With its large size and popularity, Google is one of the top search engines merchants are most concerned with. Whether it’s SEO, AdWords, or Analytics chances are a Google product or service is being utilized to get clicks and generate revenue. Although Google Analytics is integrated into Magento out of the box, other products, such as Google Merchant products, are not.
What are the benefits of using Google’s Merchant Services?
If you have a Google Merchant account and a Google Adwords account set up, and you connect the two together, you’ll be able to see your products at the top of the search results when people are looking for a product on Google. You can also set this up so that local customers can see if your store has stock and turn online customers into in-store customers. Another benefit is getting to that top of the first page, above results, giving your store a chance to be seen online. You can think of this as a cost-effective method of advertising, especially since you won’t pay for clicks until customers click through to your website. Finally, you’ll be able to use these services similarly to Google Analytics and find out what works and what doesn’t work for your store.
In order to integrate Google Merchant Services with a Magento store an extension needs to be utilized. There are many extensions out there for integrating your Magento store with a Google shopping feed, but the best one we have found to work with is Rocket Web’s Google Shopping Feed that can be found here. It isn’t free, but this extension makes it very easy to map attributes with Google’s attributes. The team at Rocket Web will also be sure that your feed is set to submit to Google if anything is going awry.
When setting up a Google Shopping feed, there are a few things to consider.
Google has a specific set of requirements — be sure to follow them. For example, we had mapped attributes in Magento to Google’s required attributes. If any of your products are missing one of the attributes, it can cause the feed to error out or for those products to not be picked up by Google. Shipping and Tax are also set up differently in Google. Magento will typically return an ID number referencing a Shipping or Tax method, while Google is looking for something like method names. It might be best to set up these in your Google Merchant Account or customize Magento’s output to Google. You can even set up an export of products and provide Google with FTP credentials to pull a file right off of your server.
In conclusion, the benefits to using Google Merchant Services are not without special considerations. However, landing that spot on the first page of Google could grant you exposition to more customers as well as increase your conversion rates. Overall, it’s a good idea to set this up, especially if you are already or planning on using Google Adwords. This is a great, cost-effective channel for advertising your website.
Front End Developer
