Quick & Easy Fixes for Google Merchant Center

Product issues in Google Merchant Center don’t just impact your Google Shopping ads in Google Ads; they also impact your free listings, reducing the number of clicks your products get. Google now spells out exactly what you’re likely to be missing out on as fixing Google Merchant Center issues will enable your Google Shopping ads to get more clicks. Whilst Google is likely to benefit from this, your ads should benefit your sales even more. Your products will start to show up more, and alongside greater numbers of similar – or in some cases the same products from other suppliers. Google will have a 100% clear understanding of what your product is, down to the colour and size variations, which improves the chances of getting you clicks. It’s then down to your product, pricing and company’s USPs to do the rest.

 

 

How to Fix Common Issues

Product Identifiers

Google uses two of the three product identifiers to match your products. These are: GTIN, MPN and Brand. MPN is your manufacturers part number, this is the code companies usually use to manage their stock. GTIN is the number often seen coupled with your barcode and brand is the manufacturer.

 

Missing GTIN

GTIN (Global Trade Item Number) is the barcode or the EAN-13. It’s the most commonly used barcode in Europe. Google uses this to ensure you’re showing up for the right searches as these are unique to each product. Google actively limits products that are missing a GTIN, unless the products are bespoke or made to order.

Imagine you’re selling a product cheaper than Amazon or another large trusted e-commerce retailer. If your product is missing key identifiers like GTIN and Brand, Google will focus on showing your product in searches based on the product title alone. This mean it won’t show your product side-by-side with the likes of Amazon and you’ll be missing out on potential sales.

My products don’t have barcodes (GTINs)

Bespoke, custom or just not off-the-shelf types of products

Your products are either custom, made to order, bespoke, or will simply never have a barcode or MPNs. This is an easy one. Simply set a rule on your feed to add the attribute “Identifier Exists” to False and set the brand up as yourself. Google will then serve your products without issue.

Good examples of products that fit this category are made-to-order products like bespoke mirrors, trade-style products like tonne bags of gravel, and many others too.

Do not do this if you aren’t sure or are trying to find a workaround instead of actually fixing the problem – it will just create another issue.

 

Missing Brand

The product Brand isn’t always your company name: this is the company that manufactures the product.

 

Images too small

There can be numerous causes for this issue. You may have uploaded product thumbnails that are now being pulled in through your feed, your images may only be a preview of part of your product, or you may have uploaded an image that is below 100 x 100 pixels (250 x 250 for clothing). Depending on the issue, you can fix it in different ways.

For a company that sells tiles, who relied on the manufacturer for images, they had no choice but to use what they were sent. Simply scaling the image would have resulted in a blurry picture, which would have been flagged again by Google. This resulted in us getting creative by dropping the thumbnail images into Canva and creating larger images using the thumbnail in a brick layout.

If you think the image is not that important (usually because it is a secondary image and not the main one your feed uses), then you can just edit the product in Google Merchant Center and remove this one. If you’re unsure, simply make sure you image is at or above 250 x 250. For more information on image requirements, check out Google’s advice.

 

Images too large

A good standard for product images is 1000 x 1000 (if you’re using Shopify, this is what they suggest for product images). When downloading any images from photo editing tools like Photoshop or Canva, you’ll always see an option to compress the image. You could even take it a step further and convert your images to a WEBP format before uploading them to your site.

 

Missing values

Some issues in GMC are simply listed as Missing values such as:

• Colour (Color in GMC)
• Size
• Age Group
• Gender
• Product Type
• and more..

Feed rules are usually what we’d use to quickly resolve issues like this as we usually have the data in your product (usually in the product title) and we simply need to setup a rule to extract it and standardise it.

So that..

Product Title: Red women’s running shoe size 3

Color: Missing

Becomes…

Product Title: Red women’s running shoe size 3

Color: Red

 

 

Where to start?

While you can fix issues easily in Google Merchant Center, you might find it faster to correct the problems at the source: your e-commerce website. Luckily, most businesses use WooCommerce, Shopify or even Wix nowadays, and these platforms are all easy to use. We suggest looking at each problem individually and seeing what’s quickest and simplest for you, but also sustainable and scalable.

