Magento's Google Shopping Ads

Brief review of https://marketplace.magento.com/magento-google-shopping-ads.html compared to Rocket Shopping Feeds for Magento 2

I wasn’t able to complete onbording with this extension as it requires store to be public so that google can verify it and synchronize products. I created request for a public demo M2 instance to further set this up.

After reviewing the code and docs there are few points to take:

The big advantage of extension is simplifying the whole google advertising experience, with focus to manage campaigns directly in Magento admin, instead of managing Merchant Center, Adwords and Analytics accounts separately, but this has limitations for expert advertisers. OOTB I think it will work for new shops or ones with less customizations and basic advertising needs, but most probably heavy shops out there would not go for it without doing customization work done.

On technical side, the solution is superior to feed based implementation as it uses google API, google tag and Magento indexers to manage product data and campaigns in a more state-full way. 

Points of concern:

• No easy testing capabilities before going live. Stores have to first connect to google before assessing any data been send over. 
• Product data export is rigid and assumes store owners would manage all needed requirements on their own, mostly creating product attributes. There are 3 types of indexers managing data: attribute, price and inventory. Support for customized catalogs or third party extensions altering catalog, require a lot of work around those indexers. 
• Indexer customization is needed to allow features our feed enables through admin:
  • Product filtering. This extension assumes all products would be synchronized to google, but a many merchants don’t want to publish all products
  • Support for simple configurable pricing and other third party extensions.
  • Tier price and MSRP
  • Nested attribute value replacement for missing values. This can also be managed at some degree in GMC, but involves more data to be pushed and limited capabilities
  • Concatenation of attribute values
  • Extended support for configurable product and product options
  • Price buckets
  • Product reviews
• Catalog rules & cart discounts (Promotion Feeds)
• Managing product data and taxonomies by Magento categories.
  
  

Overall this extension feels like the right direction going forward around google advertising, but there’s still work needed to enable many features we already have done with our feed. It brings opportunity for agencies to expand it and make functions more specific to store owners.

Implementation limited to google service and Magento 2, other markets using google feed like implementations would not benefit.