Google Merchant Center Classic vs. Google Merchant Center Next

The Google Merchant Centre is an extremely popular platform for eCommerce sellers. It helps businesses upload and manage product data. Merchants get several other important commerce features, like tracking ad metrics and running campaigns.

The common version (GMC Classic) enables merchants to optimize their product listings to get more traffic. Businesses can work with several different types of product feeds and optimize the content.

Recently, Google is rolling out its new version of the Merchant Center, called Google Merchant Center Next. In Google Marketing Live ’23, Classic will transition to Next, bringing new features. That said, some merchants can continue using Classic. 

You must be wondering about the changes between the Classic and Next versions. Today, we discuss the new upgrades and Google’s new version of the Google Merchant Center to better understand them.

So, let’s delve deeper and learn the differences between Google Merchant Center Next & Classic.

Understanding Google Merchant Center Classic

Google Merchant Center (Classic) is an online platform from where businesses can upload and manage their online store and product data. This data is available for various Google services, like advertising and shopping campaigns. Its dashboard allows online businesses to merge and carry out several operations easily:

Features In Google Merchant Center Classic

• Maintain Product Listings: Merchants can create and update their product listings as they appear on Google ads. 
• Running Google Ads Campaigns: It’s easy to execute Google Ads and manage ad campaigns in one place. It is also convenient to retarget ad campaigns to existing customers. 
• Free Product Listings: You can upload free listings to appear on Google Search, Google Images, Lens, Shopping Tab, and YouTube.
• Google Customer Reviews: You can use Google customer reviews to request product and store ratings from customers who buy from your store.
• Promotions: You can distribute offers on your Google listings, including Shopping ads, free product listings, and Shopping tab.
• Product Ratings: Product ratings show the aggregated rating for your products in ads and free listings to customers shopping on Google.
• Seller Ratings: Customers can rate their shopping experience with you between 1 to 5 stars for various aspects, such as average delivery time.
• Dynamic Remarketing: Reach back to your customers with personalized ads using Google ads dynamic remarketing.
• Selling on Google: Use Collections for creating efficient listings, low-funnel, performance focused vehicle ads, and show your products on YouTube for better outreach.

Additionally, it offers six unique types of feeds:

Types of Feeds

• Google Merchant Center feed: This is the main product feed.
• Product inventory update feed: Shows the quantity of a product available and its price.
• Promotions feed: This feed contains details of ongoing promotions.
• Local inventory ads feed: Provides stock details available at local, nearby stores.
• Product ratings feed: This feed displays ratings and reviews of products.
• Dynamic remarketing feed: This is a targeted feed displayed to customers who visited the website but did not stay or take any action.

Although Google Merchant Center Classic provides total control over these six feed types, the control is fully manual.

For example, changing the product description for five items listed across three channels requires 100% manual effort. Although merchants can use XML or TXT files to achieve this, they must still manually enter and export data before the change is reflected on the platform and updated listings.

To simplify things, you can use product feed management software such as AdNabu, Channable, or Feedonomics to cut all that work.

Especially if you are a Shopify merchant running Google ads, then AdNabu can help maintain data consistency with the support of other marketplaces. It helps manage your product feed & easily integrate it with Google Merchant Center. It gets easy to streamline operations & sync the two platforms to keep your feed up-to-date.

AdNabu helps boost your business’s goals by offering 360° feed management support, which includes AI feed optimization, multi-language feeds, product insight scores, bulk edits, exclude/include products, etc.

Introduction to Google Merchant Center Next

So, what’s changed with Google Merchant Center Next?

For starters, Google Merchant Center Next is an upgraded version of the Classic, offering new features. It delivers an enhanced and simplified user experience. 

The major purpose of the update was to simplify and streamline the product feed management experience. The layouts have become more intuitive and more in tune with Google’s modern interface designs, which have simplified the original experience with several improvements.

According to Google, the new Google Merchant Center Next’s features integrate AI, a simplified user interface, automatic feed detection, and more.

Essential New Features

Let’s take a look at what new upgrades did GMC Next bring for the merchants:

1. Generative AI for Product Images

One of the new features that includes the use of generative AI is the Product Studio. You can use it promptly to create multiple product images and custom product scenes, remove distracting backgrounds, and improve picture quality & resolution. 

Product listings with multiple images lead to a 76% increase in impressions and a 32% increase in clicks. This shows how important product images are.

2. Automatic Feed Detection

The automated feed detection capability is one of the most important features introduced with the new upgrade.

In the Classic version, users had to update all feeds manually at the beginning of the setup. However, the Next version pulls feed data automatically from eCommerce websites, which quickly displays your products on Google.

This means that merchants can drop the need for a dedicated team to update feeds regularly using simple integrations.

3. Change in the User Interface

Google Merchant Center Next is all about an intuitive user interface and ease of use. As such, the legacy design has been eliminated and replaced by a cleaner, neater interface.

Although it does take a little time to get familiar with, it is far simpler to get used to than Google Merchant Center Classic.

4. New Additions to Insights & Reporting

The new update also improves the insight capabilities. The interface has a new Performance tab under which all the analytics have been consolidated.

