WooCom­merce Google Product Feed: How to create it

Placing your WooCom­merce store’s products on Google Shopping is a very good way to invite potential customers to your site. Even though you can create a product feed on WooCom­merce manually, it is much easier to use a plugin – read on for more tips and rec­om­men­da­tions.

It’s hardly news that online shoppers use Google rather than searching for a product through in­di­vid­ual sites at random – this is es­pe­cial­ly the case when searching for specified products. There, the re­spec­tive offers are listed clearly and ideally, you can get the desired product at the lowest price with just a few clicks. Alongside Google Ads, Google Shopping is a good choice for your WooCom­merce store. Using Google Shopping, you can promote in­di­vid­ual items in a highly efficient way. To do this, you generate a WooCom­merce Google Product feed and this in turn attracts new customers. This is best done with a suitable plugin that fa­cil­i­tates your product’s placement and takes into account the fields that Google requires.

There are several benefits of getting your WooCom­merce store placed promi­nent­ly in the Google Shopping Feed. The most important ones include:

• Better vis­i­bil­i­ty: One advantage of pre­sent­ing your WooCom­merce store in a Product Feed is the better vis­i­bil­i­ty of your products. Even small stores have the op­por­tu­ni­ty to appear in a prominent position.
• Lead Gen­er­a­tion: This step will not only make your store easier to find, it will also attract the “right” visitors, i.e. (potential) customers who have searched for exactly the product that you have to offer.
• Lower drop-off rate: Visitors stay longer on your website and possibly find more products you offer.
• SEO: Better product vis­i­bil­i­ty helps search engines find your product, which ul­ti­mate­ly benefits your entire site. In com­bi­na­tion with an optimized AdWords campaign you can hold your own on the market this way, even with a smaller store.

Google requires a lot of product in­for­ma­tion for an item from your WooCom­merce store to be included in the shopping feed. Some details may vary depending on the type of product. The in­for­ma­tion provided could be:

• Product ID
• Product name
• Product De­scrip­tion
• URL
• Product Category
• Google Product Category
• Image URL
• Avail­abil­i­ty URL
• Regular price
• Condition
• Man­u­fac­tur­er
• Global Trade Item Number (GTIN)
• Man­u­fac­tur­er Number
• Iden­ti­fi­er
• Content for adults
• Multipack
• Bundle
• Material
• Age group
• Color
• Gender
• Size
• Pattern
• Item group ID

Just like with Shopify and similar al­ter­na­tives there are also lots of different WooCom­merce plugins for Google Shopping. These ensure that in­di­vid­ual products are well placed, and also make it easier for you to get an overview of your as­sort­ment. Although it is also possible to store Google Sheets directly in the Merchant Center, using a WooCom­merce Google Product Feed plugin is much more rec­om­mend­ed. These usually work by creating a feed of your products and it is syn­chro­nized with the Google Merchant Center in real time. The plugins au­to­mat­i­cal­ly request the data that is later requested by Google.

An ideal option is the Google Product Feed plugin by WooCom­merce. It costs $79 per year and is easy to use. The plugin offers numerous fields so that you can describe your products very precisely and thus place them better on Google. In addition, you can set up default settings for product groups, create vari­a­tions and quickly make ad­just­ments.

Product Feed Pro is also a very popular plugin, with which you can create feeds for Google as well as for Bing or Facebook. The plugin impresses with a good filter function, with which you can also weight and rate products according to their pop­u­lar­i­ty. Product Feed Pro also offers the ad­di­tion­al fields required by Google. The plugin is available in a free and a com­mer­cial version, which offers more features.

With YITH you can create unlimited feeds for Google Shopping. The usage is very simple and intuitive through WooCom­merce short­codes. In just a few minutes you can generate feeds that are optimized for Google and contain all necessary fields. You can create the feeds either as XML or TXT files.

The Product Feed Manager For WooCom­merce also offers feed creation for Facebook and other online sales platforms besides Google. The plugin is very user-friendly and logically struc­tured, so the feed creation takes a few minutes. There are lots of filter options and, in addition to the mandatory fields, there are also ad­di­tion­al fields for cat­e­gories, so that you always have a good overview and your product line remains up to date.

If you want to get your products well-placed in searches, you’ll need to generate a Google Product feed in WooCom­merce. We’ll explain how this works step by step. The important thing to note here is that you should take the Google spec­i­fi­ca­tions into account when creating your feed. A plugin will provide you with the necessary steps for this. If you want to create the feed manually, you can follow the list above. Below, we’ve shown an example of the creation with the Product Feed Manager For WooCom­merce.

Step 1: First, go to the dashboard of your online store created with WordPress and open the WooCom­merce plugin for Google Shopping.

Step 2: Click on “Create Feed” to create a new feed.

Step 3: Here you can make some basic settings. The name, the file format and the rules for vari­a­tions are requested.

Step 4: Now you have the pos­si­bil­i­ty to select or exclude products. You can place your entire as­sort­ment or only in­di­vid­ual articles.

Step 5: Next, set the intervals at which you want your product feed to be updated by WooCom­merce. You can also decide whether to include vari­a­tions of in­di­vid­ual products and different names.

Step 6: Now select the desired merchant type from a list. Besides Google, you have other options with many plugins, but they may require different spec­i­fi­ca­tions.

Step 7: If you choose Google, the plugin will au­to­mat­i­cal­ly show all mandatory fields for the platform. The file format also adjusts au­to­mat­i­cal­ly, since Google only accepts XML.

Step 8: Now add the in­di­vid­ual items and fill in the necessary fields.

Step 9: Once you have filled in every­thing, generate the feed. Check all the in­for­ma­tion again thor­ough­ly.

Step 10: Finally, send the feed to Google Merchant with one click. For this, you can specify the intervals at which it should be updated.

For other plugins, the order of the in­di­vid­ual steps may vary a little, but the basic principle is usually similar.