Google shopping is the latest trend that has taken eCommerce by storm with a yearly growth of 52% year after year. It has become a hot ticket for merchants to drive quality traffic and increase their sales enormously.
In the long run, google merchant is expected to lead the online shopping industry. Here is a detailed description of how to be a google merchant and increase your sales.
id – Google Shopping Feed Specification Guide
For your product data to appear in Google shopping ads, the Google feed software needs to understand your data in a way that lets search engines find your product easily and give a rich shopping experience to the user.
This is possible if you follow the guidelines outlined in the Google merchant center feed guide for the creation of product data feed.
As per the Google shopping feed specification guide, the product information must be supplied to Google feed software in .xml or .txt format. In this article, we will look into the details of the “id” attribute.
Table of Contents
ID – Definition
ID value lets the Google software uniquely identify your product and it is a mandatory field to be entered while creating a product data feed. The id has to have a specific format as described below:
- Type – It should only have Unicode characters with the recommendation of only ASCII which means alphanumeric, dashes, and underscores are allowed.
- Length – The id should be between 1-50 characters in length.
- No repeated fields are allowed in the id attribute.
- Schema.org – This annotation helps Google reliably process your content. For the id field, this should be of type text and must have Product.SKU value. Below is an example of the “id” field
| File format | Sample |
| Text feeds | tddy123uk |
| XML feeds | <g:id>tddy123uk</g:id> |
Minimum requirements
One must submit quality data for enhanced customer experience and also for Google feed software to process your product data consistently and reliably. To do that one of the requirements is that the id in the Google feed must adhere to some basic requirements, failing which the product data would be declined by Google and a notification regarding the same would be sent to the diagnostics section of your Google merchant account. Let us see what these requirements are:
1. Unique ID
The ID field is what distinguishes one product from another and it has to be unique across all products.
2. Stable ID
Google wants to maintain the product’s advertising history which is beneficial to the merchants in many ways. To do so, one must keep the ID stable at all times and not change it once the product is up for sale. The id, along with the country of sale and language are the key factors in identifying the product by Google feed software and retrieving all information specific to that product. Changing ID would overwrite all the data necessary to track the product and its advertising history. Hence make sure you choose a proper ID at the beginning itself.
3. Same product ID across different countries and different languages
- In a multilingual country like Switzerland or India, one must use the same product id for all the languages used within the country.
- If a product is being sold in two or more countries like the US and Canada, use the same product id for all the countries of sale.
4. The casing should not be used to make product ids unique
If you enter xyz345 and XYZ345 as product ids for 2 different products then even though product ids are case-sensitive in the Google merchant center, it might still lead to confusion. Google feed software might have issues in filtering them or matching them across primary and supplemental feeds. So it is best not to differentiate between product ids by means of the casing but to use different combinations of letters and numbers to identify each product uniquely.
5. Do not use white spaces
Product ids should not contain white spaces within them. If there are consecutive white spaces or a product id is preceded or followed by white spaces then the Google feed software would automatically cuts them out.
6. Make sure there are no invalid Unicode characters
When you submit your product data, you must save them in an appropriate file format that is supported by Google and they must have the right file extensions. The list of supported file formats and extensions are as below:
- .gz : Gnu zip, XML or compressed TSV (recommended)
- .txt : TSV
- .zip : compressed TSV of XML as a zip file
- .xml : XML
- .bz2: compressed TSV of XML as a Bzip2 file
If your product data adheres to the above file formats and extensions then it is less likely to have any encoding issues with these product data. These issues usually happen during the process of encoding your file so you must use UTF-8 encoding for the product data. Below is listed a few examples of invalid Unicode characters:
- Function characters
- Control characters (e.g. U+200D)
- Surrogate pairs
- Private area characters
- Unassigned code points
Best practices for defining product Ids
Apart from the basic requirements, there are a few best practices that you can follow to better the performance by using optimized product data.
Using SKUs for the product Ids
An SKU of your product is a unique number and assigning that as the product ID can help Google feed software to understand your product landing page in a better manner. Also, SKUs are never identical hence using them as product Ids will ensure that you have a unique product ID always and you are not reusing any ID by mistake.
Examples
Let us now take a look at a few examples of defining a product id:
1. Product without a variant
If a product has no variant then one can have the following id:
| Product | id |
| My baby book | 01XYZ |
2. Product with variants
If a product sells in different colors and sizes then one needs to have a unique id for each of the variants. So if your product has 4 variants then the parent SKU for all the 4 products goes in the item_group_id attribute field and the id attribute would be unique which is again based on the parent SKU.
| Product | Colour | Item_group_id | id |
| Google sunglasses | Purple | 67891 | 67891-P |
| Product | Color | Item_group_id | id |
| Google sunglasses | Green | 67891 | 67891-G |
| Product | Color | Item_group_id | id |
| Google sunglasses | Violet | 67891 | 67891-V |
| Product | Color | Item_group_id | id |
| Google sunglasses | white | 67891 | 67891-W |
| Product | Color | Item_group_id | id |
| Google sunglasses | Coffee | 67891 | 67891-C |
3. The product id for multiple countries
If you are selling the same product in different countries then the product id remains the same across countries.
| Product | Country of sale | id |
| Google android phone | the United States | 01XYZ |
| Product | Country of sale | id |
| Google android phone | Canada | 01XYZ |
Conclusion
When you want to sell your product data on Google shopping ads, there are many things you must consider regarding the product feed. Its technical requirements, specific needs of each feed and how often a feed should be updated, etc.
Having your product data in a format that lets the Google feed software understand and process it correctly is very important to generate more traffic and, in turn, sales for your product.
