What is Google Shopping Feed and How to Set Up for Shopify?

Estimated reading time: 13 minutes

Want to reach more customers and increase your brand’s awareness worldwide as a Shopify store owner?

It looks like you are talking about uploading your products to Google Shopping from your Shopify store. You are at the right place now. Let’s talk about it a little.

In this blog post first, we will talk about Google Shopping, Google Shopping Feed and how to optimize it. Then, we will explain how to integrate Shopify with Google Shopping.  

Let’s talk about Google Shopping first.

Google Shopping

Google Shopping is a Google service platform where merchants upload their products for free. It helps customers to find products they are looking for. Google sends customers directly to the product page. 

Customers can see the product’s price, features, ratings and reviews between other retailers’ products. And products are visually appealing to customers and they can easily compare one with another.

Since it’s more like a comparison platform for some customers, Google Shopping is now known to be one of the most popular comparison shopping engines.

Most merchants on Ecommerce sites are integrating their products to Google Shopping platform.

By uploading their products merchants generate higher sales by targeting the right customers. It’s currently supported in over 40 different countries of the world!

Winning Customers Starts with Google Shopping Feed

Google Shopping Feed is a spreadsheet file that includes a description of your product catalog in a way that Google can understand. Merchants upload lists of products that are available in their inventory. 

When you provide relevant information about your products, Google will show your products to your target customers. This is one of the major goals of many businesses. Getting target customers.
But how? 

Focus on target keywords and use them in your title, description. And don’t pass the negative keywords, many customers may search like that.

So, think as a customer and find keywords that they might use.

In Google Shopping Feed feel free to create your feed manually in Google Sheets. But if you have hundreds to thousands of products you may need to use an app or service that can crawl your website. It will auto-generate your feed in a Google-friendly manner.

Google searches account for around 36% of product discovery, and Shopping listings can help feature your products high at the top of those search results.

Google Shopping Feed can be highly beneficial for high search and conversion rate.

While starting to add your products there are some required product feed attributes. You need to provide clear, up-to-date product information. 

Let’s take a look at them.

Create a Google Shopping Product Feed

ID- There are two kinds of product IDs used in Google Shopping Content API. The first one is assigned by you called offerId. It’s a unique product ID, usually in numeric format. It may also represent the SKU number that you assign for your product. The second one is assigned by Google to your product. It’s called REST ID.

Keep the ID assigned by you the same when you are updating the data across countries or different languages.

Title- This is the name of your product. You can include the color, brand, size of your product. Keep is less than 50 characters.

Description- You will explain what your product is like. Describe it in less than 500 characters. 

Don’t include promotional texts or shipping information. Just explain the product and its features.

Image Link-This is the primary image of your product. 

Link the main image of your product.

Landing Page Link-This needs to be a direct link to your product’s landing page. 

This must come from your verified domain name.

You must include your link starting with http://

Availability- Add information on whether your product is available or not.

To have integrated information with your landing page; make sure the availability information is matching with the landing page. It needs real-time syncing information to help keep this up to date.

Price-You will upload your product’s price. It needs to be numeric.

Optimize Your Google Shopping Feed

Google Shopping Feed data directly impacts your Shopping Ads and how well they perform. 

Optimizing your Shopping Feed is crucial since it will affect conversation rate, sales revenue, Shopping Campaign Performance and Marketing ROI.

By optimizing Google Shopping Feed, your ads and/or organic search results will be more relevant and convert better to your products. 

Therefore, optimized product feed involves improving the structure and higher data quality of the feed. 

After optimizing, you will ensure that your feed is relevant and results in a greater impression. 

Optimize Your Title by Using Keywords 

When Google is looking for results, it looks at the titles first! 

To optimize your titles, start doing keyword research. Find target keywords. 

Brand, color, size, style, model and any other relevant attributes, include those in your title. 

Save your titles for last! 

Then, you can make sure that your titles are well optimized for your product.

