HUGE Changes to Merchant Center (Episode 528)

0:18Welcome to the Paid Search Podcast. I am your guest host, Joey Bidner. And today we're going to be talking about Google Shopping, specifically optimizing the product feed in Merchant Center, because I need to bring you all up to speed on a whack load of updates. Google is going through this like a steam train. They are rolling out new fields for us to optimize towards, for us to focus on and improving our search term relevancy, improving our ability to match our products to better queries. So I'm going to be going through a ton of new fields. I should also mention a good portion of this is dedicated to new fields focused on how to match in AI searches.

1:10They've released a ton of new fields called conversational attributes for AI conversations. So we're going to get into a lot of detailed nitty-gritty stuff all around Merchant Center today. But before I get into that, I need to mention our show sponsor Optio. Speaking of conversational search and conversational assistance, my favorite part of Optio right now is its ability to leverage AI in conversing with your data. Your Google Ads account, your meta account, any of your channels now actually, it's cross-channel, is directly integrated to its ChatGPT integration. So when you're in your account, you select the account or channel you want to talk to and you just start talking.

2:07You just start asking, hey, I'm seeing a drop in my conversions this month? What other data points can you correlate to that? Hey, my ROAS is down. Can you do a search term analysis and tell me, is it because my search terms are going higher funnel? You can use it to do a lot of the heavy lifting that, you know, we always have ideas on things we want to analyze, but might not have the time to do the actual cross-referencing and detailed work, that's what I'm using AI chat for, specifically in Optio, because of that easy integration. And on top of that, they service all kinds of really useful data points in their UI to allow you to see the things you might have missed.

3:01You know, one of my favorite tools in Optio is the CPC bands. So CPC bands are this new thing where it will show you different ranges of cost per clicks that you're paying for and the returns on those CPCs. So this helps me identify what a real ceiling of CPC should be. You know, sometimes I might say like, oh, in my search term report, that's a really high CPC. I might want to make my cap there. But then when I go to my CPC bands, I actually see, oh, that range is actually really profitable. Let's go a little higher than that and make it that my CPC limit. So that's just a few of the interesting features with Optio.

3:43And I want to remind all of you that exclusive to you as a valued listener, you get a free 28 day risk free trial. All you got to do is go to Optio.com that's O-P-T-E-O dot com, hop in the little chat window, mention that you heard about Optio on the paid search podcast, and you will get a free 28-day trial. So give it a try today and let us know what you think. All right, so I have been really looking forward to making this episode because I have been truly in the weeds of understanding all of these new fields. Google has given us a ton of new fields and functionalities in Merchant Center to optimize for.

4:29And I have been working really hard to understand them all. And I'm going to be doing my best to explain that to you today. Now, I'm not going to be talking about the basics and fundamentals of product feed optimization and Merchant Center, just because the episode would be like an hour and a half long. And we've done episodes on this already. So if you want some details on the basics of Merchant Center and all that jazz, go to episode 366 or episode 410. They're a little bit older, but they're still true and they still work. One of the beautiful things about all these updates to Merchant Center is they haven't really sunsetted anything.

5:13And that's what I really like. Merchant Center has not fundamentally changed in this big rollout. They've just added on new things for us to do. Unlike the rest of Google, where they're taking things away to add something, they haven't taken anything away. So all of your previous optimizations are still very important, still hold true. The way that we optimize them hasn't changed. So those episodes, you know, 366 and 410, they are still very relevant. So you can listen to them without in fear that they're old news. So I'm going to be talking today about two things really. One, changes that have come to images and videos.

6:01Yes, I said it, videos. Videos in Merchant Center, pretty cool. But there's a lot of changes to images. But most importantly, I want to talk about this thing called conversational attributes. Google has given us a whole set of new fields that are specifically for this new era of conversational search, talking to chatbots about your product, about products, about what people are looking for. And just our titles and descriptions and Google product category was nowhere near enough to match to the level of granularity a conversation with an AI chat can provide. So they've given us, yeah, a whack load of new fields that we're going to be covering today.

