Don't miss out on sales! Make sure your products are able to be advertised on Google Ads with this essential monitoring and alerting tool.
How GMC Works
Products are uploaded from your website to Google Merchant Centre (GMC) to then be advertised within your Google Ad campaigns. GMC has strict conditions on whether a product is set up correctly to be advertised.
What This Tool Does
This tool enables you to monitor higher level account issues and which products have issues according to GMC and send out email alerts to staff plus to be able to view them on a summary screen within Admin which is easier to access rather than logging into GMC. The issues shown are a direct reflection of how GMC reports them.
The tool allows you to set up specific groups of products to track and alert you, such as high value items, best sellers you always want to be advertised or promotions.
Hint: Use Top Products Report to get a CSV list of your Bestsellers and set them up as a group
When the email notifications are sent the Subject header changes to highlight whether any groups have problems or whether there are high level account issues. This lets staff quickly scan the subject line to establish the severity of the issues. The email contains a summary of issues and a link back to the GMC Summary in Admin.
Once you receive emails you can fix issues highlighted within GMC itself or take other relevant actions such as ordering in out-of-stock products.
Boost Performance
The Boost Performance tab analyses ad-driven revenues and performance for products and product lists (e.g. November Flyer, Top 250 products).
This can help you to check promotions (did you get the expected kick in revenues; should you exclude poor performers in future etc), FATC (first add to cart) performance as these are the key products which lead into more products being added to the cart, spot issues with impressions dropping off unexpectedly, pricing issues, and advertising costs & returns (ROAS) to make sure ads are profitable for a product.
The TCM field (Total Contribution Margin) is a custom field set up in GMC that has been included for checking / deciding to reduce the TCM for higher visibility (e.g. a 'zero' TCM gives maximum visibility) based on profitability. The TCM value is set by 3rd party AI systems which require a separate subscription.
| GMC groups supports switching between REC Product IDs or Google Product IDs. Instead of needing to enter the different combinations of Google Product IDs you can now use top level REC product IDs to monitor all the split out google products at once with ease. We recommend using REC product IDs as this provides more accurate tracking and attribution of sales to Google Ads. |
Quick Interpretation Guide
If impressions have nosedived then there could be an issue at an AI-level (where subscribed to AI), or a product being excluded from the feed or out-of -stock.
If impressions are high and clicks low then do a google search and check their results page to check competitor prices and ad descriptions and whether their product is ex-VAT whereas yours is inc VAT (those companies then need to be reported to Google for inaccurate price excluding VAT)
If impressions are high and clicks high but conversions low then check the product page is healthy with good content and then price check against competitors or see whether you have a cheaper product alternative that is stealing away the sales.
'Sort Using' Field
This lets you sort the tables by Current Periods, Comparison Period, Change Value, Change %.
Setting Up Google Merchant Centre Monitoring
This requires you to have a GMC account already and account access to it.
1. Go into Admin > Connect > SEO/Analytics > Google Merchant Centre
Enter your Merchant ID and Parent Account ID* if set up and available.
*Having the Parent Account ID allows alerts for account-level issues, otherwise those alerts will be emailed to you by Google instead.
Set Enable Cron Email to Enabled
Set the Cron Run Hour to a time of day that suits your feed submission and any other crons / maintenance jobs / backups in your schedule so they do not clash in any way. In the screenshot 7 = 7am which is normally a good time as it allows overnight tasks to have completed.
Click to Connect. Once this has worked it will say Verified (as shown above in the screenshot).
2. Go into Email Notifications > add the email addresses of the people who you wish to receive notifications.
If you do not set anything up here then the main contact set up in Site Settings > Company will be emailed instead.
You will get the first email after the cron has run (e.g. just after 7am in our screenshot) and then each day thereafter. The 2nd email onwards become important as they will identify where products have changed compared to the previous day and show up fixes you have put up in place as well.
You are all set up!
3. Create specific product groups to monitor by adding in the Google IDs (REC product ID's will be able to be added in a future enhancement, for now you will need to take the IDs from Google Merchant Centre).
In GMC Summary click n Manage Groups then Add GMC Group and enter the details and Google product IDs.