Google has made yet another splash in online marketing with the announcement of Google Merchant Center Next during their Google Marketing Live 2023 event. According to the giant, GMC Next is a simpler way for online retailers and businesses to showcase their offerings across all the Google suites they work with.
Google Merchant Center Next gives merchants the power to control the visibility and details of their products on Google without having to engage in manually uploading feeds everywhere. Several other feature additions and enrichments have also come to light, with some different features taken down altogether.
Let’s explore this latest update—the Google Merchant Center Next—and its implications for online businesses.
Table of Contents
A Quick Overview
Google Merchant Center Next is a renovated version of its predecessor, the Google Merchant Center Classic. One of the major upgrades is a friendlier, simpler, and neater user interface.
At its core, GMC Next is still intended to simplify e-commerce management but with enriched and expanded features than those that were previously available.
For example, the platform can automatically pull product data (such as title, description, etc.) from any eCommerce website to populate product feeds. This will empower merchants by saving them time they would otherwise spend manually updating their product feeds.
Google Merchant Center Next was made available to everyone in early 2024. However, Google still manages the upgrade completely. This means that you cannot manually upgrade your system, even if you wish to take control and manage it yourself. If you’re new and just getting started, when you set up Google Merchant Center, you’ll be taken directly to the latest version.
On the other hand, it is entirely possible to roll the upgrade back to the Classic version. However, it is important to note that once the rollback is complete, there is no way to return to the Next version until Google does away with the legacy version for good.
Key Features and Upgrades
It is a given that Google Merchant Center Next has an assured advantage over the older version. Observing its enriched and novel features, the new suite is a more modern and smarter version of the previous suite
1. Automatic Product Information Population
One of the finest new features added in the GMC Next edition is the automated updating of the product feeds. Google Merchant Center Next can crawl all your online channels (website, eStore, etc.) and pull product data automatically to update the product feeds.
Automation directly reduces the workload of online marketing and advertising teams, making this suite an excellent starting point for new businesses that want to establish a competitive online presence.
2. Enhanced User Interface
Google Merchant Center Next has been designed to be neater and more user-friendly than the previous version.
some features have either been removed or relocated for improved navigation.
For instance, the “Growth” tab has been removed from the dashboard entirely. The “Merchant Center Programs” tab has also been dismissed. The “Business Details” tab has been moved to the left panel.
The “Performance” and “Promotion” tabs continue to appear as they did in GMC Classic. The only difference is that you can no longer make amends in the date range.
Additionally, the new suite does not require technical knowledge while using the tools and dashboard, which significantly flattens the learning curve.
This is particularly helpful for fledgling or smaller businesses that lack the resources or workforce to support dedicated online marketing teams. With its intuitive and smart features, anyone can operate the new dashboard without hassle.
3. Insightful Reporting
With Google Merchant Center Next, users can now access a consolidated view of all the performance insights of their products, feeds, etc., all through the Performance tab in the interface.
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Some of the important metrics that merchants can now view on a single interface are:
- Their best-selling products
- Competitor search results for the same products
- Shopper engagement in physical stores
The interface also shows merchants the traffic density received on the website through clicks on search results—through organic means, paid ads, maps, and non-product website results.
4. Product Studio
One of the most interesting features introduced to Google Merchant Center Next is Product Studio. This feature enables merchants to edit product details directly from Google Merchant Center using the ‘Edit Product’ button.
This makes it easier to modify details such as product title, description, final URL, brand, etc. Additionally, the generative AI capability of the modern GMC Next enables merchants to execute three key functions on product media:
- Create custom scenes for products using generative AI text prompts.
- Remove distracting backgrounds from product media to narrow the focus.
- Enhance image resolution and sharpness for creating high-quality images instead of conducting a reshoot.
5. Introduction to Click Potential
If you have already upgraded to Google Merchant Center Next, you can use the new metrics they introduced with this suite. Click Potential, the newly introduced metric, uses historical data from your data feeds and ads to determine the potential of your current listings to attract user clicks in search results.
GMC Next calculates this metric by comparing the performance of the products listed in your Merchant Centre with each other. This process uses past traffic, product data, and demand to determine whether the click potential is high, medium, or low. This metric is essential to optimizing the low-performing listings in your product feed.
Benefits for Businesses
There are numerous smart and compact features in Google Merchant Center Next. Businesses can gain multiple advantages when using Google Suites:
1. Streamlined Feed Management
Manual feed management often involves exhaustive data entries for every product or variant listed on websites and other online channels. This is a lot of manual work; even if managed centrally, each new detail still needs to be entered and exported to Google Ad Suites.
