By default, when creating Shopping Ads campaigns, you can only target product
ads in the product’s country of sale (the product’s
targetCountry
attribute). If you want to target ads or serve free listings
in additional countries, you can add countries for all products in a country of
sale in a feed by modifying the feed settings in Google Merchant Center.
You can also add additional countries where ads and free listings can be served
for specific products with the Content API by using the
shipping
attribute on the
products
resource. If you add additional targetable countries via feed settings in
Merchant Center or via the shipping attribute on products, you can then use
the Content API to exclude countries in which you don't want to serve ads
for specific products by updating the
shoppingAdsExcludedCountries attribute on the products resource.
Keep in mind that enabling targeting in additional countries allows you to add additional countries in which you can serve ads and free listings. Smart Shopping Campaigns (SSC) and free listings automatically serve ads and list products in all enabled countries. However, when creating non-SCC Shopping ads campaigns, you need to manually select the countries you want to target.
Enabling ad targeting and free listings in multiple countries for all products
In Merchant Center, you can add targetable countries for a country of sale in a feed by selecting a list of countries in which you want to be able to serve ads and free listings. You can add countries either when creating a new feed or by modifying an existing feed, and this setting applies to all products in the country of sale in the feed.
The additional countries you can target with Shopping ads and free listings is determined by the primary country of sale of your product. To find out which additional countries you can advertise and list your products in, see Show products in multiple countries of sale.
Enabling ad targeting and list your product in multiple countries for specific products
In addition to enabling targeting in Merchant Center in multiple countries for
all products in a feed, you can use the shipping attribute on the products
resource to add countries in which you want to target ads and list products
for specific products.
The following sample shows the partial JSON for a German product for which the product can be listed and ads can be targeted in Germany, France, and Italy.
{
"offerId": "2222222222",
"contentLanguage": "en",
"targetCountry": "DE",
"channel": "online",
...
"shipping": [
{ "country": "FR" },
{ "country": "IT" }
]
}
Excluding countries from ads for specific products
After adding targetable countries per country of sale in a feed via Merchant
Center or via the shipping attribute on the products resource, you can use
the Content API shoppingAdsExcludedCountries attribute on the products
resource to exclude products for which you do not want to serve ads in specific
countries. When you run your global ad campaigns, ads are not shown in the
excluded countries for the specified products.
For example, let’s say you updated your feed settings in Merchant Center to
allow ads and free listings to be served in Germany, France, Spain and Belgium
for all products in a feed with a country of sale of Germany. You could then use
the shoppingAdsExcludedCountries attribute to specify a subset of countries in
which you do not want ads to appear for a specific product.
The following sample shows the JSON for specifying that ads
should not be shown in Spain or Belgium for this particular product.
{
"offerId": "1111111111",
"contentLanguage": "en",
"targetCountry": "DE",
"channel": "online",
...
"shoppingAdsExcludedCountries": [‘ES’, ‘BE’],
}
Merchant Center product diagnostics
The Merchant Center Diagnostics page shows the status of each product once for every country you target. For more information, see Show status of exported products in Diagnostics in Use additional countries to determine your reach.