9% are offering special discounts.
Changes to customer engagement, social media, and inventory management round out the list of changes.
Takeaway:
It’s important to understand what other merchants are doing to prepare for the competitive BFCM shopping season and to make sure that you or your clients are considering all available opportunities to make take a greater share of the sales and not leaving anything behind due to a lack of planning.
The 4 Ps of marketing. Marketing mix. Marketing fundamentals.
Whatever you call them, these elements determine your luck at the high-stakes table of e-commerce:
Product.
Price.
Place.
Promotion.
Get these right, and you’ll create a loyal fanbase that you can count on for repeat orders, high lifetime value, and customer advocacy.
Neglect or miscalculate them, and they’ll derail your entire process, have an adverse effect on revenue and margin, and allow competitors to overtake you.
Here’s how to consider each of these principles in the context of ecommerce and paid media.
Product
As in every business, your product is fundamental to ecommerce success. Even the most amazing marketing campaigns can’t compensate for a broken product or lack of product-market fit.
Think of brands that cycle through many advertising agencies over the course of a year.
Chances are they tend to blame poor planning, subpar campaign execution, or some other deficiency common to all those agencies. The most likely solution is that their product just doesn’t resonate with consumers.
Statistically, it’s extremely unlikely for a brand to go through multiple agencies and for all of them to be poor at their craft. When this does happen, it’s usually the agency evaluation process that needs work.
There’s a reason marketers talk about product-market fit over and over.
A product that solves a problem and marketing that puts it in front of the right people are core fundamentals and work like gears in a complex system. Take one out, and the whole process will grind to a halt.
Pricing
Pricing is such an intrinsic part of ecommerce and paid media in general.
If you think people who see your ad aren’t also searching for competitors and doing comparison shopping, your performance numbers will confirm otherwise.
So before you start chasing clicks or even setting budgets, your merchandising play needs to be as accurate as possible.
Consider both absolute pricing and competitiveness to make sure that your product is positioned where you want it to be while still capable of being profitable against your manufacturing and procurement processes.
Google Merchant Center has a price benchmarks feature. It looks at your product feed and shows you how your products compare to other products, brands, and categories of similar natures.
This is highly useful data that can help determine if you’ve priced your products correctly or whether they even fit in the market.
The last thing you want to do is spend thousands on ads only to realize that you got too ambitious or too conservative with your margin.
Additionally, once you’ve started running a campaign in Google Ads, auction insights allow you to see which brands are coming up against you in Search and Shopping auctions.
Use this data to see how your pricing compares to theirs, fine-tune accordingly, and run tactical promotions.
Place
Starting an ecommerce business is not easy – but for those who are able to fund and find initial product-market fit, digital advertising allows brands to bypass the limitations of traditional distribution.
Geography and access to certain distributors become irrelevant when you can sell and ship directly to consumers.
However, this also presents several new challenges:
Platform Management: Ecommerce advertisers have a wealth of options when deciding where they want to advertise. This includes traditional networks like Google, Meta, and Amazon, as well as emerging and niche platforms like TikTok and YouTube. However, choosing the wrong platforms or overextending yourself before you’re ready can cause more harm than good.
Media Mix: Advertising on multiple channels can be advantageous if you have the budget and expertise to do so, even though some brands are predisposed to putting most of their budget in a primary platform. But doing all this when you’re just starting means you’ll have less to spend on campaigns, spreading your efforts too thin and limiting how much data you can acquire. You’ll also need additional people or agencies with expertise managing those different channels in order to get the best returns for your spend.
Performance Measurement: Brick-and-mortar commerce was comparatively straightforward, and advertising and in-store promotions skewed more toward non-linear measurement. Online advertising has made us crave the need to track every dollar spent and every product sold, and draw a line back through each performance metric. But even good conversion tracking is never perfect, and ad platforms are prone to fluctuation and error as they grow more automated.
Attribution Measurement: Knowing which platforms are driving sales is critical to making sure you’re investing in the right places. This is more challenging when you have multiple platforms in your media mix, none of which freely and fully share data with other platforms. Attribution will only get worse over time as the ability to track degrades due to privacy concerns. This imperfection doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have some form of attribution, but treat it as a reference point instead of a source of truth.
