Promotions Feed

Having a planned calendar of offers on your website is essential, but equally or more important than that is to give it visibility, because if not, how will the user find out about our fabulous offers?

If your ecommerce is advertised in Google Shopping at Australia, France, Germany, India, the United Kingdom and the United States. and you're used to launching promotions on the web, you're in luck. Today we bring you the perfect guide to implement the Promotions Feed at Google Merchant Center and display under the Shopping results the tag of special offer or special offer.

It will be a prerequisite that our web site allows sales in the countries mentioned above and that, consequently, the Merchant Center account has some data feed oriented to them. If this is fulfilled, an option will be enabled called promotions. In addition, Google will review the Promo Feed before approving it, checking that it complies with their policies and promotional requirements.

Example of a promotion feed

The first step would be to create a new promotion feed, which we will orientate to the desired country and target language. This feed can be uploaded through a Google Spreadsheet, an XML or an FTP upload. Whatever the uploading method, the structure must be maintained and to make it more visual, here is an example of how a promotion feed would look like and we will comment on it later:
[wpsm_comparison_table id="1″ class=""]

Required fields in Promotions Feed

Let's start with the required fields:

• promotion_idpromotion_id: this is a unique attribute for each promotion (it cannot be repeated within the promotion feed) and it will be in charge of indicating to Google the products in the data feed that are included in the promotion. To do this, apart from reflecting it in the promotions feed, this new field must be created in the product feed of the store, under the name of promotion_id, and reflect in each product the ID of the promotion that affects it, unless it is an offer that covers all the products in the store, in which case it will be reflected in the promotions feed, as we will see later in the product_applicability attribute. In the following link Google clarifies any doubts about this attribute.
• product_applicabilitywill be applied to the values ALL_PRODUCTS (if all items in the store are affected) or SPECIFIC_PRODUCTS (for which the promotion ID of the affected products will have to be applied in the product feed).
• offer_typeindicates if a coupon code is requested for the user to redeem the offer. The following will be accepted as valid values NO_CODE (not required) or GENERIC_CODE (for which the Generic_redemption_code will be required as a mandatory attribute), where the code must be defined, for example SALES.
• long_titleThe maximum length is 60 characters and must accurately describe the promotion in question.
• promotion_effective_datesThis attribute indicates the period during which the promotion will be available and ready for validation (since Google will not pass on the promotion until it verifies that it is a real offer available on the website). The start date and end date must be separated by a slash (/). The start date is specified in the format (YYYYY-MM-DD), followed by the letter "T", the time of day the sale begins (in Greenwich Mean Time, GMT), followed by an expression of the time usage for the sale. The end date must be in the same format.
• redemption_channelcurrently only accepts as a valid value ONLINEIn the future, who knows if it will allow a promotion to be carried out for the advertiser's physical store.

Optional fields in Promotions Feed

Let's go now to the optional fields of the Promotions Feed:

• promotion_display_date: sets the date and time at which the promotion will be published on google.com and Google Shopping. The format will be the same as the promotion_effective_dates attribute. If this attribute is not filled in, the above mentioned will be taken as the date and time frame for publication in Google Ads.
• minimum_purchase_amount: this attribute indicates if there is a minimum purchase amount to be able to apply the promotion, for example 20 USD.
• generic_redemption_codedescribes the discount code that users must apply to redeem the promotion. It is mandatory if the offer_tupe is GENERIC_CODE. It is convenient to indicate that free shipping promotions must be able to be applied manually, otherwise Google will consider that it is a service normally provided and should be reflected in the product feed.

Extra comments

• It should be noted that if we create various promotions for different periods and that will affect the same product, these must be reflected in the product feed in the promotion_id separated by commas (e.g. PROMO1, PROMO2, PROMO3).
• Google is capable of mapping up to 10 promotions per item in the product feed, showing in Shopping a maximum of 5 promotions per article.
• If a product is affected by several types of promotions simultaneously, priority will be given to promotions that affect specific products (SPECIFIC_PRODUCTS) over those that affect the entire store (ALL_PRODUCTS).
• It is not possible to recycle the nomenclature of a promotion_id that has already been approved.However, if it was rejected during the review, it is possible.
• The promotion_display_date and promotion_effective_dates attributes can lead to confusion, but to understand them in a simple way, the last one allows Google to check that the promotion is real (it has to be enabled on the website) and the promotion_display_date marks the date from which the promotion is going to start advertising on Google Shopping.
• If, when performing the feed upload of promotions gives us errorIn many cases, this is due either to an incorrect specification of the date format of the promotion or because the feed template is outdated (Google provides us with this information). template).

There are no more excuses to showcase our best promotions at Google ShoppingWhat are you waiting for? If you need us to give you a hand, don't hesitate to contact us.