6:51But to start, I want to start simple. We're going to start with images. So when it comes to images, like everything, more is better. So Google, this one is not necessarily new, but I want to add it as a reminder. You can have up to 10 images per product. Usually by default, just one image is used. The first image on your product page, for example, is used. But if you have various images, you can upload those various images, but you have to explicitly take that action to do it. It's not going to do it by default. Whether you're using the API connection with shopping or you're using a third-party tool, you need to assign image 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

7:35Now, they have added a new image, separate field, called lifestyle image. So your product images might just be, you know, product, white background, but you can add a lifestyle image, somebody interacting with your product, which I think is huge, you know. Sure, this lifestyle image, I don't believe will be surfaced as the main image first. That'll still be your image one. But when somebody clicks through in shopping and is looking through the product, they'll be able to see that lifestyle image. And who knows, me just speculating that Google's AI in the background will use the context of the image to see how it's being interacted with.

8:17I think that personally, I think that might be leaning into this because how AI sees and reads images is very real. So I'm not, yeah, I'm just speculating that that will also be used contextually, but I think that's really interesting. Now, the big change that Google announced with images was an image size requirement. Now, this is one you're all going to want to really pay attention to because there is risk of disapproval. Starting January, 2027, there's going to be a new image size requirement of 500 by 500 pixels. If you are under that, you will be disapproved. And they're recommending that you make your images as large as 1500 by 1500.

9:03And what they're explaining is that they want to be able to use these images across surfaces. So for example, your merchant center feed can be used to populate images on TVs and YouTube, right? You've seen it before where you're watching a video, you get an ad for a product. It's like maybe even a video ad, but then the product itself is listed under the video, like that pinned product to the video. And if somebody's got a big TV, they need a big rich image there. So that's just one example of why they're making these image requirements because Google does not want pixely, crummy images surfaced on any of their channels.

9:47Now, my first question on my side was, okay, like if I'm pulling images from the website and 500 by 500 is the minimum, will that slow down my website if I make all the images 500 by 500? I'm not a website person, but I surfaced this question to my network on LinkedIn. And I was reassured that it's slowing down the website as less to do with the pixel size, more to do with the compression and formatting of the picture. So that's one thing I'm asking my clients to do is, you know, ask the web team, yes, update all these images, but make sure they're being compressed properly because the worst thing you can do is slow down your image, slow down your website, especially if you're doing like the bigger images, like 1500 by 1500.

10:34That was really what I was concerned with because I want the biggest images possible, but I don't want my site being slowed down because that affects everything. So just make sure the work is being done for those compressions. Now video. Video I think is very cool. This one was just announced recently and we are going to be able to put video attached to our products. Now I'm not quite sure how these are going to be surfaced but at the very least it will be something that will be able to be seen when somebody is in Google Shopping and they stay in Google Shopping and look at the whole product in shopping.

11:11And the way that I'm thinking about video is I'm not putting my user-generated content with super salesy stuff. I'm doing a bit more product-focused images of videos. Videos showing the interactions. videos maybe quickly describing the features and benefits videos that are a bit more focused further down the funnel when somebody is in their consideration phase and we can have up to 10 videos per product and the way that i'm thinking about this further is there's there's a few different categories of how we can layer these videos in i think product level videos would be good. So if you have a specific SKU and you have a specific video about that product, you can assign a video to that product.

12:04But then if you have a specific brand and you have a video talking about the brand itself, the product line of the brand, you know, for example, I've got a client that sells high-end kitchen knives. They'll do videos talking about the product line of their whole brand that they sell. And I want to assign that video to all of the videos, to all of the products in that brand. Or maybe you have a video about a specific category of product, you know, specific product type. I have a client that sells patio umbrellas. We have a video about their cantilever umbrellas. You know, we've got like six or seven cantilever umbrellas, but a video that kind of covers the whole line.