Here’s a list of where you can fix the issues you’re seeing in Google Merchant Center:

• If you’re just starting out and want to get everything perfect, watch these first-time setup guides on YouTube:
  • Shopify setup guide
  • WooCommerce setup guide
  • Wix setup guide
• Your product data on your website: if you need help with this, speak to your developer or reach out to us.
• Your product feed from your website (most common for WordPress/WooComerce sites): if you need help with this, speak to your developer or reach out to us.
• In each affected product in Google Merchant Center: this can be fast and easy – if you’ve only got one or two issues which need resolving, they can be extremely straightforward.
• In Google Merchant Center using feed rules

 

 

Need help with your Shopping Campaign?

 

How Google Shopping Works

When you think of Google Ads, you normally think of keywords for targeting, however with shopping ads this isn’t the case. Google uses your product names to show you products to variety of users for a variety of searches. This is why tools like feed optimise exists because whilst you product title might be perfect for your website, it’s not nessasaraly right for a Google Shopping ads strategy. You might want clean, clear and concise product titles on your website, but to attract more relevant people these product titles might need adjusting so that your primary terms are listed first, the target keyword gets included or anything else. The reason for prioritising what comes first in product titles for Google shopping is that most results have  and hit the character limits and so businesses need to identify the most important information to ensure users are more likely to see it which will lead to more clicks and hopefully sales.

So if the product title is so important why should you worry about the Brand, GTIN and MPN being set? Well, these unique product identifiers allow Google to show your products and product variants side-by-side with competitors accurately and will likely lead to improved click-through rates (CTR)and sales. Not only this, for specific searches Google often shows what’s called a rich snippet results which show the product and then lists all of the companies and prices within it, whereas for broader searches where the product isn’t clear the Rich snippet is more likely to be about the products and/or ranges from the manufacturer you’re searching for. But these Product identifiers help you become listed in those rich results.

 

 

 

Take a look at the search example below, whilst you’ll see the full product titles if you hover over these results on a desktop, this feature doesn’t work on mobile.

Search: black and white patterned tiles

 

Here’s a few questions to ask yourself:

1. What do you think about these results?
2. What would you change about each of these titles to make them stand out and be more likely to get the click given there’s so much choice?
3. Ignoring the style differences available, which image is most likely to get a click? Does this customer want to see different applications or close up images? Which is more likely to get the click?
4. Is the pricing strategy going to impact clicks? For this type of product will people pay £80 for a £24 product? How do customers looking for this type of product usually cost the products up? Would they have been better showing price per metre like others?

These questions don’t just need to be what you, or even what one of your customers has, with the right tools you could set up tests trying out different strategies for each to see what impacts clicks and ultimately sales.

Other things to consider are reviews, often overlooked but easy to install especially if you plugin your site to a service like Trustpilot which will automatically collect customer reviews and product reviews. On top of that you can see two of the listing have discounts available.

 

What is a feed rule?

A feed rule is effectively an automation, much like a rule you’d setup for forwarding specific emails, feed rules are as complex as you need them to be and allow you to alter or even set values based on specific conditions being met.

Example: Product Title “Where’s That From Red High Heels – Size 4” If we wanted to use a rule to automatically show the “Color” attribute, we could extract the colour from this title in your feed automatically. Whilst this fixes the issue, you’d then need to maintain it, and also consider other spelling variations like shoe, shoes, pumps, etc… Otherwise, you’d be better off adding this attribute correctly to your product.

How to find feed rules:

In the old version of Google Merchant Center

1. Select Products on the left side of the screen
2. Then select Feeds
3. Select your Product Feed by clicking the name of it
4. In the tabs, select feed rules
5. Select Add icon and choose from the list of Processed Attributes
6. Choose what you’re doing and how, whether you Set a value, Extract a value, Standardise a value – the list goes on.

In the new version of Google Merchant Center (Launched: Summer 2024)

1. Select the Cog icon in the top right
2. Select Data Sources
3. Select your Product Feed by clicking the name of it
4. In the tabs, select Your Attribute Rules
5. Select Add Attribute Rule and select from the list of Processed Attributes
6. Choose what you’re doing and how, whether you Set a value, Extract a value, Standardise a value – the list goes on.

Applying your Feed Rule changes

Whilst you’re working on this, nothing will change: even when you press save, the feed won’t update. You need to press Apply Changes for this rule to be applied.

Testing!!!

If you want to live test your changes as you go, simply take the product ID of an affected product and one that isn’t affected by your change. Input it into the field in the top right to see what the current value is and what your rule will do to it.

Again, testing is different in the new updated version of Google Merchant Center. You now need to click on Show Preview, then Searches and finally input your product ID. In the old version, this box was always visible in the top right corner of the screen.