Create feeds
Feeds must be provided to Google on a regular basis for the data to be directly shown on Google. The following feeds are needed.
| Feed | Description | Frequency |
|---|---|---|
| Merchants | Describes your merchants. | Once every 24 hours |
| Services | Describes services your merchants provide | Once every 24 hours |
| Availability | Available slots for services your merchants provide. A minimum 30 days of coverage must be provided. | Once every 24 hours |
In each feed, include metadata that instructs Google on how to interpret it.
The feeds format is described with the protocol buffer 3 syntax but you can upload your feeds as the corresponding JSON format. Please reference the Feed samples to see the JSON format. We recommend that you upload the feeds in JSON format.
Feed file size, sharding, and compression
Please view the following tutorials regarding compression and shards:To determine the size of the feeds, use the following guidelines (a feed can be constituted of multiple files called "shards"):
- Suggested feed sharding:
- Merchants feed: 1 shard
- Services feed: 1 shard
- Availability feed : less than 20 shards
- Size of feed files and sharding:
- Keep shard file size below 200 MB (after compression). Use multiple shards if needed.
- Individual records sent in one shard don't need to be sent in the same shard in future feeds.
- For better performance, split data evenly among the shards, to make all the shard files similar in size.
- If necessary, use gzip to compress plain text JSON feeds. However, do so for each individual feed shard.
Upload the feeds to your SFTP Dropbox
Upload your feeds to the sandbox environment. To do so, refer to the
usernames within the
Partner Portal feed configuration page. The Google SFTP server is
available at sftp://partnerupload.google.com on port
19321.
We recommend that you give the files you upload unique names. For instance, it can be helpful to append each filename with a timestamp. This helps to troubleshoot issues and query for feed status.
Confirm that your data looks correct
Sign in to the Partner Portal. Toggle to the Sandbox environment to find the following pages in the Dashboards section.
- Feeds
- Shows the feed summary statistics and points out errors during feed upload.
To confirm that your data looks correct after your initial upload to the sandbox environment, check the Feeds page for any feed errors. Then check the Inventory Summary page for any data issues. Common issues include uploading merchants without any services or uploading services without any availability slots in the future.
The sandbox frontend, which emulates the live UI experience, shows how the data will look from the user's perspective. To access it, make sure that the environment switcher on the top is set to Sandbox and go to Inventory > Inventory , find a merchant that is either "Ready" or "Live (in Sandbox)" then either click on the link on the rightmost column (if available) or click on the row and click on the "RwG - E2E" link. If there is no merchant with status "Ready" or "Live (in Sandbox)", open a disabled merchant and make sure to fix all the issues listed on the right (such as making sure future availability have been uploaded).
If you can't access the sandbox frontend, confirm that you are signed in with an account that has been given access to the frontend. Also be sure that this is the only account you are signed in to. If you sign in with a different account and then use the Switch User feature to sign in to the approved Google account, you are still blocked from the sandbox frontend.
Upload your feeds to production
Once you are able to consistently upload complete, error-free feeds to the Sandbox environment you may begin uploading to the Production environment. At this point your integration will not be live.
Please upload a full Merchant feed as soon as possible (minimum 1 week before launch), so you can begin matching your merchants to a Google business listing. Please verify the matching correctness.
Once all your production feed data is uploading consistently and connected to your production system, your feeds are ready for review.
Google evaluates feeds
Once you upload your feeds, Google processes and evaluates them for quality and completeness. We look at the following factors:
- Feeds match the feed specification.
- Feeds include all the required fields.
- The total number of merchants in feeds matches the number discussed with Google.
- At least one service is defined for each merchant.
- The total number of services in feeds matches the number discussed with Google.
- We check how many of the services have availability slots open for the next 1-30 days .
- We check how many of the merchants provided can be matched against features on Google Maps.