Last updated - July 8, 2021
Shopping Ads are a sure fire way for any online retail business to acquire new customers, increase product visibility and drive sales. And, Shopping Ad campaigns need WooCommerce Google product feed files. So, read on to find out what the top 5 plugins for generating product feeds are.
Introduction
Your WooCommerce store is up and ready. You’ve spent countless hours tweaking things to make it just perfect and still you see no sales. As there are tens of millions of online stores on the internet (7 million+ sites running on WooCommerce alone), visibility on Search Engine Results Pages is extremely competitive. This is where Shopping Ad campaigns come into the picture.
How do Shopping Ads work?
Shopping Ads use targeting technology to serve relevant ads for a user’s searches. They provide a clear product image, plain URL of the landing page, the price, availability and in some cases, promotional messages. These factors in conjunction allow visitors to make fast buying decisions. Shopping Ads have outperformed all traditional ad formats when it comes to retail. Since launch, retailers have taken advantage of Shopping Ads to realize their business goals.
To list products on Shopping Ads, you’ll need an AdWords account, a Google Merchant Center account and your WooCommerce Google product feed file. Merchant Center houses your store’s product data in a format that enables Google to understand what you wish to sell. AdWords is where you will create your Shopping Ads campaigns and optimize them.
Need for Plugins
Google’s motive is to provide users with the best experience possible. They achieve this by providing reliable relevant answers to search queries. Hence, Google needs to understand what you wish to sell and a properly formatted product feed file is whats used.
Google’s Product Feed Specifications:
Google has stringent rules regarding the acceptable format for WooCommerce Google product feed files. There is certain information that is deemed mandatory by Google, like Product ID, Title, Description, Category, etc. Moreover, Google’s taxonomy has thousands of possible categories, some of them mandatory. It is extremely tough to create and maintain a WooCommerce product feed file that is compliant with Google. Even more so if your store has products in the thousands and more.
WooCommerce Google Product Feed File Optimization:
Additionally, you can’t simply expect the sales to roll in once you’ve set up your ad campaign. You’ll need to perform a lot of testing and tweaking to get to that advertising sweet spot. Shopping Ads offer so much customization and targeting but what could slow you down is managing and generating Google compliant feed files.
Hence, using a plugin to manage your feed file needs is a great way to streamline this process while adding more functionality. We’ve gone ahead and compiled a list of the top five plugins you can use for this purpose.
1. ELEX Google Product Feed Plugin:
ELEX Google Product Feed Plugin is the perfect solution for your product feed generation woes. It offers so much more functionality despite being the most affordable of the lot (not including the free ones).
With this plugin, generating WooCommerce Google Product Feed files to specification becomes a breeze. Some noteworthy features of this plugin are:
- Creating unlimited product feed files:
- Intuitive Mapping of categories and attributes
- Setting refresh schedules for your feed files
- Batch managing your existing feed files
But what sets it apart from the rest is the unparalleled customer support. So if customer support is something you value in addition to all those features, you should definitely check out this plugin. Single site subscription is priced at 69 USD for a year, 5 sites for 99 USD a year and 25 sites at 199 USD a year.
You can find more information about ELEX Google Product Feed Plugin here.
2. YITH Google Product Feed Plugin:
YITH Google Product Feed Plugin is the second entrant on our list. In addition to the basic functionality that you’d expect in a plugin for feed generation, they offer:
- Creating templates for convenient and fast feed generation
- Setting General fields for attributes and categories
- Option to set overrides for categories and attributes at
YITH Google Product Feed Plugin lacks the ability to schedule your Google product feed though. It is priced at 79.99 Euros for a single site, 119.99 Euros for 6 sites and 169.99 Euros for 30 sites.
You can find more information about YITH Google Product Feed Plugin here.
3. Google Product Feed:
Google Product Feed by Ademti is the third entrant on our list. What sets it apart is the support they have for other platforms and not just the Google Merchant Center. Despite the name, it can generate feed files for:
- Google: To run Shopping Ads by integrating your products into Google Merchant Center.
- Bing: To run ads on Bing by integrating your products into Bing Merchant Center
- Google Product Reviews: Send product review data to Google to further improve sales.
Google Product Feed is priced at 79USD for one site, 99USD for five sites and 199USD for 25 sites annually.
You can find more information about Google Product Feed here.
4. WPMarketingRobot:
WPMarketingRobot is the fourth entrant on our list. It is the premium version of WooCommerce Google Feed Manager. The free variant offers generation for up to 100 products. WPMarketing Robot most distinguishing features is providing multi-channel product feed generation support. It offers templates for Google, Bing, Amazon, PriceGrabber, Commerce Connector to name but a few.
So if you plan on marketing your products on these platforms, WPMarketingRobot is a worthwhile investment. For a single site, it is priced at 69 euros for google feed generation annually. Naturally, unlimited channel support is priced more.
You can find more information about WPMarketingRobot here.
5. Google Merchant Center:
Google Merchant Center themselves provide a Google Sheets-powered solution for generating and maintaining your feed file. Moreover, you can install the Google Merchant add-on to manually input and validate all the relevant product information. All for the price of nothing. That’s right, it’s free.
Google Merchant Center fetches the Sheet automatically and your feed data stays updated. Additionally, you’ll also find examples and instructions for updating the Google Sheet, which is a nice touch. However, manually updating the Sheet every time you update your inventory is a painful process.
While checking out the Merchant Center feed file can be worthwhile to see what Google expects in a feed, it falls short as you consider inventory scale as well as a serious lack of customization.
Conclusion:
Shopping Ads are an avenue of marketing that retailers cannot afford to overlook. Properly formatted WooCommerce Google product feed files are what power Shopping Ads. That being said, creating product feeds that accurately represent your inventory while ensuring it is in the right format is a tough task. Plugins help alleviate this by providing extended functionality and support. We have gone through the ways your WooCommerce Business can benefit off of Shopping Ads, the problems you could face, and the best plugins that you can use to fix them.
