This allows ecommerce retailers to position products in front of a large audience of potential buyers, intercepting them exactly when they make particular search queries, thereby optimizing the relevance of ads and maximizing conversion opportunities by perfectly matching search intent and product offerings.

Optimizing the product feed in Google Merchant Center, therefore, directly impacts overall ecommerce performance: a well-configured feed, with search-optimised headlines and high-quality images, increases the relevance of ads and improves positioning in Shopping results. This can reduce the Cost per Click, improving the efficiency of ad spend and ROAS. 

Incomplete or incorrect data, on the other hand, can cause ad disapprovals or limit visibility, affecting sales and overall marketing performance.

As the platform is constantly evolving, it is crucial to stay up-to-date with the frequent changes in Google Merchant Center. Keeping up with these improvements reduces the risk of ad disapproval and ensures constant visibility.

The new Google Merchant Center Next: what is it about?

Introduced during Google Marketing Live in 2023, this updated version features a more intuitive interface and advanced functionalities that help companies optimize their marketing campaigns and improve product visibility on Google Shopping.

THE MAIN SECTIONS

The GMC Next, in addition to the general Overview and Alerts sections, is divided into 3 macro sections:

• Your Business, from which you can manage your main business information, such as your company profile, shop details, and product inventory. This is the section dedicated to setting up and managing your business on Google.
• Marketing, on the other hand, allows you to create and manage campaigns and promotions, improving the visibility of your products on Google Shopping.
• Analytics, which offers data and insights into the performance of our products, helping us to make strategic decisions based on statistics and trends, price comparisons, and competition.

Main differences and new features

The new features introduced with this latest version are:

• Detection and automatic import of products from the website:  GMC Next can detect product attributes from the website and automatically import them into Merchant Center Next, thus reducing the technical complexity of creating and maintaining a feed compared to the previous version of Merchant Center. And consequently, reducing errors resulting from a poorly configured feed.
• Feed management, additional feeds, and add-ons: feed management has been moved under ‘Settings’ > ‘Data sources’. From here, it is also possible to view and manage all settings on the feed, such as the source link, date of last update, and language.
  Another key section is ‘Add-ons’, also accessible from ‘Settings’, from which various features can be added, such as ‘Advanced Data Source Management’, which unlocks the ability to add additional feeds within the merchant center. In the old version, additional feeds were already usable by default. Another example of an add-on that can be activated is the Local Inventory Ads (in the standard version, they were located under the ‘Programmes’ section).
• Simplified diagnostics: the summary of product diagnostics shows only the current situation, in terms of what is approved, under review, restricted, and not approved. Previously, there was a timeline showing historical product diagnostics and how they had changed over time. In GMC Next, a simplified and less intelligible version of this timeline is available on the ‘Products’ > ‘Requires attention’ > ‘View history’ page.
• New ‘Click Potential’ metric: this new metric uses past data to calculate the click potential of users on product ads. This is calculated by comparing product performance against the best performing products and can be used to make reasoning based on the estimates provided.
• Product Studio (with AI): this function allows the creation of product images based on artificial intelligence, improving their attractiveness. You can remove backgrounds and create more appealing images for your audience, but it is currently only available for selected accounts.

Conclusion

In short, the new Google Merchant Centre Next represents a significant evolution for ecommerce, offering advanced tools and a more intuitive interface.

Innovations such as automatic product import and detailed performance analysis expand the possibilities for optimizing advertising campaigns and improving the visibility of products online. All these features enable more efficient and proactive catalog management, making the user experience smoother and more accessible.

In addition, new features in the management of the Google Merchant Center Next feed could represent a major step forward thanks to the integration of artificial intelligence-based technologies. The first significant improvement could concern the advanced automation of data import, thanks to the automatic detection of changes in product catalogs, or changes in price and availability, simplifying and speeding up the entire management process.