20. Methods for E-commerce companies to develop Google Ads through Merchant Center

This week, we are joined again by Ulaş Gökhan Gümüş. We will be focusing on Google Merchant Center and sharing our plans for the remainder of 2023.

What is Google Merchant Center?

Google Merchant Center is a crucial tool for dynamic shopping ads, even though shopping ads are currently inactive in Turkey. It is also an essential tool for e-commerce businesses.

What are the Benefits of Merchant Center?

Businesses and e-commerce companies can utilize the Google Shopping tab to showcase their products. Additionally, their products can appear as dynamic ads in PM Campaigns or Performance Campaigns. To make this happen, businesses need to send their product data feed to Merchant Center or create a catalog manually. However, it's important to pay attention to technical details during this process. All products uploaded go through an initial approval process to weed out non-original, subcontracted, or replica products. Google subjects products to an approval process to prevent such problems.

When were Standard Shopping Ads Disabled in Turkey?

It is known that on August 10, 2020 Google removed Shopping ads from search results. These ads were previously displayed above or next to search ads, but can now be found only within the Shopping tab. This change suggests a lack of consideration for user behavior feedback. It has been observed that the click rate on the shopping tab decreases when a user specifically searches for a product. This has led to an increase in keyword competition.

The ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) for standard shopping ads used to be quite high. However, since the removal of shopping ads, achieving the same level of success in PM (Performance Max) campaigns has become challenging. With low click rates on the shopping tab, everyone has turned to search network ads and keyword-based advertising efforts, resulting in incredibly high CPCs (Cost Per Click). This situation is not limited to Turkey alone, but several other countries have also experienced similar negative effects. The shutdown of shopping ads has negatively impacted both digital marketers and businesses.

For businesses, the first step is to transfer their products to Merchant Center. Once that's done, the second step is to integrate Google's remarketing code correctly into their website or mobile application. Data layers play a critical role in this process, and it's important that the Product IDs or unique IDs match. This ensures that a product that a user has visited can be displayed as an advertisement on another platform.

However, for Remarketing, you definitely need to set up your products, that is, your catalog, dynamically in Merchant Center. Of course, you can do this process not manually, but by integrating it on the back end using a feed and create an accurate, useful remarketing campaign.