Rocket Shopping Feeds for Magento puts power in your store’s data.

To be successful with Google Shopping requires mastering two important aspects. Aside from marketing battle with competition, knowing where and how much to bid, there’s also data you work with. The product data you send through Merchnat Center is your store on Google. Content relevance makes the difference in the algorithms when deciding which products to show in ads and doesn’t have much to do with been a better bidder. At the same time, good product data gives more targeting power when creating your campaigns. 

Implementing your products feed in Magento, Is all about getting the best out of your store data into required format. Magento catalogs can look very different from one store to another so it’s important to have a flexible way of getting your product data to follow Google Shopping concepts

Feed based solution

Rocket Shopping Feeds extension generates the csv file which is long proven Google way of getting product data in. The product feed is been generated with a cronjob on demand and by customizable schedule via admin for each feed.  The cron generation process can be detached from Magento’s cron, allowing more control for isolating the load, reliability and logging. Both Magento version of the extension come with console command/script for running feed generation.  Default installation relies on Magento’s cron to run it.

Larger catalogs require processing of products in batches of defined number of products to limit server resources used. Extension can detect php limits and automatically switch to batch mode while generating, before limits are reached.

Output definition

The product content of the feed is decided by columns mapping through admin for each feed, and there is pre-defined mapping when you create new feed. The mapping can cascade for each column to replace missing data on various products, making sure product lines aren’t missing data. This cascading can be used in conjunction with find and replace rules, to remove unwanted output and replace with other.

Columns can be mapped to direct product attribute but also to special logic defined by directives and their arguments. For example Product URL and Variant Attributes are directives which take arguments in the mapping itself, Price Buckets and Google Taxonomy by Magento Categories get a more extensive argument definition. 

Attribute Concatenation is a useful directive for SEO capabilities as it allows refining titles and descriptions of your products to match your Google Shopping strategy.

Aside mapping, feed configuration also takes filtering settings to adjust which products should be considered or exclude feed when specific data is missing. 

Complex products

While simple products are more straight forward, configurable, grouped and bundle ones require extra attention, and have specific configurations in the feed. Most important one is to decide how those products are detailed in the feed, only parent product, only child products or both. Including child products usually doesn’t require parent to be sent to Google, but certain columns could inherit data from parent product depending on where data is present and prioritization. This inheritance is decided with a set of column rules under each specific product type configuration. Products which variations by size and color for example, would have to point URL to the configurable product when variations are not visible in catalog, but still append parameters in the URL so that product page displays the correct options and prices. You should always make sure price and image matches the one displayed on the page. 

Custom Labels

Including custom label columns gives more flexibility to refine campaign bidding on specific product. Those columns are mapped as any other column to an attribute or a directive and should include information that is appropriate for refining bidding scope. A useful way of grouping products is by price intervals, in which case you would map custom_label_0 to Price Buckets directive and define you bucket labels by price intervals. 

Submitting your feed

Feed file by default is web available in your store, so it can be configured as a schedule fetch, but it can also be configured to be automatically uploaded over FTP at the end of generation. 

Automatic item updates

For store where products go out of stock quickly or prices are been updated often, updating the feed once or few times per day won’t be enough. Those stores require specific microdata information to be included in the product pages and it should match the information provided through the feed. For instance on complex products the price is decided based on URL parameters provided in the feed to determine which option to consider when calculating the price. This hidden data on your product page wiill be used by Google bots to automatically update your data whenever there's a gap. 

Testing and Troubleshooting

Instead of generating the full feed which may take time for large catalogs, you may probe specific SKUs to test different configuration changes. This is useful when reviewing Merchant Center diagnostics for data errors and you’re correcting them. Feed generation log is also available to identify skipped products and generation history .