What You should avoid in your titles: Don’t add promotional phrases such as; ‘’limited time offer’’. Don’t put prices in the headline.

Greater Detail in Description 

Describing your product in greater detail will increase your conversion rate. Less information will lead Google to less match your ads with search queries. 

In a research by Semrush stated that; 

It can cause an increase in returns; up to 40% of customers claim to have returned a product due to a mistake or lack of content.

It weakens confidence in the brand for up to 87% of users.

While explaining your product, there is no such thing as too much information. Fuel your customers with as much detail as possible. Better descriptions can increase the relevance of your ads.

Google will crawl your product description with relevant keywords. So, take it as an opportunity to target relevant, secondary keywords that you didn’t use for the product title.

Product Image Optimization, Upload Quality Images to Google Shopping

To display your products on Google Shopping, you have to upload at least one image of your product. This is required. If you don’t upload images, Google will refuse your feed, and your account may be blocked. But it’s important to upload high-quality images. Remember, Google Shopping is a visual experience; images are crucial!

First, start by following Google’s guidelines. 

• Use a solid white or transparent background.  
• Show a single unit of the product.
• Ensure the best performance by using the highest quality images.

You can grab the attention of customers with high-quality images. Many customers decide to purchase by just looking at the image, price and title. 

You can upload images like these ones.

Some of your customers may be looking at products on mobile devices. 

Upload high-quality pictures that can be opened on mobile. Make them mobile-friendly.

According to Google, When customers visit a mobile-friendly site, 74% of people say they’re more likely to return to that site in the future.

Make sure your variants match with the picture. Such as color, size, and product type.

Dynamic Pricing Within the Data Feeds

Think as a customer for a minute. 

You are looking for products online, there are many merchants selling the same product. Since Google Shopping’s visual experience, you can’t see the difference by looking at the images, they look very similar. What would you do?  

Compare prices!

Most of the customers relate price between quality and value. If you have a low price while offering the same product with other merchants, customers aren’t likely to buy yours. They might associate your brand with low quality or no value at all! 

To get higher sales and more clicks it’s important to price your products competitively.

Adopting a dynamic pricing model might be a good idea. In a dynamic pricing model you will track your competitors’ prices. How they price their products and how competitive they are with other merchants. 

Think about Amazon, one of the largest retailers on Ecommerce. They have adopted dynamic pricing and update their prices every 10 minutes! 

By uploading your product price data and your main competitors, you can see how your pricing is compared to your competitors and then, you can stay ahead of the competition. 

By staying ahead of the competition you can generate higher profit margins and set more competitive prices on Google Shopping.

Quick Tip: Always keep testing what resonates best for your audience and converts online shoppers to be repeat customers. Dynamism with price fluctuations in the Ecommerce world can be very helpful when it’s done intelligently.

Offer Sales and Merchants Promotions

Promotions trigger people’s buying habits and usually get higher clicks-through sales. 

Google Analytics Statistics show that; ‘’Promotions can cause 28% lift in conversation rate.’’ 

Searches for “discount code” have increased 50% since last year(2021), and these searches are great moments for you to drive more sales. 

Create Promotional Code

You can offer a promotional code for your products. You can define the start and end time for specific products or for all products using promotional codes. 

Use Google Promotions Feed for Multiple Promotions

If you would like to offer multiple promotions and change them frequently Google Promotions Feed is an alternative. It’s a spreadsheet file that includes your online promotions and related data. You can change your promotions frequently and define specific products for promotions if you want.

Optimizing your feed can be highly beneficial for an effective Google Shopping campaign. 

Ecommerce teams can improve KPIs, quality scores, better ROI and higher conversion rates by getting the advantage of optimized Google Shopping Feed.

