Google is increasingly enforcing the use of Global Trade Item Numbers (GTIN) identifiers for brand name products submitted via the product feed into Google Merchant Centre so that they then display in Google Shopping. GTINs help Google understand exactly what you're selling and therefore can boost your ad performance. You can find GTIN's on product boxes / packaging or from the manufacturer.
To know whether you are affected, warnings are displayed in Google Merchant Centre under the diagnostics tab. If you have a managed product marketing service with us then your account manager checks this and will already have advised you about the tighter Google requirements for compliance by 16th May.
If you are affected, then you need to make sure you have GTINs set up and there are two ways to do this:
1. Add GTIN's to product options and a GTIN attribute to the product record.
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This can be done within Product Manager on a product-by-product basis.
2. Export products and edit in a spreadsheet.
To speed up the process if you have a large quantity of products, we have created a new GTIN export program that allows you to export your product data either by brand or in its entirety. Once you start to use this process then you will need to maintain GTIN additions/amendments this way in the future as the data is held separately to the product record.
- Go to Export System > Google Products GTINs
- Select your brand or All
- Click Generate GTINs CSV
- Make and save changes to the GTIN field NB We only re-import the GTIN column data!
- Go to Import System
- Step 1 select REC CSV Import (with headings)
- Step 2 select Google Products GTIN's
- Step 3 select your modified GTIN CSV
- Step 4 click Submit
Google Merchant Centre is then updated overnight, but it can take them a further 24 hours to update their system. Allow for this and log back into it and check there are no more warnings. If there are, repeat the process till all of them have been resolved.