Promotions feed is a popular feature of google shopping campaigns that helps you show discounts and special offers running on your store with the shopping ads and lets you stay unique from other advertisers.

It allows you to stand out amongst your competitors and attract buyers to visit your online store to purchase the product with specific offers & discounts.

As of now, the Promotions Program is only available for a few countries which are listed below.

• The US
• The UK
• Australia
• Canada 
• France
• Germany

There are certain criteria & requirements by Google that you need to fulfill for the Promotions Program. Please refer to the link below by Google for more information.
https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/2877565?hl=en&ref_topic=7322621

In this doc, we’ll help you step by step on how to submit the promotions feed. It is easy to set up and there are no additional charges for this feature.

Check once if your merchant center account is already approved for the promotions under the “Promotions” option on the left sidebar in Google Merchant Center.

If it is not approved then, you will need to activate it first in your Google Merchant Center account.

Login to your Google Merchant Center account > Growth > Manage Programs > Promotions > click on “Get Started”. It will ask you to fill out the Interest application form.

If you are enrolling for the first time, then we recommend you to select the first option “I want to enroll in Merchant Promotions”. 

Fill out all the required details, click on “Submit” and you will receive a message from Google.

You have to wait for 1-4 business days to get a response from Google Team about the application status.

Once it is approved, you will be able to see the “Promotion” link in the left sidebar under Marketing > Promotions.

Also, make sure that all the products on which you want to run the shopping campaign are submitted and approved in the Google Merchant Center.

Now you can start to submit promotions and discount offers running on your store via promotions feed for “All Products” or “Specific Products” from our plugin “API Feed for Google Shopping and Facebook”. 

In our plugin, click on Promotions Feed. You will be able to see the screen below if you have not created any promotions yet with the option “Add New Promotion”.

Follow the below steps to create a promotion feed:

1. For All products: 

Click on “Add New Promotion”, it will take you to the promotion creation forum.

Title: Add a suitable promotion title. For example; $30 off this Christmas or 15% off this New Year or Free Shipping over $100.

To check more details regarding what can be included or what cannot be included, check the editorials guidelines with this link: https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/2877578?hl=en

Product Applicability: As we are implementing this scenario for “All Products”, so select the option “ALL PRODUCTS” 

Offer Type: Here select the “GENERIC_CODE” as we would need a valid code so that the customer can use the code at the time of checkout and promotion can be applied.

Generic Redemption Code: Here create a code that needs to be applied when checking for the promotion/discount. 

Promotion Effective Dates: Select the dates when the promotion will start and end.

Also, keep in mind the maximum duration between the promotion dates can be 180 days. You will have to select the start and end date from the same calendar pop-up.

Promotion Display Dates: This attribute specifies the date and time frame when the promotion will be live on Google.com and Shopping ads. These dates can be the same as “promotion effective dates” or can be any duration between the effective dates.

Minimum Purchase Amount: It is optional. If you would like to keep the minimum amount over which you want to provide this promotion then you can add the amount.

After filling in all the details, click on “Add to feed” and the created promotion will display on the promotion feed dashboard of our plugin.

Once the process is completed, you will be able to see the feed URL. This URL remains the same for all the promotions you add or remove.

This feed URL needs to be submitted to the Google Merchant Center’s promotion tab.

2. For Specific Products: 

The process will be the same as for “All Products”. Add promotion title, in the product applicability select “SPECIFIC PRODUCT” and fill up all the other details as explained above.

As we have created the promotion for “Specific Products”, now need to assign this promotion to the products for which you would like to display this promotion in Google Shopping.

Once you have the list of the products on which you would like to assign the promotions, then proceed with “Do Edits in Bulk” and select the option “Assign or Remove Promotions”.

A dialog box will appear and will ask you to select the promotion. Here you will be able to see only one promotion as only created a single promotion for “SPECIFIC PRODUCTS”.

  Now you’ll be able to see that the promotion has been mapped with specific products successfully.

Note: You don’t need to map the promotion which is created for “All Products” as Google does the mapping on its own.

After assigning the promotion, it will take up to 10 mins to get this updated in Google Merchant Center.

Now, let’s move on to the next step of submitting the feed URL to the Google Merchant Center. Locate the option of “Promotions” in Google Merchant Center as 

Marketing > Promotions > click on Promotion Feeds > click on “+” icon.

Select the “Country Of Sale”. Then proceed with “Continue”.

Add the “Feed Name” as per your convenience which is easy to understand and remember.

Also, select the “Schedule fetch” option when you would like to submit the feed URL here and click on “Continue”.

Fill out the details as mentioned in the below image and proceed with “Create Feed”.

You are all set with creating a promotion feed. If you want Google to crawl your promotion feed at the same moment, then you would have to click on the “Fetch Now” option. This will help to pull the data of all the promotions added to the feed.

After a few hours, if there is any issue or rejection then please go through the details provided for rejection and then need to re-create the new promotion as Google does not allow promotion editing.

You can also add the promotion feed for the additional countries from Google Merchant Center. As of now, you can only submit a promotion feed for the primary target country from our plugin.

Note: To add the promotion feed for additional countries from Google Merchant Center, the feed should be already submitted for that country in Google Merchant Center.

We hope it is going to be helpful. If you have any queries on any of these options you can write to us at support@simprosys.com and we will definitely help you.