Export & shipping best practices for your product feed and Shopping campaigns

Once you’ve chosen the relevant markets you want to export to, you’ll need the right tools to reach potential customers. Smart Shopping campaigns represent an excellent, low touch option to launch in new markets. They can help you simplify your Shopping campaign management, maximise your conversion value and expand your reach, while saving you time to focus more on your strategic business objectives.

Key tip: Identifying new & relevant markets for your business

Some publicly available resources, such as Google’s Market Finder, can be useful tools to help you identify relevant markets for your products. By entering a few details about your business, you’ll be able to:

• Uncover the potential market for your product categories
• Get an indication of your Google Ads campaigns’ competitiveness
• Review demographic data
• Check localisation and logistical best practices

You can find a full list of supported countries, currencies and languages where Shopping Campaigns are available in this Google Merchant Help Center article.

Before setting up your Shopping campaigns in Google Ads for export, it’s important to correctly structure your product feed in Google Merchant Center and prepare your landing page.

Recommended practices to build your feed:

1. Duplicate your existing feed: This way you can decide if you want to sell all your products or specific items; then you can adjust your feed accordingly.
2. Match language and currency: Did you know that 72% of consumers spend most of their time on websites in their own language and 82% of shoppers are more likely to buy if promotional material is in their own language¹? Therefore, using the language and currency of your new target market in your feed, and matching it with your landing page, can play a key role when exporting to new markets.

• Same language: If your export market uses the same language as your home market, you’ll only need to add the country to your feed in Google Merchant Center. You can do this in the feeds section of your GMC account: simply select your feed and, under settings, click to include additional countries. Even if the currency is different to your home market, you will be able to automatically use Google’s currency conversion tool to display your products in the local currency.
• Different language: If your export market uses a different language to your existing markets, you will likely need to add a new translated feed and build new landing pages on your site. You can add a new primary feed in the feeds section of the Google Merchant Center. When translating your site, make sure to translate all site elements and steps in the checkout process.

Recommended practices to prepare your landing page:

• Disable IP detection: Keep your landing page experience consistent in every market (this is unique to Shopping ads).
• Match languages: When translating your landing page, make sure to translate all elements and stages of the checkout journey.
• Match currencies: Use the currency converter if you want to target a country that uses a different currency to your landing page. It automatically converts the price in your product data to the currency of the new country of sale and displays both prices in your Shopping campaigns.

Key tip: These steps will help you prevent potential suspension of your feed or your Google Merchant Center account.

• Show your products using the same product data: You can quickly include additional countries of sale to show your offers within the same feed. Simply log in to your Google Merchant Center account, and in the settings tab of your feed page, click ‘add’ under additional countries and follow the set-up instructions.
• Set up multi-country shipping: You can set this up at account level (more info here) or amend the shipping attribute to indicate which countries you’d like to target for individual products. This will allow you to use a single service to ship to multiple countries, while it won’t impact which countries you target or where your products show. If you are using the same feed across multiple markets and want to exclude certain products from showing, you can use the ‘shopping_ads_excluded_country’ attribute.
• Follow local tax & shipping policies: Countries follow different tax regulations, so familiarise yourself with the policies of your export country.
• Remember import & export charges: These charges (e.g. duty, excise, or customs) do not fall under the tax attribute, so make sure you combine them with the price or shipping attribute and be consistent throughout the user journey.