Google Shopping - Listing your products

About Google Shopping

Google Shopping is a marketplace extension of Google Search, where you can browse and purchase items for sale across many different online retailers, both locally and nationally.

If you are wondering how to grow you store quickly, then listing your items on Google Shopping can be a quick way to market while you wait for your natural search to grow slowly behind the scenes.

What you need to get started

To start lisitng your products, you will first need to signup for a Google Account.  This will allow you to then apply for both Google Merchant Centre and Google Adwords accounts.  It is usually a good idea to create a new Google Account specific for your online business, especially if you plan to run more online stores in the future.  Once you have a Google account, you get started with Google Shopping and Google Adwords.

1. Register for a Google Shopping Account at https://www.google.co.uk/base/
2. Register for a Google Adwords Account https://adwords.google.co.uk/ (You will need your credit card handy for this step)
3. Once you have both the above accounts setup, you will then need to link the two together.  To do this, follow the Google guide at https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033961?hl=en-GB
4. When you have linked the two accounts, you can move onto setting up your Google Shopping Feed.

Setting up a Google Shopping Feed from Instantcart

Follow these instructions to connect Instantcart to Google Merchant Centre.  You will also need to refer to the Google support guide on retreiving FTP Login details.  Instantcart uses FTP to send your feed file to Google.

Once you have completed the above, your feed should be setup with Google.  To test it, simply run the Google Shopping feed from your Instantcart control panel under Catalog >> Shopping Feeds.

Setting up your Google Adwords Product Listings Campaign

You'll need to head over to your new Google Adwords account for this next step.  Once logged in, you can work through the help guide provided by Google here.

If you find yourself getting confused at this stage, dont worry, there is further information provided here from Google about Product Listing Adverts and how they work.

The above guides on Google go into alot of detail, but you wont need to cover most areas to get started, especially if you are happy for all your products to appear in search results.  This means you can leave the product target in your Google campaign set to "All Products" - this is the default product target setting.