Promotion
While good marketing can’t fix a bad product, a good product can make marketing better, easier, and less expensive.
For ecommerce that relies heavily on paid media for promotion, there are two aspects to consider.
Account Management
With paid media, the ad account is the third gear that supports product and marketing.
Decisions like which campaign types to run, how to structure your ad account, running good ad copy and creatives, and using audiences and first-party data to target the right people will all affect your revenue and margin.
Too many brands make the mistake of trying to fix their ad accounts and campaign metrics before their product, pricing, placements, and customer journey.
If you do that in the right order, your challenges around the ad account should largely be limited to ad platform issues, like disapprovals and automation.
Customer Journey
I think of ads as just one component in a wider marketing system – one ingredient in a successful recipe.
You need all the pieces to achieve success, and if you’re neglecting everything that happens before and after the ad click, no hook or campaign is going to save you.
The bulk of ecommerce shopping happens over mobile, which, as of 2023, was valued at $2.2 trillion. If your pages aren’t easy to navigate on smartphones, there’s a good chance you’re not getting all the conversions you could. Are your pages mobile-optimized? Do they load quickly? Do they deliver good experiences during checkout, upsales, cross-sales, etc? If not, fix this.
Trust is a major objection to overcome in any sale, and reviews do a great deal to show why people should trust you. In addition to proving the value of your product with certifications and ratings, use reviews to seal buyer confidence. Your social proof should reflect your target audience, so they feel like others like them have benefited from your product.
With fraud and scams on the rise, online shoppers are becoming more guarded with their payment details. You’ll have to prove that you can be trusted if you want to earn their money. Security validation and third-party payment logos (like PayPal and Apple Pay) go a long way in establishing that you are a real business with good intentions.
The journey begins long before the ad click and continues long after. User-generated content shows people using your product and positions them as the hero, which means prospective customers are more likely to feel the same way. Email marketing can address abandoned carts, communicate shipping status, and make the rest of the journey pleasant.
Does your ad copy tell people what problems you solve creatively? Instead of features like “x milligrams of caffeine,” you might focus on outcomes like “the energy burst you need to be productive until late afternoon.” Be imaginative and help people picture their life after they buy your product.
The Future Of Ecommerce Requires Full-funnel Thinking
Ecommerce might be glamorous and often lucrative, but it’s not easy.
The period when low-cost manufacturing and a frictionless global supply chain made it possible to start a direct-to-consumer brand with minimal investment and hassle is gone.
Between ad platforms becoming increasingly automated and reducing the amount of campaign management required, brands need to focus more on fundamentals and the pre-click and post-click experiences to stay profitable.
It’s important to stop thinking about paid media as the entire package and instead focus on its actual position as one part of a wider marketing strategy.
Google Shopping can be a goldmine for many ecommerce retailers.
But, it also comes with the risk of losing money if not managed properly.
Even seasoned PPC advertisers can make easy mistakes that can drain the budget and lose campaign effectiveness.
However, making mistakes is a necessary part of any learning process. Each misstep can provide valuable insights to better optimize your Google Shopping campaigns.
In this article, we’ll review seven common mistakes ecommerce retailers make with Google Shopping and how you can turn those pitfalls into opportunities for growth.
1. Poor Product Feed Quality
The foundation for any successful Google Shopping campaign is undoubtedly the quality of a product feed.
Better data quality leads to better campaign outcomes.
However, many retailers overlook the importance of feed quality, which can lead to issues like:
Missing or incorrect product information.
Poorly written descriptions.
Lack of relevant keywords.
A poor product feed can result in low ad relevance and a poor-performing campaign.
So, where does one start to ensure a solid product feed?
The first priority of your product feed should be the title attribute. Some key items to consider when optimizing product titles include:
Avoid using the brand name in the title if it doesn’t perform.
Use descriptive words.
Embrace the title character limit for maximum communication about the product.
It’s important to regularly audit your Google Shopping product feed to ensure all information is accurate, complete, and optimized for your top-performing keywords.
Google Merchant Center also includes diagnostics tools to identify any errors to fix.
Additionally, leveraging feed management tools can help automate and enhance the feed optimization process.
