Google Shopping is a shopping channel based on product listing ads. It’s a service that lets customers search for products and compare prices directly through Google Search.

Google Shopping is one of the most popular shopping channels, and is used across all countries and industries. (No matter what you sell through your shop, it’s highly recommended that you advertise with Google Shopping.)

You will need to have an account with Google Shopping before you can add the Google Shopping connector to AdCurve. 

If you don’t already have a Google Merchant account, go to www.google.com/merchants and click “Sign Up” to create an account. Alternatively you can find additional support on creating a Merchant Center Account here.

​

​

The Google Shopping connector for AdCurve can be found in the AdCurve Appstore. If you’re having difficulty finding it, try using the “Shopping” filter to narrow your results. Once you’ve opened the details page for Google Shopping, press the “Install Connector” button to get started.

Before getting started, please ensure that you have pop-ups enabled, if you’re unsure of how to do so, please select your browser for further instructions: Google Chrome, Safari, Microsoft Edge, Firefox.

During the install process, the Connector Wizard will ask you to log into your Adwords account. AdCurve uses this access to your AdWords account to retrieve your advertising costs on a daily basis, and to upload and update your products in the Google Merchant Center.
​
​

Once you’ve pressed the “Connect to Google Adwords” button, you’ll see a prompt to grant AdCurve access to your Google Account.

After granting access you’ll be presented with a drop down menu to select which Adwords account to use. If you have multiple Adwords accounts linked to your Google Account, please select the account you use for your shop.

The next step in the installation wizard is to fill in conversion tags if you use them.

This step is entirely optional. If you don't use Google Conversion tags, or are not sure if you use them, you can skip this step. The values can be added in your account settings at a later date.
​
If you know that you use Google Conversion tags but are not sure where to find them, please see section 6 at the bottom of this article for further details.

The final step of the installation wizard is a recommendation on the next steps to take, to upload your products to the Google Merchant Center, and to map any required "Taxonomies" such as product category, age-group or gender.

​

AdCurve supports two methods for uploading your products to the Google Merchant Center.
​
The default setting is to use Google's Product API. This effectively creates a direct connection between AdCurve and the Merchant Center so that your products can be updated in real time.

Any time a change is made to a product, AdCurve will "push" that change to the Merchant Center so that your ads on Google Shopping can be updated immediately. 

Once the installation wizard is complete, AdCurve will start uploading products to your Merchant Center account. However, if you have any existing feeds in the Merchant Center, those feeds will take priority and AdCurve's uploads will be ignored.

To allow AdCurve to start updating your products, it will be necessary to delete any feeds listed on the Feeds page in the Merchant Center.

You can also check the status of AdCurve's uploads on the API Diagnositcs page, found under the menu at the top right of the Merchant Center.

If you need any assistance with the Product API uploads, please don't hesitate to contact us with any questions you might have.

​

Alternatively, you could chose to use the more traditional XML Feed method for uploading products to the Merchant Center. 

Using a feed means slower product updates, but if you have an established Google Shopping campaign, it does allow you the opportunity to test the AdCurve feed before switching from your current feed.

If you would prefer to use an XML feed rather than the API, please contact AdCurve support to let us know so that we can reconfigure your account.

If you need instructions for uploading the feed to the Merchant Center, please see our Guide on how to do so.
​  

If you’ve chosen to use the AdCurve feed, you’ll need to map your products to a Google product category before the ads will be displayed. Google requires your products to be mapped to one of the product categories to ensure that your ads are relevant to customer search keywords. 

To learn how to map your products, check out our Product Mapping article.

You can also view a complete list of Google Product Categories for the United States, United Kingdom, or The Netherlands.

​

Google Shopping supports the addition of both Age and Gender to products. These "taxonomies" are not always required, but are highly recommended to improve the quality of your ads.

Note: If you sell fashion products on Google Shopping U.S, it is required to add both Age and Gender to your products before Google will display the ads.

You may want to use filters or rules to add Age or Gender to large groups of products at once. You can learn more about using filters and rules in our Ads tab article.

​

Google Adwords allows you to change your Google Shopping CPC bids for product categories, but not for individual products, or custom groups. A bidding group is a custom filter that you can add to your Google Shopping feed to manage your bids on customized groups of products, or even individual products.

For Google Shopping you can add a named bidding group, or custom tag to selected products in your feed, and use this as a filter to manage bids for those products. 

For details on how to set up a named bidding group, please check our Bidding Groups Article.

Once the bidding group has been added to your feed and collected by Google Shopping, you will then need to log in to Adwords to finish setting up the bidding group

Select your Google Shopping campaign in Adwords, and navigate to the Products Tab. Here you can set up a new filter to use the named bidding group that you added to your feed.

Select “Custom Label 4” as your filter option, and then enter the bidding group label that you chose in AdCurve. You’ll also need to save this filter, and give it a name you’ll easily recognize later. 

You can now move to the “Product Groups” tab, and select the newly created filter to see only the products that you added to the “Group A” bidding group in AdCurve.
​

Next, select all the products and manually manage the bids for these products by selecting “Change max. CPC Bids” from the Edit menu.

​
​
​

Google “Conversion Tracking” allows you to see valuable data about how your Google ads lead to customer activity such as completed orders.

Before you can set this up with AdCurve, you’ll need to have created some “Conversion Actions” in your Adwords accounts. If you’re not familiar with conversion actions, or need some help getting started, you can read more about it here.

Once your conversion action is set up, you can open the conversion action to find the tracking tag. 

It’s not necessary to implement the tag directly on your shop yourself, AdCurve can include the tracking tag inside the AdCurve Tag Manager.

(This is the complete tag if you were adding the code to your website, however we only need small parts of it to enable conversion tags within the AdCurve Tag Manager.)

Copy the values only next to “var_google_conversion_id” and “var_google_conversion_label” from the code, and paste these values into the channel settings page for Google Shopping. Make sure that you remove the quotation marks from the conversion label when entering it in AdCurve.

​

If you need any further support with Google Shopping, or if something is missing from our article, please don't hesitate to start a chat with us at any time using the Intercom button in the bottom right of your screen.