Automatic item updates to Google Shopping will increase the traffic to your ads

Delays in updating your product data may cause customers to receive inaccurate information. Such inconsistencies affect the degree of their satisfaction and their desire to shop in your online store. On Google Shopping you can get rid of these delays by automatic item updates.

With automatic item updates, your data will still be up to date

Use structured data markup

Structured data markup is a machine-readable representation of your product data, which the user inserts into the site’s HTML code. They use Google to interpret and process the content of your site. Based on structured data markup on Google Shopping ads, you can edit product information for PRICE and AVAILABILITY attributes. These data are searched by advanced data extractors that update them regularly (once a day, once a week, once a month) on your list of items.

How to turn on automatic item updates

Automatic item updates are turned on by default (you can turn them off at any time). However, they turn on only when there are valid structured data at your input (on your or your client site). At the same time, you must verify that the Google Shopping Actions section is listed as included_​destination and that you access the LINK attribute (the URL of the item).

This way, users will automatically see the right price in Google Shopping ad and the will be only referred to goods that are actually in stock. Google updates product data via input information — this helps to avoid inconsistencies between data in both Shopping and the client web.

For the current status of automatic item updates, see the “Automatic Item Updates” section of your account, which can be found in the three-dot menu on the Home Page.

What to watch out for

1. if you have your account configured for multiple clients, each sub-account will use the parent account’s parameters by default — but you can select a custom setting in your subaccounts
2. because of a large number of items, automatic item updates cannot check all of them — send accurate product data as often as possible
3. if more data are not matched, the automatic update will stop working and your account’s items could be denied — check:

• if the input’s structured data are sufficiently matched with the data sent to the Google
• whether the input data are correct and whether some are not missing
• whether the structured data is valid

Provide only current data to your Google Shopping customers. Automatic item updates will help you to ensure that your customers have accurate information always at hand. Interested in advertising on Google Shopping? Get started with our articles The Complete Google Shopping Guide #1 and #2.

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