2. Ignoring Negative Keywords
While Google Shopping campaigns don’t have a keyword bidding component, they certainly have a negative keyword component.
For that reason, many retailers forget the importance of having a negative keyword strategy in their Shopping campaigns.
Ignoring the use of negative keywords is an easy gateway to wasted advertising spend on irrelevant searches. This can lead to reducing the overall campaign efficiency and return on investment (ROI).
To combat this potential wasted ad spend, start by reviewing the search terms report regularly to identify and add any negative keywords.
In your Google Shopping campaign, navigate to Insights and reports > Search terms.
From there, you can review what search terms triggered your products and how they performed.
If you find any irrelevant terms triggering your ads, you can add them as a negative – or better yet, create a negative keywords list to easily add to in the future.
This helps refine your targeting by showing your ads on more relevant searches, reducing wasted ad spend on non-converting traffic.
3. Inadequate Bid Management
Bid management is another critical component of a successful Google Shopping ads strategy.
However, many PPC managers will set bids once and then forget about them, instead of adjusting them based on performance data.
This hands-off approach can lead to underbidding or overbidding, and both scenarios can hurt your campaign’s ROI.
Another common mistake is using a “one size fits all” bid strategy, where you set the same bid amount or bid strategy across all products and campaigns.
To start optimizing your Google Shopping bid strategy, utilize automated bid strategies like:
Target return on ad spend (ROAS).
Target cost per action (CPA).
Maximize Conversion Value.
These Smart Bidding strategies help optimize your bids in real time, looking at factors like device, location, time of day, audience segments, and more.
Additionally, make sure that your daily budget aligns with your Smart Bidding strategy to ensure you’re not over- or under-bidding in any particular campaign.
For example, if you have a daily budget of $50 but are using a Target CPA bid strategy with a goal of $25, you’ll likely need to increase the daily budget significantly to give the algorithm a chance to learn more by serving more ad impressions.
4. Not Optimizing Images
With Google Shopping ads, the product image is likely the first thing to catch the user’s attention.
Most ecommerce retailers use the standard images from the official manufacturer’s website.
But wait, why would that be a bad thing?
Well, to start, this means everyone will see the same image across a variety of brands, making it extremely difficult to stand out from your competitors.
For example, when was the last time you searched for “Nike shoes” and got a barrage of Shopping ads for the same shoes, just different retailers?
Screenshot taken by author, July 2024.
If you’re used to using the same stock images, try taking advantage of some of the recent tools announced by Google at this year’s Google Marketing Live.
For example, advertisers can use Product Studio later this year, which instantly turns static images into eye-catching videos.
Additionally, you can use the new generative AI tools like their AI-powered image editing for product images from your Google Merchant Center feed.
Lastly, try A/B testing the standard stock photos against lifestyle images featuring the product to understand what resonates better with users.
5. Misunderstanding Campaign Types & Structure
As with any other campaign type, the structure can make or break your performance.
With Google Shopping, there are essentially three different options when creating a campaign:
Performance Max (with a feed).
Performance Max (feed-only).
Standard Shopping.
Both campaign types have their pros and cons when it comes to Google Shopping. The key is to understand the differences in features, functionality, and amount of control in order to choose the right campaign type for your goals.
In a regular Performance Max campaign, you have the option to add a feed as an asset, among many other assets like headlines, descriptions, images, etc.
This essentially means your Google Shopping ads can show across many types of Google inventory, not just on the Google Shopping network.
Now, feed-only Performance Max campaigns and Standard Shopping campaigns both focus on only showing ads on the Google Shopping network.
Next, let’s talk about the structure of your campaigns.
It may be tempting to lump everything into an “All Products” ad group and call it a day.
This mistake can cost you a lot of wasted ad dollars if not monitored closely.
If you’ve taken the steps to have a well-organized and clean product feed, don’t let that work go to waste!
A well-structured product feed will make your Google Shopping campaigns run much smoother by giving you control of how and when certain products are triggered.
If you’re unsure where to start, try grouping your products by their category. This allows for greater control over the ad listings.
Additionally, if you know you have low-margin products or products you want to avoid completely from showing, make sure to exclude those when setting up your campaign.
6. Overlooking Competitive Pricing
Google Shopping is a highly competitive channel, especially when it comes to pricing and its effect on ad performance.
