What is Google Merchant Center?

Google Merchant Center can be considered as a launchpad for Google Shopping Ads or Product Listing Ads. Merchant Center is where an advertiser stores product feed and then Google reads and lists whenever possible. A product feed is information of an advertisers products that contains details like product name, image, unique id, description and attributes in a format that is easily readable by Google. Google Merchant Center, besides product feed, also hosts important details pertaining to the taxes and shipping of every individual product. An advertiser has to plugin all these details before the shopping ad services go live.

How to setup Merchant Center?

Setting up a Merchant Center account is easy. Jump to Merchant Centers home page and click on sign in button with your Gmail account. In case you dont have a Gmail account, or any other Google account, create one. Once you are done with registering a Merchant Center account, you will be prompted to do the following actions.

• Add your Business Information
• Agree to the Terms of Service
• Website Verification

After these 3 simple steps, your Merchant account is ready! The very first task after getting hold of your merchant account is for you to set up shipping and tax details. Find the settings tab on the left side, and from the drop-down menu select tax and shipping.

Now that your virtual store is inaugurated, it is time to add products to the shelf. You have to create your product feed and upload the file for Google to read and get them ready for relevant users. You are either create a feed manually or use Content API for Shopping or export data for your eCommerce platform.

Linking your AdWords account to Merchant account is necessary before you can create campaigns or start bidding. Under the setting tab, you see AdWords listed. You will have to enter your 10 digit AdWords ID to complete the process.

This is how you set up your Merchant account, link it with AdWords and also provide Google all the business and product details. Following this, you can create a Shopping Campaign in AdWords. We will learn about that in the next blog.

For any queries regarding setting up Google Merchant Account, comment below or write to us.