12:46I want to layer that video across all of my cantilever umbrella product types. Now, doing it to that level of granularity is a bit more complex. You probably need a third-party software, like Data Feed Watch, for example, but it's very doable, and that's what I'm going to be doing. I'm going to be layering all three. I'm going to be doing the brand videos, the product type videos, and the SKU-related videos. And because every product can have up to 10 videos, that one SKU that might be in all three of those categories can have all three of those videos. So I think it's pretty interesting. Again, we don't really know how this is going to be used or surfaced.

13:28So at this point, I'm still speculating. I'm uploading my first ones as we speak because this is brand new. But yeah, I had to mention it because it is, I think, very interesting. and it also supports google's real push of video in general you know google if you've listened to the google marketing live event for the last couple years that's google's big event where they talk to us marketers about all the exciting stuff they're doing video has really been in the forefront of their focus they're really trying to go like cross-channel with more engaging content not just like product and text. So I really like that we're getting video in Merchant Center, and I'm personally excited about leveraging it.

14:16No, we probably won't be able to measure its impact, which is the case with a lot of these new changes. You're going to hear a lot of the changes I'm about to talk about have very little measurable functionalities, and that's just the reality we live in. But just because I can't measure its impact doesn't mean I don't think it's worth doing. I think we're in an era of Google Ads where, you know, it's less about the button pushing in platform, the day-to-day bid adjustments. It's more about the data we give the system. I think this is the real fundamental shift in Google and how it's shifting. It's

15:04fuels the algorithm and how we can leverage the algorithm to go in a direction we want. And that's going to segue me to my next point with conversational attributes, because this is going to be a field that zero, zero measurability, really. But I am putting the utmost level of importance to these conversational attributes, because I think they're so valuable, because you will see the rich level of data we're going to be giving Merchant Center is unparalleled. Titles and descriptions are like peanuts compared to what we're given now to really fuel the system. So yeah, I'm starting to care less about how we can measure every little thing, though I will still kick and scream about it.

15:54It shouldn't hold you back from spending the time to give Google this data is all I really want to say. All right, so conversational attributes. This is really exciting because as we all know, chat-based search is the future, right? It's kind of the future. Whether we're there or not now, I'm still putting a lot of weight into the importance of these fields, not just for conversational attributes, but for regular search too. It's more context. It's giving Google more context for your product that even if it's not something that's going to be used in a conversational search, I think it will still help standard search on just the Google search bar on a three or four word search or a two to three word search.

16:40I think this is fundamentally important still. Okay, so before waxing lyrical about it, I'm going to talk about the different fields. So there are a number of them. I'm going to list them off real quick and then we're going to talk about each one. So we have product highlight, product detail, related product, question and answer, popularity rank, and document link. Now each one of these has its own kind of deep dive into how to optimize for it and what to do with it. And that's what we're going to be talking about. So let's start with product highlight. So product highlight is kind of like taking your product title and injecting it with steroids.

17:27So if you recall with product title, that was always our prime way to match to somebody's query, right? We had 150 characters, or I shouldn't say had, we still have. Product titles are not going anywhere. We have 150 characters. And the idea with, you know, your product title optimization is you want to fill that title with all the relevant parts of your, the relevant features and benefits of your product that somebody might be searching for. So I'll use the example of a patio umbrella. Our patio umbrella titles are like cantilever umbrella built for high wind. You know, call out a specific brand name of the fabric sunbelt, sunbrella fabric in black eight to 10 feet.

18:15Right. That way, if somebody types in sunbrella patio umbrellas, it triggers. If somebody types in patio umbrellas for high wind, it triggers. If somebody types in 10-foot patio umbrella, the match happens. Now, product highlight is we have up to 100 product highlights we can assign to every product. And they have 150 characters each. And these are designed for us to write our features and benefits. Our sales pitch is basically in here. So we want to say things like patio umbrellas built for high wind. We want to say things like easily movable patio umbrellas with the wheels on the base. We want to say things like easy to operate and open with the crank function.