Retailers who ignore their competitors’ pricing strategies may find their ads less appealing to customers, which leads to lower click-through rates and conversions.
For retailers who sell items in minimum quantities, it may be about lowering your prices. It may also be about analyzing how your feed is structured by showing the “price per quantity.”
For example, when searching for ‘wedding invitations,’ the Shopping results come back with different brands with vastly different price points:
Screenshot taken by author, July 2024
It’s clear that from this example, some brands show the price for a minimum of 30 (in the first example).
Other brands in the middle look to show the price per individual invitation.
When regularly analyzing your Shopping listings compared to others in the auction, it may be worth adjusting your price feed structure to stay competitive and remain attractive to active shoppers.
7. Not Using Merchant Promotions
In this economy, it’s no secret that almost everyone is looking for a deal when shopping.
If you actively run promotions on your website, make sure to take advantage of Merchant Promotions and promotion assets in Google Ads.
Running Merchant Promotions will help make your product listing more attractive to shoppers, which could lead to higher click-thru rates and better ROI.
In this example, the Shopping ads shown when searching for ‘king bed comforter set’ showed two listings that were using Merchant Promotions.
Screenshot taken by author, July 2024
To set up a promotion, navigate to Promotions on the left-hand side of your Google Merchant Center platform. Then, click Create promotion:
Screenshot taken by author, July 2024
From there, you’ll enter the required information in order to save the promotion. After saving, the promotion can take up to 15 minutes to be visible to shoppers.
The required fields include:
Country.
Language.
Promotion Title.
Promotion ID.
Start and end dates.
The use of promo code is optional, where you can add it in if necessary for users to enter in order to redeem the sale.
Screenshot taken by author, July 2024
Later this year, Google also announced the rollout of a new way to tailor promotions in Shopping, like member-only exclusives or special pricing.
Additionally, Google announced on the same day that advertisers will be able to feature ‘first order’ promotions for new customers, which will be available in both Performance Max and Standard Shopping campaigns.
Continually Refine Your Google Shopping Campaigns
Avoiding these common Google Shopping mistakes can save you significant time, money, and headaches, as well as enhance campaign performance.
By focusing on things like product feed quality, bid management, negative keywords, and more, you can be on your way to driving better results and achieving a better ROI.
Remember, every mistake is an opportunity to learn and refine your strategy.
Stay proactive and continuously optimize, and you’ll turn your Google Shopping campaigns into a well-oiled machine and power revenue driver for your ecommerce business.
Google has announced plans to transition all retailers to its updated Merchant Center platform by September.
This move will affect e-commerce businesses globally and comes ahead of the holiday shopping season.
The Merchant Center is a tool for online retailers to manage how their products appear across Google’s shopping services.
Key Changes & Features
The new Merchant Center includes several significant updates.
Product Studio
An AI-powered tool for content creation. Google reports that 80% of current users view it as improving efficiency.
This feature allows retailers to generate tailored product assets, animate still images, and modify existing product images to match brand aesthetics.
It also simplifies tasks like background removal and image resolution enhancement.
Centralized Analytics
A new tab consolidating various business insights, including pricing data and competitive analysis tools.
Retailers can access pricing recommendations, competitive visibility reports, and retail-specific search trends, enabling them to make data-driven decisions and capitalize on popular product categories.
Redesigned Navigation
Google claims the new interface is more intuitive and cites increased setup success rates for new merchants.
The platform now offers simplified website verification processes and can pre-populate product information during setup.
Initial User Response
According to Google, early adopters have shown increased engagement with the platform.
The company reports a 25% increase in omnichannel merchants adding product offers in the new system. However, these figures have yet to be independently verified.
Jeff Harrell, Google’s Senior Director of Merchant Shopping, states in an announcement:
“We’ve seen a significant increase in retention and engagement among existing online merchants who have moved to the new Merchant Center.”
Potential Challenges and Support
While Google emphasizes the upgrade’s benefits, some retailers, particularly those comfortable with the current version, may face challenges adapting to the new system.
The upgrade’s mandatory nature could raise concerns among users who prefer the existing interface or have integrated workflows based on the current system.
