The free Shopping listings currently take the form of:
Organic Product Grids
Product knowledge panels
Image search results
Shopping tab
Reports to Check
GA4 – Acquisition – User Acquisition > organic SHopping (Keep in mind the recent non-PDP auto-tagging changes – might need customisation in GA4)
Search Console – > Performance Report > Add Filter > Merchant Listings
(There are reports for Search type: Web and Search Type: Image – just add the Search Appearance filter
Product Feed Attributes
Image link
Description
Rand
Grin
Mpn
Colour
Size
Material
Title – v influential for free listings
Contributes to CTR and rankings
Merchant Features
Important when optimising
Include –
Seller rating – 5 star reviews thing – requires lots of recent reviews, or at least within the last 12 months
Top quality score
Promotions – e.g. coupon codes
Local free listings
Buy Now
Paypal / google pay accepted
Loyalty programs
Products with the best price tend to rank highest
Shipping policy – same with returns policy – can affect rankings
In Search console there are warnings that show if u don’t have these set up in merchant center or in structured data.can ignore the warnings sometimes tho
Structured data – although we have seen google may unify product feeds and structured data in the near future
Influence for Free Shopping Grids & Listing –
*Most influential* Website content →Product Feeds→ structured data. *Least influential*
Make sure everything matches up.
Case study – aggregateOffer to ProductGroup
aggregate offer in structured data prevents merchant listing eligibility
Couldn’t show product variants in merchant listings
Transferred to ProductGroup schema – this enabled the shop to become eligible
Resulted in increase in pages eligible for product grids and increase in revenue
Major takeaways
- Use all of the reporting tools – Search Console, Merchant Center and GA4.
Search Console might be the most important for setup and then monitor with GA4 and Merchant Center
- Use an extensive set of product feed attributes
- Ensure you optimise the titles for the products
- Explore all the merchant features
- Make sure you have a SSP or USP like price, returns, shipping etc.
- Pay attention to the warnings etc in google search console
