As of 1st June 2015, Google have made changes to the specification of the Product Feed that powers Google Shopping. The majority of these changes won’t be fully enforced until mid-September 2015 however you need to aware of the changes and act accordingly.
The changes will help customers find your products more easily, helping them make a more informed decision. The increased relevancy of your products can only be a good thing and if you make the specific changes to your product feed, you will continue to see a good CTR and conversion to sale from these rich media shopping ads.
For your reference, a brief summary of the changes are as follows:
- Unique Product Identifiers: changes to tighten the submission criteria for product identifiers and improve their quality.
- GTINs & EANs: becoming a required attribute for AU, BR, CZ, FR, DE, IT, JP, NL, ES, CH, UK & US and across all ‘Branded’ products that are also ‘New’ in condition.
- Google Product Category: a move to support numerical Category ID’s as well as the existing Google Taxonomy naming conventions.
- Shipping: becoming a required attribute for CH, CZ, ES, IT, JP & NL in addition to all existing required territories.
- Apparel & Variant Attributes: changes to separate Apparel/Clothing and Variant Attributes as well as making Colour, Pattern, Material, Age Group & Size required attributes for BR, DE, FR, JP, UK & US.
- Units & Quantity: impacts the US only with a move to support US/non-metric units.
As in integrated partner of Google and Google Shopping, our Data Quality Team work closely with Google to ensure product feed formats are always up to date. You benefit from the team’s experience and our good working relationships, in addition, when working with us, you only have to provide one master product feed which we then enhance and enrich to ensure the most perfect product data feeds for each of our 800+ integrated partners.
Our team are here to help you connect your products with your customers while optimising at a product level to ensure maximum profitability.
