Google Updates its Shopping Feed Specs

Anne Garcia - May 15, 2013

Last year Google introduced Google Shopping, where the search engine migrated their Merchant Center product to a commercial model via Product Listing Ads through AdWords. Last week, Google announced that they are making some changes to the Google Shopping Feed Specification in order to improve the quality of data that merchants provide. Some of the changes include:

• Google support for merchant-defined multipacks, where merchants can sell custom multipacks of one product.

• Google is recommending higher quality images with a minimum size of 800×800 pixels to give shoppers a better visual representation of advertised products.

• The introduction of identifier exists attribute for products like custom goods, vintage items or collectibles that don’t have unique product identifiers.

• Updated and more precise guideline for description and color attributes.

Google says that it will start enforcing the new requirements for new unique product identifiers on July 15, 2013 for merchants within the United States. For all other target countries, enforcement will begin on September 16, 2013. In addition, Google says that non-compliant items may be disapproved and disappear from Google Shopping.

Be sure to keep abreast of the latest product feed changes to ensure that your Google Product Listing Ads do not disappear or lose revenue.