The upgrade allows merchants to view all their best-selling products in one place. Also, it’s easier to track your competitors and track shoppers’ engagement with local businesses on Maps and Search.

Additionally, a new metric has been introduced called ‘Click Potential.’ This metric lets the merchant see the potential of a product feed to generate traffic for the channels.

A key feature of Google Merchant Center is its diagnostics capability. It examines the health of their product data by highlighting information such as item eligibility status, item disapprovals, and more. Understanding the business impact of these errors can improve site traffic.

Key Differences Between Google Merchant Center Classic & Next

Let’s understand the differences in a better way: 

1. Automation and Ease of Use

The Google Merchant Center Next features feed automation. It lets merchants specify their websites from which the platform can automatically pull product data.

The platform achieves this by crawling the webpages on the URLs specified by the merchants. You should ensure that your website has a well-structured sitemap added for indexing. The sync can take up to 3 days.

2. Change in User Experience & Interface

The second distinction is that the Next platform is neater and more consolidated. It offers a more intuitive user experience as compared to the Classic version.

For example, all the metrics and insights are now consolidated into the Performance Tab. This provides improved, single-point access to all metrics. Users no longer need to be technically adept to make full use of the platform.

3. Click Potential Metric

The GMC Next platform introduces a new metric called ‘Click Potential’ that highlights the performance of a product vis a vis others. This comparative helps the merchants understand the likelihood of an ad getting clicks.

4. New Unified Dashboard Analytics

The best part about Next is that it allows you to consolidate inventory everywhere into a single view. This helps see the final numbers of the items currently available anywhere. The unified view is not available in the Classic version.

Transition to Google Merchant Center Next

Switching to Google Merchant Center Next is automatic as it is governed completely by Google. If you are currently using Google Merchant Center Classic, you will be invited to accept the upgrade to Google Merchant Center Next. When you agree to upgrade, it will be done automatically.

If you are just signing up for Google Merchant Center, you will be given a choice between Classic and Next versions at the time you create an account on the platform.

However, if you wish to continue with Classic, you can do that manually from your dashboard. Note that once you revert to Classic, it will be difficult to switch to Next until Google discontinues Classic permanently.

Google aims to achieve a complete rollout by 2024. If you are ready to prepare for the transition, you must understand what specifications matter to you the most and if you’re comfortable with the old setup or the new one.

Based on this comparison, you can decide to keep the upgrade or roll it back.

Similarities Between Classic and Next

Even though Classic has upgraded to Next, the platform retains its core functionality. It provides you with features like:

• Product feed management
• Google Ads Performance metrics
• Diagnostics
• Policy compliances

You may find that your tabs have moved (like the Performance tab). Some tabs have even disappeared (like the Growth tab) from the interface. With that said, all the core functionalities are still present. Your operations will not face any setbacks from the upgrade.

Advantages of Google Merchant Center Next for Shopify Integration

The Google Merchant Center Next upgrade provides easy integration with Shopify. This makes it a beneficial upgrade for Shopify-based businesses.

Since Google Merchant Center Next, updating your product feeds automatically has become simple. It can directly pull real-time feed data from Shopify, reducing the time it takes to update or publish a listing.

The feature of real-time product feed synchronization from the Shopify interface to Google Merchant Center Next is a step toward efficiency. There is no need to spend hours manually updating spreadsheets with new product data to export to Next.

Conclusion

Google Merchant Center Next promises more than streamlined usage and neat interfaces. It provides businesses with consolidated product feed management, automated updates, and several other capabilities oriented toward saving time.

Additionally, integrating product feed management software (especially for Shopify merchants) like AdNabu further enhances its capabilities to provide simplified, quick, and easy eCommerce management.

FAQs

How does Google Merchant Center Next differ from the classic Merchant Center?

Google Merchant Center Next is a neater, simpler upgrade over Classic. It has several new features like Click Potential metric and automated feed in real-time sync with eCommerce platforms.

Can I edit product details manually in Merchant Center Next?

Yes, merchants can edit product details in Next, but they would need to do it individually for each product.

What are the new features in Google Merchant Center Next?

Next, has an automated feed that pulls data directly from websites. It also has new metrics and a consolidated performance tab to see analytics in one place.

Are there any limitations to using Google Merchant Center Next?

Several old features have not been included in Next, like Supplemental Feed and Growth tab insights. Additionally, any changes to feed are done manually, making it time consuming.

When will Google Merchant Center Next be fully available?

According to the rollout timeline, it is aimed that the full upgrade should conclude by 2024.

What is the Product Studio in Google Merchant Center Next?

Product Studio allows you to edit product images in the Next interface. It leverages GenAI to create product images, allows you to define them better, and also enables the removal of distracting backgrounds.

What should merchants expect during the transition from classic Merchant Center to Next?

The transition is planned to be automatic, so merchants should check the notification that their platform has been updated to Next.

How do I switch to Google Merchant Center Next from the Classic version?

The transition is set to happen automatically, under Google’s control. Merchants do not need to do anything at their end.

Other Resources That You Might Like:

• How to Revert to Google Merchant Center Classic?
•  Google Merchant Center Supplemental Feeds