With Things to do on Google, partners can help users discover new and exciting experiences and attractions around the world, right on Google Search. By promoting your inventory through free listings and a dynamic ad format, you can reach potential consumers who are already performing travel-related searches on Google.
Things to do centre makes it even easier to manage your products by providing the tools that you need to expand your reach and connect with users. You can configure feed credentials, view issues found in the products and check the latest referral status of each product. To begin integrating with Things to do centre and surfacing your inventory to travellers, contact our partnership team.
Initial setup
To create accounts and Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) endpoints, Google requires you to provide Secure Shell (SSH) keys to use as upload credentials. Once these are provided, Google will create a Things to do centre account for you and two SFTP end points (one for development and another for production).
Learn how to generate an SSH Key pair for SFTP.
After your Things to do centre account and endpoints have been created, your Google representative will contact you and provide access details. As you develop the feed, you can upload it to the development end point and check the processing results in Things to do centre.
Product feed
The product feed is the primary way for you to provide Google with a list of products to display across Google.
The supported upload format is JSON. Each JSON file must be a complete ProductFeed object and may also be uploaded in a compressed format such as ZIP, TAR or GZIP.
If there are too many products to be uploaded in a single file, you can upload the data using multiple files. You'll need to have the correct FeedMetadata field in each of the uploaded files. The Things to do processing pipeline will then consider those uploads as a single feed.
Find Location Matches tool
In addition to details about your products, you also need to specify the location of a point of interest (POI). The preferred method is to provide the place ID of a POI. The other two available options are to use the name and address of a POI (less preferred) or latitude and longitude information (least preferred).
The 'Find Location Matches' tool in Things to do centre allows you to find the place ID based on the name or address of a POI. This way you can obtain the place ID of a POI without having to use the Places API. You can use the file upload functionality to research multiple POIs at the same time.
Monitor your products and diagnose issues
You can monitor the status of your products on the 'Products' page. There are three types of status:
- Ads issues
- Free listing issues (admissions)
- Free listing issues (POI experiences)
You can view these statuses in their respective columns.
If your products have any issues, they might show up as an 'Error' or 'Warning' in the table.
Errors: Issues that affect the eligibility status.
Warnings: Issues that do not affect the eligibility status but might affect how and where the product is displayed.
Learn more about all product issues.