Google is making it easier for merchants to get product listings for their sites through automated “website crawl” feeds in Merchant Center.
How it works. Google uses structured data tagging on merchant websites to automatically extract up-to-date product information such as titles, prices, availability, and images.
The general picture. Automated feeds aim to reduce the work required to keep product listings up-to-date as assortment and pricing change, a challenge with traditional feed file uploads.
Why we care This update could help reduce manual work when updating product listings in Merchant Center, although there may be a learning curve to ensure all products have the correct markup scheme, which may not be the advertisers role in the marketing team.
The details To use automated feeds, merchants must implement mandatory schema.org markup for product details such as:
title Google streamlines product listings via website crawl
price [price]
availability [availability]
image [image_link]
Additional attributes such as GTIN, brand, size, and condition can further enrich listings when provided through markup or supplemental feeds.
What’s new. Some merchants now see an alternate “Website” feed experience that allows them to simply turn on/off automatic product ingestion in Merchant Center.
Products are automatically added or removed from Merchant Center based on website crawling.
Complements other product data sources without duplication.
the challenges Proper implementation of structured data is key, as is managing crawl directives using sitemaps and robots.txt to avoid indexing issues.
What they are saying “Supplementary feeds provide additional information…and you can upgrade [them] more often,” according to Google’s automated feed documentation.
between the lines Automated feeds align with Google’s push towards entities and structured data as the core of its modern “AI First” approach across all products.
first discovered This update was detected for the first time Thomas Eccel’s profile:
bottom line By reducing manual feed labor, automated product ingestion could lower barriers for merchants to participate in Google’s growing variety of surfaces, including Search, Shopping, Images and more.
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