If you’re looking for the next great thing to boost your revenue and traffic, look no further as leveraging Google Merchant Center Shopify is the way to go.
This may look like a grand statement to you, so let’s take a look at what Google Merchant Center is and why you should use it.
Basically, GMC lets you manage the way your products look whenever they appear on someone’s Google search. This means that it’s massively helpful when you want to get your product in the best light possible in front of potential customers.
So, let’s buckle up because I’m gonna show you the easiest way to integrate the Google Merchant Center with your Shopify store.
Table of Contents
3 Steps to Set Up Google Merchant Center Shopify
Okay, so it’s pretty easy to integrate your Shopify store with the Google Merchant Center. There are just a few simple steps that you have to follow.
- You must have a Google Ads account. In case you don’t have any, the first step would be to create it.
- After you get the first step right, go to the Merchant Center’s home page and click on “Get started.”
- Fill out the required business information such as where your company is based, its name, and the URL for your website.
- From there, you have to agree to the terms of service.
- Verify your website’s URL on the Merchant Center (it basically checks if anyone else is using it currently)
- That’s it, the phase 1 – creating an account is completed. Let’s move to the next phase.
- The first thing you should do after having an account, is going to the “Settings” tab on the Merchant Center.
- Select tax and shipping from the drop-down menu. Define the tax rate for the places you want to ship to and the shipping services you will be using for your products.
- When you’re done with integrating GMC and your Shopify store, you have to add your google data feed to the Merchant Center. For that you must create a product feed, containing all the relevant information about your items. It includes things like a proper image for the product, tax and shipping rates, price, etc.
- Once you’re done with creating the file, you should upload it to Google for processing, and then it’s ready to be shown to relevant future customers.
There are two ways you can go about uploading your product feed. One is manual and the other is through a specific application that can be found on the Shopify app store.
Once you set up the Google Merchant Center, you can create your first shopping campaign for your Shopify store.
Steps for Uploading Your Product Feed to The Google Merchant Center
Now that you know how to do the initial setup, let’s look at the two ways you can integrate GMC with your Shopify store.
How to Upload Your Product Feed Manually?
- Go to your Google Merchant Center and under Products, select Feeds. Click on the + option to add a product feed.
- From there you must input Country of sale and Language, then click on Continue.
- Name your feed and choose an input method.
- After that, select Generate a new Google Spreadsheet from a template.
- Again from Feeds, select the newly created product feed.
- There will be a Google Sheet that you have to fill out.
- In order to get your product data, go to your Shopify store.
- Select the Products, click on Export, and download the .csv file.
- Return to the Merchant Center again to Feeds and select your newly created feed.
- Click on Fetch now to upload your product feed.
- Let it upload and it’s all done!
How to Upload Your Product Feed with the Google Shopping App?
- Go to the Shopify store app and search for the ‘Google Shopping’ add-in.
- Select it and continue with the installation process.
- Afterwards, you have to connect your Google account with the application.
- Integrate your Google Merchant account with this Shopify app.
- For that, you must provide your store’s currency, target country, and language.
- You must also choose whether you want to “Automatically import my shopping settings” or if you want to upload them manually.
- Move on to the final part when your products are uploading. To get it done, wait for 3-5 days for Google to approve each item.
- In case any of your product doeesn’t qualify, you can see it in the Not approved tab. There will also be a list of the reasons that would tell you why it’s not qualifying so that you can fix it.
- Once you’re finished with all of this, integration is done!
By the way, I would recommend you going with the application as it’s faster and more user-friendly. However, the only problem with it is that it can sometimes glitch.
The manual way takes longer to do but will definitely be 100% reliable (only when you do it correctly).
The Bottom Line
If you’re a business owner, you have to sign up for a Google Merchant Center account. Integrating it with your Shopify store will be another great addition to your overall marketing strategy.
Since Google is the most used search engine, many of your future customers are likely on it, which makes it a great place to market your product.
Stats show that businesses who use it see a 33% growth in revenue and a 79% boost in visibility.
So, take a smart decision as a business owner and take the half-hour needed to set up GMC for your store. I bet that payoff will be worth it.
