Create a feed

Summary

Merchant Center accounts store the product information for Shopping campaigns. You upload product information to your merchant account through product feeds. You can create product feeds that upload multiple products at a time in the Merchant Center or through the Content API for Shopping. The Content API for Shopping also lets you upload and update individual products.

With both feed and API uploads, newly uploaded products are subject to data quality checks that may take up to 72 hours to resolve. These products will have the pending status in the meantime. See the Product status definitions page to learn more.

If you already have product information in an eCommerce platform, you may be able to connect that eCommerce platform to the Merchant Center and have the information shared automatically. Check with your eCommerce platform provider to see if any connectors exist for sharing product information with the Merchant Center.

All products must adhere to the Product data specification. Read through the specification to understand what product attributes must be provided for a product to be valid. Some types of products require different attributes than others.

Manual steps

If this if your first time creating a feed, it may take a few tries to resolve all the errors. See the Google Advertiser Community for help.

  1. See About feeds and File formats for product data to plan the structure of your feed.
  2. Follow the steps in Upload a feed.

Automatic steps

You can use the Content API for Shopping to bulk upload product information through feeds and to send individual product information.

You can only automate scheduled feeds.

  • Use the datafeeds service to create, update, and delete registered feeds.

  • Use the products resource to upload and update individual products.

    See the Product data specification to learn which fields are required for your specific product.

    Use products.insert to upload product information. If you're sending multiple products at once, see Sending batch requests.

    Product errors are signaled with a non-2xx HTTP status message, and the body of the response contains more information.

    Even successfully uploaded products may return warnings that you should examine to improve your proudct data. See the common errors guide for more information.

    You can use the productstatuses service to see the status of products on you account.

    Individual products uploaded through the Content API for Shopping expire either after 30 days or on their manually set expiration date, whichever comes first.

    In order to keep products from expiring, they must be updated or re-inserted. It's important to schedule a regularly occurring refresh to the Content API for Shopping's products endpoint.