With GMC Next, the process of updating feeds is automated. Not only does this help minimize errors, but it also reduces manual tasks.
2. Flexible Product Information Control
The new interface now allows users to make real-time edits to the product feeds. This can be achieved through the Google Merchant Center Next dashboard and simultaneously for all the feeds.
This flexibility enables more efficient control over product information and enhances accuracy and quality. Merchants can remain competitive by editing product information in real-time and enhancing ad performance and ranking using relevant keywords.
3. Enhanced Insights
GMC’s insight and product diagnostics features make this a top-of-the-line upgrade. The reporting features now include a new metric (click potential) that helps with understanding product feed performance.
Furthermore, the new product diagnostics module can now show the current situation of products. For example, you can view what has been approved and what has not, what is under review, and what is limited (like the product description does not meet Google’s requirements or is in violation of policies, etc):
4. User-Friendly Experience
The new interface is much cleaner and more intuitively organized than the older Google Merchant Center. The latest Google Merchant Center Next would be a manageable learning curve for someone familiar with Google’s interfaces and UI.
Comparing Google Merchant Center Classic and Next
Here are the key differences in features between GMC Classic and GMC Next:
1. Product Diagnostics
Unlike earlier, the product diagnostics in GMC Next have been trimmed down to show only the most relevant, crucial ones. It includes details regarding what’s approved, limited, under review, and not approved.
2. Product Editing
In GMC Next, merchants can easily edit individual product attributes. In GMC Classic, this feature was not available. As a merchant, you could only add or delete products from your feed.
3. Product Studio
The Product Studio is unique to GMC Next. With this feature, you can create product images using AI. Moreover, you can edit and customize existing product pictures to remove the background, increase resolution, etc.
4. Insights and Metrics
Unlike in GMC Classic, in GMC Next, all performance-related data and insights are clubbed under the “Performance” tab. Moreover, GMC Next also offers a new metric called “Click Potential,” which shows the probability of visitors clicking on a product ad.
5. Other Features
Apart from this, GMC Next is anticipated to roll out two previous GMC features that weren’t available in GMC Classic – “Feed Rules“ and “Supplemental Feeds.”
In totality, if you use both versions, you will find the top 3 differences in user experience;
- GMC Next boasts a cleaner, streamlined user interface than GMC Classic.
- GMC Next currently has fewer features than GMC Classic.
- GMC Next might have a bit of a learning curve involved compared to GMC Classic.
Transition to Merchant Center Next
If you have decided to try GMX Next, you may be wondering how the upgrade works. For those looking to switch to Merchant Center Next, Google Merchant Center Next follows a unique rollout strategy and became available for all businesses starting in early 2024.
1. Rollout Strategy
Most interestingly, Google and Google alone are handling the rollout of the upgraded avatar of Google Merchant Center. This means there is nothing you need to do to upgrade your platform to GMC Next. When the time comes, it will be automatically updated to the newer version, and you can start using it like a normal day at work.
2. Preparation Guide
Since businesses need not do anything at their end to switch from the older version to GMC Next, barely any preparation needs to be done. However, it is important to note that a rollout at such a huge scale takes time, and it could be months before your platform sees the change.
In addition, you may realize that the GMC Next platform doesn’t yet have the features you need. It is important to keep in mind that Google is continuing to innovate with this new platform and making all the Classic GMC experiences available on it. Should you switch back to the older version, you would lose the chance to come back to the Google Merchant Center Next version until the older version is discontinued.
Therefore, the best strategy is to think carefully through the features you absolutely need and whether a rollback would delay your business until you can upgrade again.
Potential Limitations and Considerations
Even with its improved interface and shiny new features, every platform has an Achilles’ heel. Listed below are some limitations of Google Merchant Center Next. You would want to consider the following:
1. Platform Limitations
Knowing that even Google Merchant Center Next is thoroughly focused on remaining integrated with Google products may be limiting. Although it wasn’t different from the older version, it still stunts the business’s capabilities to formulate flexible marketing or ad campaigns that may yield more with cross-platform compatibility.
2. Feature Comparison
Compared to the Classic Google Merchant Center, the GMC Next offers little flexibility in optimizing feeds. Although the data import is largely automated and mostly accurate, there are chances of inevitable errors that may need to be noticed.
Furthermore, for businesses with high-volume inventories and feeds, the process of on-platform product feed editing could be more helpful. It can only be done individually for each product, which is extremely effort-intensive.