19:07You know, it's really a bit more salesy, but focused on features and benefits. That's the key here. And again, 150 characters, 100 of them. Now, I'm not using 100. I think it was a bit ridiculous. They made 100. I think 10 is fine. But it's there. So that's one of the really interesting ones. Product highlight isn't exactly new. It's actually been around for a little while. But it is looped into this conversational attribute field. Now, product detail is the second one. This one is specifically focused on technical specs, material sizes, diameters, radiuses, like all the tech specs. So this is where we're putting like aluminum pole, fiberglass ribs, water fillable base, eight millimeter diameter pole insert for the base.

20:03all those like tech specs go go here and these matter because sometimes people for example somebody's looking for a patio umbrella base for their existing patio umbrella they might search for a universal patio umbrella base that fits an a a 10 centimeter pole diameter how would they know to match to our product without this like this is and man that level of granularity is how i search for stuff i don't think we can put it past this that all people wouldn't search for that no no people do search like that people do search like i search like that so this is phenomenal because it is giving us the opportunity to fill in all these tech speccy stuff to match to those kinds of queries.

21:00So I love it. All right, the next one. This one's pretty exciting, though kind of complex. Related product. So related product has sub-attributes. So this is where we can say, oh, you're interested in that product? You might also be interested in this product or that product needs to be bought with this product. It's part of a set or it's an accessory. so the the various sub-attributes are accessory required part part of a set often bought with substitute and different brand so again i'll break these down quickly so accessory i'll give you an example you got a patio umbrella the accessory might be an attachable light and you can now connect those two skews so in the conversation it can be recommended required part would be like it needs to come with batteries oh we have batteries here's the skew add it adds it adds to cart a lot of these things i think are designed to help with building your average order value building your cart allowing people to recognize that you need to add this or you might want to add this to the cart if you're buying that.

22:13Part of a set. So this one's interesting. The patio umbrella doesn't come with a base. You have to buy it separately. So the two are part of a set. So it's, oh, you're buying the patio umbrella. You might want to use this base. Now this is where it gets interesting. We've got five different bases and they match to different umbrellas. And we're able to say, oh, you're, if you're buying this base, this umbrella, you're going to want that base because that's the matching one or you're buying this table this is the matching chair set phenomenal like i think this is excellent um often bought with is another one i don't have a example for that but i think it's kind of self-explanatory if you i guess it often bought with would be like people often bought this skirt with this shirt because it's a similar style maybe So up next is Substitute and Different Brand.

23:09These are both I consider like substitutes, but Different Brand is really interesting. If you carry various brands and two of them are kind of similar, maybe one's a bit of a better price option than the other one, but they're very similar and they're competitive or comparable, you can link the SKUs, which is so cool. now the next one is what's being most talked about online this is the one that's being most talked about as one of the more important ones q and a so this is where at the skew level we can give a q and a set of conversations we can put in common questions that are asked and give the answers.

23:57So I've got clients that are, you know, scraping their Amazon conversations, scraping their backend data to find conversations that have been had or asked or even emails where there's been specific questions asked about the product. And this is where we can give those questions and those answers. And I think this one's really interesting to think about. And I where you want to use this one, in my opinion, again, speculation, in the context of talking about your product once they found your product. So unlike the other fields that I think are more used for acquiring a customer in the sense where it's like someone is searching about a topic or about a product category and it's matching to you, Q &A is more about once they found you, they're interacting about your product.