To address these concerns, Google has stated that it will provide resources and support to help with the transition. This includes tutorial videos, detailed documentation, and access to customer support teams for troubleshooting.
Industry Context
This update comes as e-commerce platforms evolve, with major players like Amazon and Shopify enhancing their seller tools. Google’s move is part of broader efforts to maintain competitiveness in the e-commerce services sector.
The upgrade could impact consumers by improving product listings and providing more accurate information across Google’s shopping services.
For the e-commerce industry as a whole, it signals a continued push towards AI-driven tools and data-centric decision-making.
Transition Timeline
Google states that retailers will be automatically upgraded by September if they still need to transition.
The company advises users to familiarize themselves with the new features before the busy holiday shopping period.
In an SEO Office Hours podcast, Google’s John Mueller answered the question of how to get more product rich results to show in the search results. John listed four things that are important in order to get rich results for product listings.
Product Rich Results
Product search queries can trigger rich results that presents products in a visually rich manner that Google refers to as Search Experiences.
Google product search experiences can include:
Product snippets that include ratings, reviews, price, and whether availability information.
Visual representations of products
Knowledge panel with vendors and products
Product images in Google Images search results
Result enhancements (reviews, shipping information, etc.)
John Mueller Answers Question About Product Rich Results
The person asking the question wanted to know how to get more “product snippets in Search Console” which confused Mueller because product snippets are displayed in the search results, not search console. So Mueller answered the question in the context of search results.
This is the question:
“How to increase the number of product snippets in Search Console?”
John Mueller explained that there were four things to get right in order to qualify for product rich results.
Mueller answered:
“It’s not really clear to me what exactly you mean… If you’re asking about product rich results, these are tied to the pages that are indexed for your site. And that’s not something which you can change by force.
It requires that the page be indexed, that the page has valid structured data on it, and that our systems have determined that it’s worth showing this structured data.”
So, according to John Mueller, these are the four things to get right to qualify for product rich results:
Page must be indexed
The page has valid structured data
Google’s systems determine that it’s worth showing
Submit a product feed
1. Page Indexing
Getting a page indexed (and ranked) can be difficult for some search queries. People who come to me with this kind of problem tend to have content quality issues that can be traced back to using outdated SEO strategies like copying what’s already ranking in the SERPs but making it “better” which often results in content that’s not meaningfully different than what Google is already ranking.
Content quality on the page level and on the site level are important. Focusing on content that has that little extra, like better images, helpful graphs, or content that’s more concise, all of that is so much better than focusing on keywords and entities.
2. Valid Structured Data
This is another area that explains why some sites lose their rich results or fail to get them altogether. Google changes their structured data recommendations and usually the structured data plugins will update to conform to the new guidelines. But I’ve seen examples where that doesn’t happen. So when there’s a problem with rich results, go to Google’s Rich Results Test tool first.
It’s also important to be aware that getting the structured data correct is not a guarantee that Google will show rich results for that page, it’s just makes the page qualified to show in the rich results.
3. How Does Google Determine Something’s Worth Showing?
This is the part that Google doesn’t talk about. But if you’re read about reviews systems, quality guidelines, Google’s SEO starter guide and maybe even the Search Quality Raters Guidelines then that should be more than enough information to inform any question about content quality.
Google doesn’t say why they may decline to show an image thumbnail as a rich result or why they’ll not show a product in the rich results. My opinion is that debugging the issue is more productive if the problem is reconceptualized as a content quality issue. Images are content, if it’s on the page, even if it’s not text, it’s content. Evaluate all of the content in terms of how the images or products or whatever might look like in the search results. Does it look good as a thumbnail? Is the content distinctive or helpful or useful, etc.?
4. Merchant Feed
John Mueller lastly said that the merchant feed is another way to get products from a website to show as a rich result in Google.
Mueller answered:
“There’s also the possibility to submit a feed to your merchant center account, to show products there. This is somewhat separate, and has different requirements which I’ll link to. Often a CMS or platform will take care of these things for you, which makes it a bit easier.”
While John Mueller listed four ways to get product rich results, Google Search Experiences, it’s not always as easy as 1, 2, 3, and 4. There are always nuances to be aware of.
Listen to the Google SEO Office Hours podcast at the 7:00 minute mark:
