How to start showing products on behalf of your merchants

Participation in the CSS programme allows you to show products on behalf of merchants organically and in ads on Google.

This article outlines the steps that you need to take in tools on Google to start participating in this opportunity. Learn more about different ways that merchants can work with Comparison Shopping Services.

Before you begin

Make sure that you're compliant with minimum requirements to show products on behalf of your merchants.
Go through the CSS programme onboarding process.

Getting started

There are two phases that we suggest you pass through to start successfully showing products on behalf of your merchants on Google: technical integration and scaling (adding more offers).

Watch this introduction video for Comparison Shopping Services. It covers the basics of Merchant Center, policy disapprovals and feed maintenance.

Technical integration

This phase allows you to implement and test your integration with Google's systems and ensure that your setup is working properly. During this phase, you can test that everything works as intended with a subset of your inventory of up to 1 million offers and up to 100 sub-accounts, or up to 100 merchants.

Step 1: Create Merchant Center accounts for your merchants

Create Merchant Center accounts for your merchants. If you already have accounts created, go to the next step.
Switch them to your CSS Centre.
Make sure that you have the required access to Merchant Center accounts.
Upload products.

We recommend that you create at least 10–15 Merchant Center accounts and upload products to them to test your integration.

Note: You can also create sub-accounts for your merchants in your CSS multi-client account.

Create Merchant Center accounts and upload offers

Using the Content API, create Merchant Center accounts for each merchant that you'd like to represent.
Submit product data for each merchant that you represent through the Content API. If you represent fewer than 1,000 merchants, you can also use feeds. We recommend using the Content API if you're planning to make multiple changes per day, for example updating price and availability of selected offers. Learn more about how to create a feed.
When uploading your data, take into account the Shopping ads policies and follow the product data specification. Here are requirements to note in particular:
- URLs submitted in the 'link' attribute need to lead directly to a site on the Merchant Center domain. If you want to use redirects through other domains for tracking purposes, use the 'ads_redirect' attribute.
- Landing pages must show all key elements of the advertised product, and ensure that those details match what you submitted in your product data. These elements include title, description, image, price, currency, availability and a buy button. Title, description and images don't always need to be identical to the content in your product data, but they should still refer to the same product. Pages that don't allow direct buying of the product (auctions, for example) aren't allowed.
- For each Merchant Center account, set the merchant website for that account. The website must match the domain linked to in the product data submitted in this account. The website will automatically show as claimed by the account. Don't set a domain for the CSS MCA parent account itself.

Merchant dashboard

Merchants who have their own Merchant Center accounts have access to a dashboard showing them which CSS are uploading products for their shop. The products submitted by CSS are active by default, but merchants can choose to opt out of individual CSS and Google Shopping, which turns off those products.
The dashboard lets merchants understand who represents them so that they can adapt business decisions and marketing strategies, manage their budgets and ensure that their systems are set up to handle traffic that is driven from CSS.
The customer service contact information entered for your CSS MCA will be shown to merchants that you represent to allow them to reach out to you if needed. You'll be notified by email if a merchant opts out of your CSS. You can also find an overview of all merchants who have changed their opt-in status on the 'Merchants' page in the 'Merchant status' report in CSS Centre.

Step 2: Create Shopping ads campaigns

Create a new Google Ads account and link it exclusively to your Merchant Center account(s). We recommend that you don't reuse existing Google Ads accounts for CSS campaigns. A dedicated CSS Google Ads account helps ensure that we can treat your confidential data accordingly.
If you switch an existing account of a merchant to your CSS, you can keep using their existing Merchant Center and Google Ads accounts.

The following articles can help you get started:

Learn more about Google Ads and Shopping campaigns.

Scaling

After you've created Merchant Center accounts for your merchants, uploaded their products and linked at least one Google Ads account to your merchants, you can request to start the scaling phase.

During this phase, you'll be able to upload your inventory. Let us know how many offers you plan to upload so that we can reserve the respective capacity. If you intend to upload offers for more than 100,000 merchants, let us know so that we can configure your account correctly.

Note: Onboarding is completed after 60 days. You can also request to move out of the scaling phase before this time. Once onboarding is completed, your inventory will be subject to the performance requirements based on how well your ads perform – view details below.

Inventory performance requirement

After the onboarding is completed, to optimise resources and the user experience, your inventory will need to exhibit a certain minimum performance to maintain its current size. When consumers click on your ads, this indicates that your products and merchants are useful for them. The more clicks from users that your ads receive, the more products you'll be able to upload. We therefore require that your uploaded inventory achieves a click-to-products ratio of at least 1:40 over a 28-day period.

This means that for every 40 products submitted to Google, there must be at least one click during a 28-day period. If your inventory doesn't meet this ratio, you won't be able to upload more products and you'll have to reduce your inventory to bring it back to the requisite ratio. If this happens, you'll be notified in CSS Centre.

Links to your website

Links to your CSS website can be shown along with your merchants' products organically and in ads. To show the user relevant products on your website, Google passes their search query on to your site's search function. If there's a risk that the query contains private user information, the link takes the user to your homepage without passing on the query. The behaviour for a given query is the same for all CSS. Links corresponding with the CSS whose merchant's product is shown are currently displayed automatically without charge.

If your CSS is active in several countries, we recommend making sure that users find offers for the correct country and language on your website when they click on your link shown along with your merchant's listing. This means that the country and language of the offers on your website should correspond to those shown on Google.

To set up or update the link, use this support link.

Expansion into other countries

To be able to expand your CSS to another country:

Your CSS will need to be eligible to appear in this specific country, complying with the minimum requirements. One of these requirements is to show offers from 50 distinct merchant domains for every country that you target with Shopping ads. These must be merchants that deliver products to the respective country, meaning that consumers in the country can buy from them. To sign up as a CSS in a specific country, find the minimum requirements here.
When your CSS is eligible to run shopping ads in a specific country, you'll be able to use multi-country advertising to use a single feed per language to target other multiple EEA-based countries at once.

Learn more about how to show products in multiple countries of sale.

Merchant products beyond Google general search

By default, a CSS is able to place products only on Google's general search results pages. Use this form (Parallel tracking exemption and opt-ins section) to opt in to other Google surfaces (including the Shopping tab, image search and YouTube).

Use of automated feeds from website crawls

Google provides merchants the possibility to use automated feeds from website crawls. By default, every CSS allows merchants to use this feature. If you want to change this setting, use this form to opt out.

Bear in mind that:

A merchant may still choose to override your setting by configuring it differently in their Merchant Center Next account.
If you choose to enable automated feeds for your accounts, products will only be added if the domain owner has granted 'Website crawl' access to the CSS in the CSS dashboard.

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