Google has announced changes to their Google Shopping feeds specification. If you are using product listing ads via Google AdWords you will have to ensure your feed is updated prior to to September the 30th 2014.
Full specifications can be found here.
We advise all clients to leave their existing feeds intact whilst configuring a new feed to the new specification simultaneously to avoid any potential down time. You can use the Test Feed tool to ensure your new feed is working correctly.
It is crucial you ensure your new feed is active (and your old feed de-activated) by the 30th of September to ensure your Product Listing Ads do not stop running within AdWords.
Feed Changes in Summary (Provided by Google):
- To ensure online shopping via all mobile phones works well, you can now provide a separate mobile landing page via the ‘mobile link’ attribute.
- We are expanding our support to merchant-defined bundles. Many consumer products are sold in custom bundles, such as a camera with a lens and a bag. The feed specification now includes the ‘is bundle’ attribute, which should be used when submitting merchant-defined bundles.
- We are simplifying the ‘availability’ attribute by merging ‘in stock’ with ‘available for order’ and removing ‘available for order’. All items that can be shipped in a timely manner can now simply use the ‘in stock’ value. In addition, we are now offering an ‘availability date’ attribute that you can use to let shoppers know when pre-ordered products will be available for delivery.
- We have refreshed our apparel articles to provide more examples and clearer guidance on all things apparel. We are also adding new values to ‘age group’ and introducing two new size attributes to allow an even more detailed apparel description and filtering (‘size system’ and ‘size type’).
- Our new image quality recommendations now include even more details and tips on how to submit high quality images that draw users’ attention to your products. For example, submit images taken on a white, gray or lightly colored background – that way the product will be clearly visible and recognizable to users on all devices.
- To display all product data in the most effective way, the feed specification now clearly states how many characters can be used for most attributes.
- We have replaced the existing destination URL policy with the new landing page content policy. This refined policy comes with more background details, additional examples and explanations as well as an implementation guideline for submitting landing page URLs.
