Google has rolled out their new Merchant Center Next version to most advertisers. In fact, pretty much all of our clients can now optionally make the switch. Importantly, at the moment, they can also switch back if the change causes issue. One thing that advertisers have complained about is the lack of feed rules and supplemental feeds.
These functions are available but you have to activate them by enabling the new “Advanced data source management” add-on, which is far from obvious.
Notwithstanding that, I personally like the more simplistic approach in the new interface.
In this post I’m going to walk through the different areas as discuss what’s new, what works well, and what worries me.
Navigation
The new interface is far less busy and better organized with overview and notices, business, marketing, and analytics in a single left side menu. Less frequently used tools such as things you typically only do once, like enable an add-on are available from a cog menu. This is much more intuitive.
Overview Screen
The overview screen is fine with the basics you’d expect to find here. You’ll see a performance summary, account status, and some recommended “next steps” to improve your account/feed.
Products
The products menu is better organized than in the previous Merchant Center. The first stop “all products” provides a full list of your products. Unlike the old version, you have the ability to add almost every field to the table. This is far more useful as, for example, you can quickly scan through which items are missing GTINs. You can also directly edit products from this screen. But I wouldn’t, at least not now!
It’s unclear whether changes in Merchant Center will remain persistent, if say you change the same field in your original shopping feed later on. Imagine, then, you’ve made a few hundred changes to your feed in Merchant Center but now want to replace all of your product_type fields for 3 different product categories. This could be a serious issue.
It also means that the product data you’re advertising on Google Ads may not line up on other marketplaces like Amazon or ad platforms such as Microsoft Ads.
You’ll note in the products section there is no feed menu. Instead you have a button to “add more products” which will show your currently enabled feed types and provide options to add others. You can, however, access your active feeds directly from the cog menu item called data sources.
The needs attention, sales tax, and automatic improvements all make sense.
The new design is clearly focused on Google trying to migrate advertisers away from traditional feeds and instead utilizing website content as the basis for product information. In theory this is nice but in reality this method for product management is fraught with many issues. For example, very few advertisers will state GTINs on their product pages. Advertisers with older cart management may not have properly implemented microdata, which can cause conflicts on things like pricing and currency settings. And that’s just scratching the surface.
Product Studio
The snazzy new thing Google is pushing in the products section is the Product Studio. I’ve made a short YouTube video demonstrating how it works.
This tool uses AI to place nice looking backgrounds behind your existing plain product images. While not always reliable it worked well for me on 90% of attempts. The tool is easy to use even if you’re not very familiar with prompts.
Just choose your product image from your product list, add a product description, add a background description, and wait up to 40 seconds for 4 results. Choose the one you want and either add the image directly back to the product in Merchant Center or download it to insert back into your website and shopping feed (recommended by me).
While this tool is fairly easy to use, it takes a bit of time to write the prompts to describe the product and scene you want. And it takes up to 40 seconds to process the image. If you have several thousand products to update, and multiple images for each, you’d better have a lot of free time on your hands. Thus, this tool is best for smaller shops that need to tweak images for a handful of SKUs rather than overhaul an entire product catalog.
Shipping and Returns
You have two tabs here, not surprisingly named shopping policies and return policies. This is easy to use and similar to the previous version of Merchant Center.
Business Info
The Merchant Center Next details tab contains information for your company name and address, domain verification, logos/color scheme, and direct checkout options. Easy peasy! Stores is a bit of a new concept for many advertisers. This offers optional connectivity between your Google Business Profile and Merchant Center.
Rounding out this section is countries, which is a new way to identify which countries you wish to sell your products in. You will still, of course, need to include country specific prices in your feed for each country of sale.
Marketing Section
The marketing section contains your add-ons such as promotions, product ratings, and free listings. Looking at promotions as an example, you can directly add promotions here, set them up through a feed, or on website directly where supported. No real difference here from the old Merchant Center, other than naming conventions.
Analytics
This section offers you 3 different data views including a summary, product specific, and online store. The product specific report is by far the most useful and offers competitive comparisons on price and visibility, how your promos are performing, as well as your shopping experience scorecard.
The scorecard is particularly important as it’s akin to ad rank for search ads. A higher scorecard rating combined with your bid is what yields your ad placement. This means you can yield more clicks with the same bid if you have a better scorecard. Yet so many advertisers ignore the scorecard completely while desperately testing 3 different P-Max configurations.
Want more sales? Improve your scorecard!
Cog Menu Items
Supplemental tools are provided under the cog icon. As I mentioned earlier, this is where you’ll access setup items that you should rarely need once you’re up and running. Most of the tools are similar to the previous version of Merchant Center, but some names are different. You’ll find your shopping feeds under data sources. Apps and services is where you’ll connect Merchant Center to other tools including Google Ads.
Conversion sources is new and may confuse a lot of advertisers. This is where you can add UTM tracking tags to your product URLs to track those details in Google Analytics. The numeric annotation feature allows you to include some details about the number of people shopping at your store. This is, obviously, more useful for larger spend accounts that are looking to drive more sales through social proof.
Summary
Merchant Center Next offers a more simplistic and easy to use interface than the bulked up version that came before. The Product Studio is a great tool for small shops and while site scraping to create product data is promising, there are too many holes for this to work well for most advertisers. While supplemental feeds are supported, how to implement such a popular feature is not obvious.
Overall I do like the new direction for Merchant Center. But as is often the case, Google has changed the names of common functions for nobody’s benefit.
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