How to configure Google shopping feed in Magento

What is Google shopping feed?

Shopping feed is a detailed list of items, along with their creatives, descriptions, and components that Google utilizes to match consumer’s requirements with their results on Google Shopping. 

And if you want to make your product trending, you need all resources because Google will not recommend products that are not following the guidelines (but you probably already know that if you’re working on paid shopping campaigns).

If you’re running an eCommerce store, you know how essential it is to be present when your consumers are researching the industry to get their desired requirements. 

MagnoStack is providing you brief information on setting up and optimizing your shopping feed through Magento.

---

How to configure shopping feed in Magento?

Whether you have an efficient way for shopping feed generation, or you’re utilizing a 3rd party extension, it is essential to perform everything right in this process, to build a full product feed with top-notch data.

In case you lack a feed generation solution on your eCommerce site, we would recommend Rocket web’s Google Shopping Feed extension. 

We are using this highly flexible and easy-to-use extension on most of our projects to provide high-quality feeds and shopping campaign structure to our clients.

• Price

The price you’re aiming through your shopping feed should be a minimal price that consumers can pay to attain advertised items. In practice, it means that if you sell specific items in a significant quantity, and it’s impossible to purchase only a single item, your feed should have the price per bundle instead of per piece.

Additionally, the same amount should be present on your landing page and microdata markup.

• Brand

Including brands to your product feed is essential for most of the new products. There are simple rules; submit the selling brand attribute through Google Shopping or, if you don’t have a specific brand, go with the manufacturer attribute instead. 

Keep in mind that you should never use fake brand names in your feed. If you’re selling replicas or items compatible with specific OEM brands, don’t submit the OEM brand to your product feed.

---

How can you know if your product feed is best compliant with Google policies?

Download and upload your new product feed on Google Merchant Center as test feed. After some time, Google will build a test feed report, in which you’ll see if any problems need to be resolved before you upload your actual Google Shopping Feed to Merchant Center.

Once you’re confident that the data in your feed is very accurate and in-line with Google’s recommendations, include new product feed to Google Merchant Center.

Don’t forget to proceed with surfaces across Google programs to participate in these new Google Shopping ads, focus on a daily fetch, and your feed is prepared.

---

Licensing and installation

MagnoStack follows an exceptional approach to licensing, and we also make full functional efforts to prevent unlicensed utilization.

We exceptionally make use of any new extension to test the system thoroughly in a staging environment before moving towards the production environment. 

The process of installation is quite fast and simple, but you have to disable compilation before installation if you are utilizing it. You can again restart compilation after the installation of the extension. 

If installing extensions fills you with difficulty, you should choose the experts at MagnoStack for the professional installation option while buying the extension.

---

Initial configuration

There are a few general configuration options available after the installation that need to be executed, before working on the set up of the first product feed.

Many of these core configuration settings are already available and can be left as they are initially. However, you may want to make disabled products’ to No, as it makes little sense to include in your product feed any products that are not seen on your website for shopping.

The other initial setting, which is very important, is the Cron job reporting – an email address is required to get reports on the success or otherwise of your scheduled data feeds.

---

Including new attributes

For the feed approval, you need to build a number of attributes that weren’t utilized by the store owners previously. This was a better way than adding the attributes within Magento.

Other attributes that are needed is GTIN, which we just included, and then uploaded the data. We also needed to add a secondary gender attribute, to manage unisex as on the site.

There is a requirement of some shipping data, which is hardcoded, some we utilized the existing attributes, and some we mapped within the merchant center.

---

Filtering the products

Filtering by product category is the most common way of product restriction, and this can be performed on either an ‘include’ or an ‘exclude’ basis. Whether you go for include or exclude, particular kinds will come down to what you want to earn with the feed.

Obviously, if you only want to add a single item category in the feed, ‘include’ is the best option. If you want to include your entire catalog, then you should go for the ‘exclude’ option.

Filtering the products enables the eCommerce site owners to mention precisely what items are required. As mentioned above, it is simple to filter based on product type, so that only essential items are included.

We also utilized the option to filter attribute sets, which are very useful to discard custom options. Along with advanced filters, this process is also used to filter the visibility, which we used to drop orphaned items that are pre-orderable..

---

Data feed for other shopping engines

The procedure for generating feeds for other shopping engines is widely the same as for Google Shopping, although each engine includes different upload formats and required fields.

The MagnoStack’s highly skilled team has developed a comprehensive user guide, though, to proceed with the 19 pre-installed data feed templates, to ensure vendors can provide their requirements clearly what is required for each data feed to be successful.

We also include PHP code snippets in our feed templates to format field contents according to the requirement for any given shopping engine.

---

Support and upgrades

MagnoStack is a renowned name when it comes to customer support, and the organization provides a 24-hour guaranteed response on all support queries.

We also focus on the updates of the extension to cover any modifications made by the shopping engines to their feed specifications.

---

Conclusion

Sometimes people were pleasantly surprised at how simple this whole procedure was, and we didn’t need any development resources at all. 

Our experts are using both the Data Feed Manager and Simple Google Shopping extensions available for Magento 2.

If you need any help with your shopping feed and campaign management, reach out to our highly skilled professionals to achieve your business goals.