24:55What you don't want to, I think, put in Q &A is like, what's the best patio umbrella? Our patio umbrella is the best patio umbrella. No, this is not about going outside of your product. This is questions once they found you. That's how I think we should think about this because you can easily waste a lot of time over building Q &A. And the same can be said about all these categories. all of these categories can be overbuilt and overthought and i'll be honest they're not easy to build out actually even with a third-party software there's a lot of specifications of format of how to actually import the data maybe we'll talk about that in another episode because it is a bit of a beast in its own and today i just wanted to focus on understanding them.

25:46But what I'm getting at is each of these fields has a required amount of effort and a time investment. So we need to think of them strategically so you don't waste your time. And Q &A is one that I think we could easily waste a lot of time. So I want you to think about it in the context of somebody has already found your brand. They're asking about your product. Keep it at that. Now, moving on from there, document link. This is super cool. Document link is if you have any kind of PDF documents, if you have a instruction manual, an assembly manual, if you've got sales documents, PDFs, you can upload them again at the SKU level and Google's going to read them.

26:31We all know that these AI softwares, if you've ever uploaded a PDF into one, they are phenomenal, phenomenal at reading documents. You can get them to summarize a book for you if you want. So they're leveraging that. And we can put our marketing material, I think it's really interesting to put like assembly, assembly material or tech specs or certifications, any kind of documents you have, you can put the link, it's got to be hosted online, obviously. So if it's on your website or on a server somewhere, you put the document link there and Google's going to read that for context that will be used across your merchant center to better match you to queries that people are making.

27:17Like one of the examples that I'm thinking of is if you've got a product that requires assembly and your, let's say, assembly instructions kind of show that it's a five-minute assembly. Like it's going to have all that data and be able to tell somebody how to assemble it even. I think it's really interesting. But beyond that, I think even uploading like sales PDFs, like if you've got info sheets and stuff like that, I think it will be really valuable, really valuable to put in there. Okay, so last we have popularity rank. Now, popularity rank is a bit of a funny one, but I think it's going to be helpful.

27:54You're essentially giving a rank of your products from zero to 100 on the popularity of them within your product mix. So it's kind of telling Google what your best sellers are. And I'll tell you the way that I'm thinking about this. I don't, The way that I'm doing this is I'm taking my products and I'm splitting them into three categories. I've got my top 1 % of products, my top 5 % of products, my top 10 % of products, and then my average products. So four categories. And I'm basically giving top 1 % a rank of 100, top 5%, 90, top 10%, 80, and average products 50. The idea is just to have some level of delineation.

28:39So Google knows this is a better seller than that. I'm not really sure how Google is going to be leveraging it. Like if someone's maybe if it's like if someone's asking about a mix of products and someone just says like, what are the best sellers? What are the most commonly bought? I don't know. That's how they would use it. I personally thought it wouldn't be that big of a mover. But there's a lot of talk online about this one being one of the more important ones. I mean, I personally think product detail, related product, Q &A and document link, all of those are more important in my opinion.

29:15But there's a lot of speculation on the importance of this one and it's pretty easy to do. So I think it's worth running in there. So now that I've mentioned all those fields, I want to talk about a few different ways and how to optimize for them. and to talk about comparing them to the fundamentals, the previous fields that we've been using and how they are still, I think, the most important thing. And all of this stuff is kind of like the icing. The conversational attributes are the sprinkles, the sweet little cherry on top. But we still want to focus on the fundamentals. So before I discuss all of that, I want to mention once more our channel sponsor Optio and to remind you to give it a try because a lot of the times when we're managing accounts we don't know what we don't know.

30:13There's all kinds of valuable pieces of information that are buried in your account that unless you thought to check could go under the radar and could be a missed opportunity and that's what I love about the dashboards in Optio. They have a beautiful UI, a great UI, and they do a really good job of surfacing all kinds of data points to make you aware of something that could be leveraged or negated. And they do it in a way that's not overwhelming. I personally don't feel data overwhelmed when I go into Optio. So I find that, yeah, they do a really good job of the UI, but most importantly, I am a freakish fan of their chat functionalities.

