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The Automations feature keeps your product data accurate by automatically using your landing page data to update your product data. Automatic updates allow Google to update your products on Shopping ads and free listings using the structured data markup that we find on your website and advanced data extractors. Automatic updates are offered for the price [price], sale price [sale_price], availability [availability] and condition [condition] attributes.
Example
If your most recent product upload contains a product that costs £4, but your product landing page lists it as £3, we'll update the product to £3 in your ads or product listings.
On this page
- Benefits of automations
- How automatic updates work
- Get started
- Best practices
- Frequently asked questions
Benefits of automations
Avoid price, availability and condition mismatches. Automations look at the information found on your landing page to eliminate any mismatches in your product pricing, availability and condition.
Improve the user experience, generate more traffic and get higher conversions. Because customers view the correct price, availability and condition for your products in your ads or free listings, they're more likely to interact with and purchase your products.
- Automations aren't a replacement for regular updates of your product data. They're designed to fix temporary problems with your price, availability and condition accuracy for a small percentage of your products. You should continue to provide accurate product data frequently (for example, updating your product data file) as we're unable to cover all of your products with automations. If you expect the pricing, availability and condition of your products to update frequently, consider using the Content API to schedule product uploads.
- In addition to price, automations for price will update strikethrough prices (also known as reference price, original price, previous price or regular price). If landing pages show multiple strikethrough prices, our system may not be able to accurately crawl the correct strikethrough price. You shouldn't enable automatic updates for price in this case.
Bear in mind: For automations, we use relaxed matching rules. Specifically, in_stock, preorder and backorder are all considered compatible with in_stock. This means that if your feed indicates in_stock and our crawler detects preorder or backorder, we consider this a match and maintain the value as in_stock.
How automations work
- You set up structured data markup on your website for product prices, availability and condition. This markup is added to the HTML on your website and helps us understand and process your content reliably.
- In your Merchant Centre, configure the settings for automations. You can choose to update the product prices only, product availability only, product condition only or update any combination of the three: price, availability and condition. Automations are enabled by default.
- We automatically read the structured data markup on your website using our advanced data extractors and directly pull product data from your HTML into Merchant Centre.
Get started
Step 1: Prepare your website
If you haven't already done so, set up structured data on your website. Automations only take into account the price, availability and condition attributes, so make sure that these are correctly formatted on your website. Our price [price], availability [availability] and condition [condition] attributes map to the price, priceCurrency, availability and itemCondition properties listed on schema.org.
Condition
Google product data attribute: Condition
Schema.org product data attributes: itemCondition
Formatting:
| Data spec attribute | Schema.org value |
new |
NewCondition |
refurbished |
RefurbishedCondition |
used |
UsedCondition |
Price
Google product data attribute: price
Schema.org product data attributes:
Formatting:
price: Number. Submitted without currency symbols, thousand separators or spaces (for example, '1498.99').priceCurrency: Text. Submitted in a three-letter ISO 4217 format (for example, USD, GBP, EUR), the currency should meet the language and currency requirements for your target country.- Note:
priceandpriceCurrencycan be provided directly under the offer instance or indirectly via apriceSpecificationproperty of typepriceSpecification
Availability
Google product data attribute: availability
Schema.org product data attributes: availability
Formatting:
Valid values are from the ItemAvailability type. They're mapped to feed values as follows:
|
Data spec |
Schema.org value |
|---|---|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
<span itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Product" class="microdata">
<meta itemprop="image" content="pixel6image.png">
<meta itemprop="name" content="Pixel 6 Pro">
<meta itemprop="description" content="Google's smartest, fastest and most secure phone ever">
<span itemprop="offers" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Offer">
<meta itemprop="price" content="899.99">
<meta itemprop="priceCurrency" content="USD">
<link itemprop="availability" href="https://schema.org/InStock" />In stock
<link itemprop="itemCondition" href="https://schema.org/NewCondition" />New
</span>
</span>You may need to add to your existing HTML on your website to ensure that it meets structured data markup guidelines. Here's an example of existing product data that's been updated with structured data markup (the additions are marked in yellow):
<div class=”product-details” itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Product">
<div class=”product-image”>
<span class=”label”>Image:</span>
<img itemprop="image" src=”pixel6image.png”>
</div>
<div class=”product-info”>
<span class=”label”>Product name:</span>
<span class=”info” itemprop="name">Pixel 6 Pro</span>
</div>
<div class=”product-info”>
<span class=”label”>Description:</span>
<span class=”info” itemprop="description">Google's smartest, fastest and most secure phone ever</span>
</div>
<div class=”product-info” itemprop="offers" itemscope
itemtype="http://schema.org/Offer">
<span class=”label”>Price:</span>
<meta itemprop="priceCurrency" content="USD">$</span><span
itemprop="price" content="899.00">899.00</span>
<link itemprop="availability" href="https://schema.org/InStock" />In stock
</div>
</div>
Step 2: Update your settings for automations
Automatic updates should already be turned on in your Merchant Centre account. If you have a multi-client account, each sub-account will have automations enabled (sub-accounts can also specify their own settings).
-
In your Merchant Centre account, go to Products and shop.
- Select Products and go to the Automations tab.
- From the 'Automations' page, choose the specific automation that you want to change. This could be automatic updates for price, availability, condition and image improvements.
- Select View details and toggle the updates to turn on or off.
Best practices
- If the price, availability or condition of the majority of the products on your website is updated multiple times per day, then automations can help you avoid errors due to the time difference between updates on your website and updates to product details in Merchant Centre.
- If you're using the sale price
[sale_price]attribute, make sure that the time period in which the sale is active is specified correctly with the sale price effective date[sale_price_effective_date]attribute and that the time zone is correct. When a sale is active, the sale price is shown as the current price in Shopping search results. - Make sure that any strikethrough price value displayed on your website matches the price
[price]attribute when the sale price[sale_price]attribute is also provided. - For products sold in bulk quantities, you should submit the total price for the minimum number of products sold. Landing pages must list prices in the appropriate currency of the target country, and in the same currency as that submitted in your product data.
- To detect and update mismatches, Google crawls the landing pages listed in your data feed or provided in the Content API. You can increase Google's crawl rate to allow us to cover more products on your website. Learn more about how to change the Googlebot crawl rate
- Ensure that the info in your product feed is consistent with the actual condition of your product.
- Include information regarding the condition of your products in your product data. Automatic item updates for condition check the value that you provide for the condition
[condition]attribute against other values in your product data. Using terms like 'new', 'used' or 'refurbished' in the title or description of your product allows us to cross-check for consistency. If you turn off automatic item updates, the product will be subject to item-level disapprovals.
FAQ
Structured data markup is tiny pieces of product information on your website. It helps search engines read the information on your website and display it in a useful way.
Using Schema.org structured annotations on your website allows us to reliably retrieve up-to-date information directly from your website. In Merchant Centre, the structured annotations are used to update your product data and simplify the creation and maintenance of your product feed. For automations, we rely on the price, availability and condition annotations on your website to update the price, availability and condition attributes in Merchant Centre.
It's recommended that you set up structured data markup on your website. If your product landing pages don't contain any structured data, or the structured data markup is incomplete or incorrect, we rely on advanced data extractors to update your products automatically.
Advanced extractors use a combination of statistical models and machine learning to detect and extract product data from your website independent of structured data markup. While we've designed various checks and safeguards for this feature to prevent incorrect updates, we may not have advanced data extractor coverage for every domain, and Schema.org annotations may be disabled if they aren't accurate.
If the extractors are unable to determine price, availability or condition information, your products will be subject to item-level disapprovals.