Selling on Google Shopping in 7 Steps –

In this article we will explain how to start selling on Google Shopping in 7 steps.

What is Google Shopping?

Google Shopping is a type of campaign within Google Ads (Old Google Adwords). The main difference with the rest of Google Ads campaigns is that it allows you to advertise individual product listings within Google search results. In other words, once configured correctly, it allows us the possibility that when the user makes a specific search related to one of my products in my online store, a product file is displayed in these search results.

An example of how Google Shopping ads appear:

The main difference that we see with search ads is that in Google Shopping ads, we have the following information:

• Product image.
• Price.
• Discounts or free shipping.
• Store that sells.

This information is completely taken from the product sheet of our e-commerce, which gives us great flexibility to manage websites with many products.

How does Google Shopping work?

Just as for one you need to specify which keywords you want to bid on, in Google Shopping thanks to a feed or list of products that we make, we will upload our products to Google Merchant and through the descriptions and product titles, we will appear for relevant searches. So in Google Shopping we have three parts: Your Google Ads account, where you will launch the campaigns, an e-commerce or online store with a product feed and a merchant account that will help us connect Google Ads with your feed.

What do you need to start selling on Google Shopping?

First of all, the most important thing is that you have a Google Ads account. By going to ads.google.com you can create an account to advertise. From here you will manage your ads, campaigns, budget and more.

Second and basic, to sell on Google Shopping you need an online store or e-commerce where online shopping is allowed. This is important to emphasize, if your website does not allow online sales, you will not be able to do Google Shopping. There are some very interesting content managers to create online stores, one of the most popular is Prestashop due to its versatility of themes and plugins. Choosing one CMS or another is a very important decision that will affect your website.

Third, you need Remember, ideally you should use the same Gmail account to create your Google Ads account and your Google Merchant account. This way it will be easier to link your Ads and Merchant accounts. Creating a Google Merchant account is quite simple, you will have to provide information about your company and type of business. So to speak, Google Merchant helps Google to understand what you sell and it is on this platform where we will upload our list of products.

So, all set? Do you already have your Google Ads account, online store and Google Merchant account? Perfect! Well then, we are going to explain in seven steps what you have to do to start selling on Google Shopping.

How to sell on Google Shopping:

1. The first thing we need to sell on Google Shopping is to create a product feed. This feed or list of products will later allow us to upload it to Google Merchant. Making a product feed by hand would be completely crazy, since you could spend weeks doing it. For this, various developers have released add-ons or plugins that, by installing them in your CMS, will allow you to generate a product feed in XML format. Some interesting examples of plugins are the This plugin has different configuration options to do the export, such as if you want to export all the product categories in your feed, how often you want it to be updated, if you want it to use the short or long description of your products.

Remember that this is only a suggestion to make a feed, there are also free options or other options for example for WordPress such as WooCommerce.

A product feed always has to have mandatory information about your products. Here you can find it:

• product id: Up to 50 characters and must be the same for all languages.
• Title:Up to 150 characters. Try to make it as clear as possible.
• Description: Up to 5,000 characters. Here you must include information about the product: Ingredients, composition, utilities…
• Link: Up to 2,000 characters. Remember that the domain must be in https.
• Condition.
• Price: It must always be the same as the landing page.
• Availability: That is, if the product is “In stock”, “Out of stock” or “Pre-order”
• image link: To the product image.
• Category in Google Product: Depending on the category it is mandatory, it serves to classify your product within the
• Brand of the product.
• Gtin: It is the commercial code of the product, it is also mandatory.
• Mpn: It is an alternative to Gtin.
• Exists Identifier: It is used to identify products that have neither Gtin nor Mpn.

2. Bring this feed to Google Merchant: Well, if you already have your product feed created, the next thing is to tell Google Merchant where it is. For this we will have to follow the following steps: Go to merchants.google.com. On the left side click on products and then on feeds. A button with a “+” will appear to be able to add your feed:

Later you will have to add basic information about your feed such as what type it is, to which country you are going to sell, currency and if you want it only for shopping or for one too. We recommend that you mark both options so that you can later carry out shopping campaigns such as dynamic remarketing.

In step two it will ask you to name the feed and input method. There are several methods, if you have used a plugin to make your feed, the most normal thing is that it generates a URL and you specify it in this menu in “Scheduled recovery”. It can also be done with API, through an upload from your computer or also with Google spreadsheets. Using one option or another depends on you, but perhaps the simplest is the scheduled recovery with the URL generated from your CMS.

Later in programming, we will specify how often we want the file to be recovered, we recommend setting it daily.

3. In this third step, you have to wait. If this is your first time uploading a feed, it can take up to 3 business days for it to be reviewed. Don’t worry, once Google has reviewed it, they will notify you if there are any problems and the number of approved products. Once you have received this notification, I recommend you go in and check what percentage of the total products you have approved:

Remember that if there is a product that appears as rejected, you can go to the “Go to diagnosis” option to see what happens.

4. Link your Google Merchant and Google Adwords accounts: You can access this at the top right in the three points and giving the account link. If you manage your merchant and ads accounts with the same email, it will allow you to link that Merchant account in the Adwords part. The purpose of this is that from your Google Ads account, we recognize that this is our Google Merchant account.

5. Create your first Shopping campaign in Google Ads: Go to ads.google.com and click on the campaigns tab and on the “+”. Select sales objective and type of Shopping campaign

• If you have your Google Merchant and Adwords accounts properly linked, the option to select your Google Merchant account will appear here.
• You have the option to create a standard or smart shopping campaign. The standard one will only show ads in shopping format and the smart one will also show ads on display or youtube. To begin with, we recommend doing the standard.
• Once you have done this, the standard campaign configuration options will appear to choose territory, daily budget and other options.
• It will then ask you to create your first ad group and place a bid. Use the to see the recommended CPCs in your sector.

6. Divide your campaign into product groups by category: At this step, Google has created a campaign for you with an ad group without any division. We recommend adding a subdivision to have more control over the campaign. Simply within your ad group, click on the plus that says “Add subdivision”. In this way you will find a new menu that allows you to make subdivisions based on the category, brand or more variables.

7. Activate and review data: It is always interesting in shopping campaigns to review CTR data, the average bid of the competition, to know if you are bidding above or below. In addition, we also recommend that you review the search keywords that are triggering your shopping ads in the keywords section. There may be some words that you want to negativize.

And that’s it, what do you think? Google Shopping can be a bit convoluted at first with the whole part of creating your feed, uploading it to merchant and getting it up and running. In this part there are many who give up, but if you continue and have done a complete feed, you will see very interesting results.