30:59And I should also mention they're starting to build a lot of really specific skills in there. So a skill is basically like a pre-built tool that you can use to do a specific action. They spent a lot of time massaging. So they have a tool on analyzing and updating your ad copy. It's a tool that helps to identify which pieces of your ad copy have like lower click-through rates and which ones would be worth swapping. And then if you want help with AI to update that ad copy, you can, but even just a sweep of just analyze all my ad copy and tell me which ones could be swapped out. Like really cool.

31:37So give them a try 28 day free trial. That's opteo.com. Hop in the chat window and mention that you heard about them on the paid search podcast to unlock that free 28-day trial. Okay, so back to updating these conversational attributes. So it, I won't lie, they're not that easy to optimize for. They're a new field and right now they're still pretty tricky. They have a lot of formatting, technical specs, technical formatting that maybe if it's requested we'll talk about in a future episode, but they're not all that easy. Now, one of the ways that I did this for my clients was I first approached the clients that were really fluent with AI, ones that had their stores integrated with AI, like with Claude or ChatGPT even, and I built them a document.

32:37And this document had links to all of the Google documentation for each of these fields. And with my Claude subscription, I made a template for them. So I gave this to Claude. I explained all the fields best I could and got it to read the documentation. And then I gave Claude a couple examples and got it to build a few samples, a few samples of what these fields would look like in a spreadsheet. Because the way that we update this is through, well, there's a number of ways, but the way that I'm doing it is through a supplemental feed. So now we're getting a little technical. I won't dive too deep in the technicalities, but I need to mention that.

33:17We're building a spreadsheet to be used as a supplemental feed, which basically layers over your current feed. And it just has all these fields and cells. And I basically made a sample, massaged it a little bit, had to go a bit back and forth for the formatting, but it wasn't very hard. Gave that to the client. They gave that to their Claude system that's plugged into their website. and within a day we were able to do an export that only had to go back and forth like twice it was it was quite simple and rolled it out easy as that you also don't need to do all of them at once i think it's it's valuable to do one thing at a time so maybe focus on one of these conversational attributes at a time and roll them out slowly and that segues me to my next point of I don't want you all to feel like you have FOMO, that fear of missing out, that we need to jump on this right now and we're missing out on doing this.

34:18There's a saying in a French-Canadian saying, we go, whola, back down a little bit, take it easy. We don't want to overwhelm ourselves with all of these overwhelming fields. It can be overwhelming. When I first learned about all this, I was overwhelmed big time. We can take it slow, roll it out slowly because one thing is still true. The fundamentals of feed management still apply at the same weight they had before. And that's our title optimization, our descriptions, GTINs, if you have them, if they're a product that has GTINs, and Google product category. These are still the bread and butter of Merchant Center.

35:03Everything else is icing. Everything else is sweetness added on top. And if I were to inherit an account today and I was auditing it, those are still the first things I look at. Those are still the first things I optimize for. The conversational attributes are secondary and they should be done slowly over time. But title, description, GTIN, Google product category, that needs to happen right now, right? That is the most important. So I just want to remind you all of this just to give perspective in what to focus on and to hopefully ease whatever tensions you might feel that I felt when I first learned about these because I had big-time FOMO and I thought I had to do it all at once and walked myself off the ledge of trying to do too much at once.

35:58because it's not that you can break the feed by doing too much at once when it comes to these because they're not affecting previously you know they're not affecting any of your previous fields but you'll just drive yourself crazy and you maybe you'll make mistakes in the process of doing so so i just hope that um yeah you take it slow and uh do it right so okay that's that's it for me today feel free to reach out if you have any questions um you know uh email chris at um actually not sure chris's email on top of my head but paid search podcast.com you could submit questions there i'd be happy to answer any of your questions if you have them in a future episode or hop into the the questions um hop into the comments area on youtube be happy to to jump in there and answer any of your questions there.

36:54So until next time, see ya.