3. Learning Curve
Even though the platform’s latest iteration is being touted as intuitive and easy to use, some initial learning is involved. Like a new platform with certain new features and a rearrangement of the existing ones, Google Merchant Center Next may require more time to understand where and how each new and modified addition can be accessed.
Conclusion
Google Merchant Center Next is a significant leap toward modernization and making eCommerce more intelligent. That said, it still lacks certain essential features, like feed rules or supplemental feeds.
With that said, Google engineers are tirelessly working to add more features and streamline the new upgrade, making it a promising and performant contender in the niche of eCommerce management.
If your business, too, is searching for ways to achieve high marketing efficiency by leveraging Google, wait patiently for your Google Merchant Center account to upgrade to Google Merchant Center Next. With every tool you would ever need, you can expand your feed management toolset (which GMC Next lacks) using AdNabu, a key product feed optimization platform.
AdNabu is AI-based feed management software for Shopify that provides multiple marketplaces, product optimization, instant syncing with Shopify, and a secure environment for all operations. Visit the AdNabu website to explore the full scope of its features today!
FAQs
1. What is Google Merchant Center Next?
Google Merchant Center Next is an eCommerce management platform that empowers businesses to streamline their online marketing and advertising campaigns. It is an upgrade over the previous version of Google Merchant Center. It provides several new features while enhancing the existing features of the Classic GMC platform.
The core functionalities remain the same, while the new upgrade polishes the interface for ease of use.
2. What are the differences between Google Merchant Center and Google Merchant Center Next?
While Google Merchant Center Next contains the same signature as Google Merchant Center, the two have marked differences. First, GMC Next is more user-friendly and has a neater, more intuitive interface.
Second, it introduces a new metric called Click Potential that wasn’t available in the previous version.
Furthermore, the GMC Next platform can import product feed data directly and automatically from web channels. You can also view your feed performance data consolidated into a single view in the Performance tab, which wasn’t available with the Classic version.
3. Does Merchant Center Next Offer All The Features Of The Current Merchant Center?
Google Merchant Center Next offers only some features that Classic Google Merchant Center offers. For example, supplemental feeds and feed rules are absent in the GMC. The new interface also lacks a direct way to see raw product feeds. Some tabs have been rearranged, while others have been removed completely.
Google is continuously working to improve this platform, which assures us that with each new upgrade, there will be more features and enhancements that it currently lacks.
4. How to ‘Add Products’ To Google Merchant Center Next?
To add products in the Google Merchant Center Next:
- Sign into your Merchant Center account.
- From there, go to the Navigation menu and select Products.
- Click on All Products, and then click on the Add Products button. This will enable you to add the desired products one by one.
You can then fill out the product details later. You can also use the Merchant Center dashboard to fill out the product details. This flexibility makes the GMC Next a promising upgrade.
5. How to import products to the Google Merchant Center Next?
Google Merchant Center Next can automatically import your products from an online store or eCommerce platform. The automated feed update tool makes it extremely easy for businesses to update product information on their listings quickly.
If you want to do it from a feed file, you can upload the file to your Google Merchant Center and import the products from the file.
6. When Google Merchant Next be fully available?
Google Merchant Center Next aims to achieve a full transition from the Classic version by early 2024. The rollout is controlled completely by Google, so there is no need for businesses to pause or compromise their operations to engage in the upgrade.
However, merchants can control the rollback if they wish to switch to Classic.
7. What happens to the existing features of Merchant Center with the switch to Next?
When your business switches to the Google Merchant Center Next version, you will be presented with the new version’s features. For example, several features, such as supplemental feeds and the Growth tab, have been removed from the Next version. Access to the features of the older version will only be allowed if you decide to roll back.
However, Google is continuously adding new features to the interface as the rollout progresses, ensuring that businesses have whatever they need on the platform.
8. How does Merchant Center Next improve insights and reporting?
Google Merchant Center Next consolidates all the insights and reporting into the Performance tab. This lets users view the entire insight on a single interface, giving a more comprehensive visual of what’s happening. This drastically enhances the interface’s usability and the time taken to make data-based decisions.
Additionally, GMC Next introduced a new metric called Click Potential, which gives better insight into potential product feed performance.
9. Can I switch back to the classic Google Merchant Center?
Yes, you can switch back to the Classic Google Merchant Center. You can do it by clicking on Help and Support in the upper right-hand corner of your Merchant Center Next dashboard. From there, click on “Use Merchant Center Classic.”
However, once you do that, you will lose the chance to return to GMC Next. This can only happen when Google discontinues the Classic version. Therefore, think carefully about the rollback.
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