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The automations feature helps keep your product data accurate by automatically using your landing page data to update your product data. These automatic updates may allow Google to update your products on Shopping ads and free listings using the structured data markup and other sources of product data the crawlers find on your website. Automations 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 USD, but your product page lists it as $3 USD, we’ll update the product to $3 USD in your ads or free listings.
On this page
Benefits of automations
- Avoid some price, availability, and condition mismatches. The automations feature looks at the information found on your landing page to eliminate 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.
Notes:
- Automations aren't a replacement for regular updates of your product data. They’re designed to fix sporadic 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 source) as we’re unable to keep all of your products up to date with automations only. If you expect the pricing, availability, and condition of your products to update frequently, you should use the Merchant API to manage product updates .
- Automations may not work for products with frequent price or availability value changes (for example more than once per day). The product may be disapproved instead of updated if we detect a mismatch. We may also stop updates if the total number of detected mismatches becomes too large.
- Automations for price may also update strikethrough prices (also known as reference price, original price, previous price, or regular price). If product pages show multiple strikethrough prices, our system may not be able to accurately find the correct strikethrough price. You shouldn't enable automatic updates for price in this case.
Keep in mind: For automations, Google uses relaxed matching rules. Specifically, in_stock, preorder, and backorder are all considered compatible with in_stock. This means that if your data source indicates in_stock and Google finds preorder or backorder on your online store, 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 Center, 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 3. Automations are enabled by default.
- We automatically read the structured data markup and other product data sources on your online store using our advanced data extractors and directly pull product data from your HTML into Merchant Center.
Get started
Step 1: Prepare your website
If you haven’t 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 [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 [price]
Schema.org product data attributes:
Formatting:
price: Number. Submitted without currency symbols, thousands separators, or spaces (for example, '1498.99').priceCurrency: Text. Submitted in a 3-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 [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 |
|---|---|
in_stock |
|
out_of_stock |
|
preorder |
|
Here’s an example of a product with structured data:
<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 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
Automations should already be turned on in your Merchant Center account. If you have a multi-client account, each sub-account will have Automations enabled (sub-accounts can also specify their own settings).
- Select Products, in your Merchant Center account.
- Select the Automations tab.
- From the "Automations" page, choose the specific automation 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 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 timezone is correct. When a sale is active, the sale price is shown as the current price in Search results. - Make sure that any strikethrough price value displayed on your online store matches the price
[price]attribute when the sale price[sale_price]attribute is also provided. - To detect and update mismatches for price and availability, Google finds products on the product pages provided in the link attribute. .
- To detect and update mismatches for condition, Google checks the value you provide for the condition
[condition]attribute against other values in your product data. Use terms like "new", "used", or "refurbished" in the title or description of your product to allow us to cross-check for consistency. Ensure the info in your product feed is consistent with the actual condition of your product.
Frequently asked questions
What is structured data markup?- Structured data markup is tiny pieces of product information on your online store. It helps search engines read the information on your website and display data in a useful way.
- Using schema.org structured annotations on your website allows us to reliably retrieve up-to-date information directly from your online store. In Merchant Center, the structured annotations are used to update your product data and simplify the creation and maintenance of your data source . For Automations, we rely on the price, availability, and condition annotations on your online store to update the price, availability and condition attributes in Merchant Center.
- It’s recommended to set up structured data markup on your online store. 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 online store 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 product-level disapprovals.