Welcome to the third part of my Google Merchant Center Next (GMC Next) Deep Dive. This blog is devoted to the Automatic Improvements and Add-on sections of GMC Next.
Check out previous posts:
- Part 1: Deep Dive Series: Google Merchant Center Next – First Steps
- Part 2: Deep Dive Series: Google Merchant Center Next – How to Navigate and Troubleshoot the Feeds
Automatic Improvements
Auto Improvements allow Google to use data from your website to automatically update your feed for things like prices, stock availability, and condition of the product. Further, Google can also perform minor image changes.
Automatic Improvements are found on the Product tab in their own section and have two separate sub-categories: Automatic Updates and Automatic Image Improvements.
Automatic Updates
I particularly appreciate the Price and Availability updates for clients who frequently change their prices during the day or who have volatile stock issues where items go in and out of stock all day long. (Condition is a much more static attribute that should be in your feed and doesn’t change for the same SKU, so this one has always made me wonder why it exists.)
The good thing is that you can toggle on Automatic Updates for Prices, Availability, and Condition separately.
Before we get into more about the updates, it’s important to understand where the data for Automatic Updates, like Price, Availability, and Condition, come from, and that’s the Structured Data from your website. If you include those attributes in your structured data, Google will be able to automatically read that data and make those changes in your feed. (Structured data is also important for organic rankings for your products, so it makes good business sense to have it!)
The reason it’s important to understand how Google implements automatic updates is because if you don’t have structured data on your site, and you do turn them on, Google will turn to “advanced data extractors” to update the products, and we have seen Google get overzealous in changing prices or availability incorrectly, which is not a good scenario.
If you see a lot of pricing or availability issues in Needs Attention (covered in part 2 of my blog series), checking to see if you have Automatic Updates for Price or Availability is important. Sometimes, if you have it on and are having issues, it could be that you don’t have structured data or that it is incorrectly configured; you can use the Rich Results Test to check. (It’s also a good idea to use the tool to check your structured data before turning on auto price updates.)
Automatic Image Improvements
Automatic image improvements are found in the same place as Automatic updates. Auto image improvements are hit or miss on whether they can remove watermarks or text from images. I have not experienced any issues with image improvements changing an image incorrectly, so it’s worth trying it if you are having image issues. (I will be doing another blog about how to use GMC Next to edit images with watermarks when Automatic image improvements aren’t working.)
Add-ons
Add-ons is a section name that I feel doesn’t adequately describe what it includes, as it houses some pretty important tools. This is where you can turn on things like supplemental feeds or feed rules, promotions, dynamic remarketing, Google customer reviews, product ratings, loyalty programs, and more.
Add-ons are found under the Gear. There you will see Add-ons that you already have enabled and ones you can add.
Advanced Data Source Management
Advanced Data Source Management will let you do both Rules and Supplemental Feeds, which are important when you need to improve data quality.
Once you add Advanced Data Source Management in Add-ons, you will see a new tab when you go to Data Sources (under the Gear), then click the feed file – the tab will be called Attribute Rules.
Rules can be handy in fixing product types, misspellings, categorization, etc. You’ll see in my example above that we’re adding things like missing age_group, custom_label_0, custom_label_1, and gender. (We’re also appending brand to the title and adding multiple levels in the product_type, not shown in the picture.) Rules rely on logic – if THIS, then THIS – to work well, so consistency really helps in feed data. (Learn more about rules here. This blog is a bit outdated but does get you to the gist of how to set up rules.)
But what do you do when rules aren’t enough? That’s where Supplemental Feeds, also found under Advanced Data Source Management, come in.
Supplemental Feeds
When you turn on Advanced Data Source Management, Supplemental Feeds also get activated. They are found in a different location than Rules; to see them, they are on the Data Sources (found under the Gear) > Product Sources, and when activated, they will show next to the Primary Sources section.
We love using Supplemental Feeds when we need to overwrite a large number of items that don’t follow consistent logic, like improving individual product titles, adding GTINs, and many other useful changes. Learn more about how to create a supplemental feed; like the Rules one I reference, it’s a bit of an old blog, but it’s still pretty accurate.
Other Add-Ons
There are other add-ons available, so make sure you review this section. Here are the ones we found particularly helpful:
- Promotions: if you want to show promotions on your Shopping Ads (and they can also be used for the free shopping listings), you’ll want to activate Promotions. Once activated, you’ll see it on the left-hand navigation. One hint: you can’t reuse promotion IDs (not to be confused with the promotion codes); Google requires promotion IDs to be unique, even though you can reuse the promotion code that the shopper sees.
- Dynamic Remarketing: if you want to customize your remarketing ads to show items shoppers actually viewed, you’ll want to turn this on.
- Loyalty Programs: help engage new customers and retain existing ones.
- Google Customer Reviews: if you don’t use a third-party review company, you can maintain your own Google Customer Reviews here.
- Product Ratings: same as the above.
- Custom Reports: this is one I haven’t used enough to truly comment on them, but the reports that are available aren’t always helpful, so it might be worth spending some time investigating this section. Once turned on, it will show under the Analytics section in the left-hand navigation.
In this third installment of the Google Merchant Center Next Deep Dive series, we explored the powerful tools within the Automatic Improvements and Add-ons sections. Whether it’s streamlining product updates with automatic adjustments, enhancing image quality, or leveraging supplemental feeds and rules, GMC Next offers a wealth of options to improve your feed quality and optimize performance. Add-ons, in particular, provide essential features like Promotions, Dynamic Remarketing, and Google Customer Reviews to help you drive better engagement and results.
As you continue to explore GMC Next, take advantage of these tools to automate workflows, fix data inconsistencies, and enhance your Shopping Ads and your free listings. Stay tuned for the next blog in this series, where I’ll dive deeper into image editing solutions for watermarks and other practical tips for maximizing GMC Next!