Takeaways For Optimized Feed

• Optimize your product titles based on the category of the product. 
• Use dynamic pricing in your data feed. Do it to stay ahead of the competitive Ecommerce marketplace.
• Upload Quality Images of your product. You might lose customers if you have unprofessional, unqualified images. 
• Offer promotional codes and sales. They are attractive for customers with higher sales.
• Describe your products in detail. Use secondary keywords so that you can get higher rankings on Google.

Google Shopping Require Technical Skills: XML File

Google Merchant Center requires very technical specifications for your product flow. Your product flow is essential to prepare your catalog in a specific format. This might be a format in XML. 

Let’s define XML.

XML is a markup language and a file format. It’s a set of codes that describes the text in the digital format.

How XML Feed Works?

This data file includes information about the product you sell. Name, category, description, price and delivery date all that information is included in the data file. With XML Feed you can transfer data between systems.

How to Create Google Shopping Feed for Shopify Store?

Shopify partnered with Google in April 2020 and merchants are allowed to list your Shopify products for free on Google. As a Shopify merchant you can manage your products on Google Shopping from Shopify. 

Online retailers on Shopify can now show their products and brand to billions of people around the world!

But also, some Shopify merchants can put paid ads to gain visibility and get higher ranking on Google.

Merchants that want to upload their products on Google Shopping have some requirements. Google is asking for:

Have a refund policy and terms services visible on the website.

Only link to a product landing page. So you have to directly send customers to the product page with your link.

Add a valid payment method.

Show contact information. This is important, otherwise you can’t upload your products. Google won’t allow you to do so.

There are some restrictions on Shopify, it’s not available in all countries and all currencies as well.

How to Integrate Google Shopping to Your Shopify Store?

Well it’s a simple task.

In 5 steps you can integrate your Shopify store to Google Shopping Feed setup.

Let’s dive into how to do it.

Now you can start selling on Google Shopping by gaining visibility and reaching more customers!

Integrating your Shopify store with Google Shopping is one of the best ways to reach billions of potential customers worldwide. 

Ensure that your products and your product feed such as price, stock availability, variants and so on are constantly up to date.   

There are also 3rd party apps that can help you connect your Shopify store to Google Shopping channel. You can benefit from those if you have thousands of products or having trouble with integrating your products on Google Shopping from Shopify. After the integration you can consider optimizing Google channel for Shopify as well.

An Alternative Approach: Order Legend’s Google Shopping Autopilot App

If this sounds like too much time and effort or if you’re limited on your ad spend, there is an app available for Shopify merchants – Order Legend’s Google Shopping Autopilot app.

With this app, the process of promoting your products on Google is pretty much effortless. Once installed, you just need to set a budget cap and agree to usage-based billing. From there, Order Legend takes care of the nitty-gritty details we highlighted in the previous section. The app handles everything from creating the Google Merchant Centre and managing the product feed to overseeing the ad account, campaigns, and funding.

If you want to try this method, install the app from the Shopify app store and complete their simple onboarding process.

Benefits of Integration of Google Shopping from Shopify

Easy to Manage, Simple to Control

Google Shopping App helps the creation fast and straightforward. After connecting Shopify with Google Shopping, your marketing team can easily manage and track results from Google Analytics with a few clicks. 

Accurate Reporting

Building your business in the virtual world at a low cost is a great way. 

But you should be able to measure results. Your outcomes have to be quantifiable so that you can make better decisions. Otherwise your goal is lost. 

After Shopify integration with Google, you can measure outcomes more precisely. Understanding the performance of your products will help your marketing team to design new campaigns.

Highly Targeted Traffic

Google Shopping will drive traffic to your website. After listing your products on Google, you can get more traffic day by day.

But high traffic doesn’t always mean higher sales.

Your main purpose should be getting higher targeted traffic. This means getting the target customer to your webpage. After that, you can get higher sales and maximize your profit margins. 

Concluding Remarks 

By setting up Google Shopping channel you will have the ability to reach billions of new customers worldwide. As a Shopify store owner, you can upload your products to Google Shopping by following steps mentioned above the article.