When marketing content usage is enabled, you're giving permission to Google's systems to access, index and store your email marketing communications (such as promotional emails, newsletters, product updates and announcements). Our systems attempt to identify and request your email marketing communications through the publicly available sign-up form on your website. If your website doesn't offer the ability to sign up for email marketing communications, the feature doesn't apply to your business.
Marketing content in emails often communicates helpful information such as new product arrivals or collections, sales events and ongoing promotions, which may now be shown to users across Google (including Ads, Search, Shopping and Maps).
Our systems may use information from your marketing content to display relevant information on Google surfaces, helping you reach more customers and effectively promote your brand and products. The information goes through quality checks to ensure that it is fresh and accurate.
You can choose to opt out of sharing your marketing communications with our systems at any time. The content from your marketing emails will not override information that you've submitted directly to Merchant Centre. In addition, you will have the opportunity to review and approve the use of specific content from your emails for use in Google Ads.
On this page
- How do Google's systems sign up to your marketing content?
- What information do Google's systems gather?
- How do Google's systems use the information?
- How do I opt out of marketing content usage?
- FAQ for marketing content usage
How do Google's systems sign up to your marketing content?
Our systems may sign up to receive your marketing email communications by submitting the marketing email sign-up form available on your website. Alternatively, merchants can send their marketing content directly to our systems. If your website supports email marketing communications, you can add [email protected] to share your most relevant content.
What information do Google's systems identify?
Our systems gather and index the content in your marketing email communications, including, but not limited to:
- Upcoming or current sales and promotions
- Highlighted social media content
- Images and videos
How do Google's systems use the information?
Our systems will collect and may display relevant content from your marketing emails on Search, the Shopping tab and more, which includes sales and other promotions, social media links and new product announcements.
How do I opt out of marketing content usage?
You can opt out of marketing content usage by following the steps below:
- In your Merchant Centre, navigate to Settings in the left-hand menu.
- Select General.
- Scroll down to the 'Marketing content usage' section, then select Do not share data.
- Select Save.
After you've opted out, our systems will no longer show information from your marketing content on Google.
FAQ for marketing content usage
What will Google do to our image after indexing it from marketing emails?We will extract some of the images to understand the context of the email. We might also crop some of the images to make it visually appealing.
Our systems index your marketing emails to gather relevant data, including, but not limited to, links to your primary social media channels, highlighted social media content, upcoming or current sales, promotions, brand images and videos.
Our systems attempt to sign up for your marketing email communications by subscribing to the marketing email sign-up form if one has been identified on your website. Alternatively, you can add the unique Google email address [email protected] to your email marketing list(s) to ensure that Google's systems receive your latest marketing content directly. Note that our systems will only access your marketing emails after a successful newsletter subscription.
No, this feature does not use or access personal emails. Our systems only access content from marketing emails sent to the designated Google email address or submitted through publicly available website sign-up forms for marketing emails. Emails related to orders or purchases can't be collected or used.
No, merchant-submitted data in Google Merchant Centre, such as your product data source and promotion, will always take precedence over gathered or crawled content from marketing emails.
Currently, merchants can't view marketing content within Merchant Centre.
Our systems collect and display relevant content from your marketing emails across various Google surfaces such as Search, the Shopping tab and Maps, which may include highlighting sales events, promotions, social media links and new arrivals from your brand. The content is treated as 'Content' subject to the Merchant Centre terms and is processed using AI technology.
Note: Our systems will not display personalised coupons or other similar non-generic content.
If you opt out, our systems will unsubscribe from your email marketing content. Our systems will no longer use any emails received after you've opted out for marketing content usage purposes. In addition, all past emails that our systems have collected will be deleted. However, content that has already been displayed (e.g. images or brand data) may continue to appear temporarily before being removed.
At this time, there is no specific reporting available for marketing email content. If the content is used in specific product areas (e.g. promotions), it may be reflected in the reporting for those areas, but this depends on the existing functionality of each feature in Merchant Centre.
The feature is designed to use publicly available marketing emails. Our systems don't display personalised coupons or other similar non-generic content. Our systems use AI technology to automatically process the information from your marketing emails to build a repository of brand and promotional content. For brands with a high volume of emails, we aim to gather only the most relevant and current marketing information.
Our system identifies marketing communications related to your primary website domain associated with your Merchant Centre account.
As always, we aim to show trusted, relevant information across Google surfaces. This update makes it possible to show more shoppers key information from a brand's marketing channels in places like your brand profile, product listings and Google Business Profile (GBP). The information is consistent with how social media accounts are shown across Google today. We're working on ways to give merchants more visibility into where email information is showing across Google.
Opting out of marketing email content usage will ensure that we stop showing data on Google, though it is separate from how our system finds and uses information from your website for Search indexing. Learn more about how to control what you share with Google.
Currently, the feature isn't available. If you wish to highlight specific promotions, we recommend using the promotions feature in Google Merchant Centre. You can access this by navigating to 'Promotions' in the navigation menu of your Merchant Centre account. Learn how to get started with promotions.