Use a product feed to show your products in Discovery ads

Discovery ads enable you to automatically promote the right products to the right people at the right time as they scroll through their favorite content on YouTube, Discover, and Gmail. This can help you drive purchases from people who might not have been aware of your brand.

If you’re a retailer, you may have a product catalog that you source when it comes to your advertising. Google Merchant Center is a great place to keep that product catalog because it helps millions of people discover, explore and buy products.

Use product feeds with Discovery ads to promote your Google Merchant Center product catalog and to increase sales, leads, or other actions on your website.

Important: On average, Discovery campaigns that are optimized either for sales or lead generation conversion goals, or for both, achieve 45% more conversions at a similar CPA by using product feeds*.

*Source: Google internal data, Global, November 2022. Based on an analysis of 458 advertisers who used product feeds in 731 Discovery campaigns from August to November 2022.

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Benefits

• Performance: Promote the right products to the right audience at the right moment, reaching potential customers among the 3 billion people on YouTube, Discover, and Gmail. Google machine learning will anticipate a user's interests and intent to automatically show relevant products, helping to meet your max conversions, Target CPA, or Target ROAS (beta) goal.
• Simplicity: Instead of creating an ad for each item you promote, connect your Discovery campaign to your existing Google Merchant feed. Images and product details in the feed will be used as a large set of creatives for ads that are automatically surfaced to potential customers. Potential customers can select a product image to immediately go to the product’s landing page for more information and to make a purchase.
• Flexibility: Set and use predefined product group filters to create more targeted Discovery ads.

Note: You will need to set up a new Discovery campaign to link to your Google Merchant Center feed. Adding a Google Merchant Center feed to an existing Discovery campaign isn't supported. You also cannot make changes to a Google Merchant Center feed that's already attached to a Discovery campaign.

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Prerequisites

1. Set up your account for Google Merchant Center. Learn more about how to Sign up for Google Merchant Center.
2. Create a feed for your Google Merchant Center account. Learn more about feeds and product data specifications.
3. Learn how to link your Merchant Center Account to your Google Ads accounts.
4. In Google Merchant Center, ensure that you enable “Shopping ads” as a destination.
5. Familiarize yourself with the product feeds for Discovery ads requirements.

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Best practices

Use these best practices for optimal results for your prospecting or remarketing campaigns.

	Prospecting campaigns	Remarketing campaigns
Objective	Prospecting campaigns will help you achieve a range of objectives, from generating site traffic to engagements to sales.	Remarketing campaigns typically focus on specific goals such as sales.
Audiences	Use the custom segments and in-market audiences, and enable optimized targeting to find more potential new audiences. Exclude the previously engaged users to focus on new customers. Tip: Avoid excluding “all website visitors” as these users may still be your potential new customers.	Include Customer Match and remarketing lists for users who have shown interest in your products or site before. Tip: If you are looking to measure success for remarketing audiences specifically, then only focus on first-party audiences. If you are looking to expand your audience, consider adding custom segments and in-market audiences.
Product groups	Include as many products as possible that are relevant and are a good match for your selected audiences. Tip: If your product selection is too narrow, it could impact the ability to serve the most relevant product for each user.	We recommend you include all products from your catalog.
Bids and budgets	If hitting a target KPI is your primary goal, use Target CPA or Target ROAS (beta) bidding strategies. Benchmark your KPIs against your social channels, as Discovery ads run on feed-based ad placements with social-like ad formats. Recommended daily budget is 10 times the Target CPA, or expected CPA, or at least $100 USD to $500 USD per day, whichever is higher. Tip: Just like standard Discovery campaigns, allow 1–2 weeks for your campaign to ramp up.
Creatives	Assets for product feed ads are primarily populated from your Google Merchant Center catalog. Ad headlines and descriptions: Use your ad-level headline and description to show your storefront or overall offering. Example: “Free shipping on all products” or “10% off storewide”. Intro card: Intro cards are optional. If you supply an intro card, it may appear as an alternative or a fallback when product details cannot be shown.
Google Merchant Center	Use the Google Merchant Center attribute short title [short_title] to power your thumb-stopping product ads. Use quick and snappy titles, which are usually less than 65 characters, that can attract user attention as they browse. Avoid attributes that are specific to product variants, like sizes or gender. We recommend that your most important feed products are represented with square images (1:1) or close to square images (0.6:1.4) for best coverage.

Learn more about inspiring action on Google's personalized feeds with Discovery campaigns

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Instructions for linking your product feed to a new Discovery campaign

Set up your campaign

Note: The instructions below are part of a new Google Ads user experience that will launch for all advertisers in 2024. If you’re still using the previous version of Google Ads, review the Quick reference map or use the Search bar in the top navigation panel of Google Ads to find the page you’re searching for.

1. In your Google Ads account, click the Campaigns icon .
2. Click the Campaigns drop down in the section menu.
3. Click the plus button then select New campaign.
4. Choose Sales, Leads, Website traffic, or No goal as the marketing objective.
5. Select conversion goals, from the options available, to optimize sales and click Continue.
6. In the “Select a campaign type” section, select Discovery.
   
7. Select the Discovery campaign with product feeds option.
8. Select a Merchant Center account to link to your campaign.
   
9. Enter your web page URL. This will be the web page people will go to after clicking your ad.
10. Enter a name for your Discovery ads with product feeds campaign.
11. Click Continue.
12. Select your geographic and language targeting for this campaign.
    • Note: Ad rotation and frequency capping aren't available for this campaign type.
13. Select your bidding strategy and enter your average daily budget. Learn more About automated bidding.
    • Conversions: If you select the checkbox for “Set a target cost per action”, the campaign will try to meet the Target CPA you enter. Learn more About Target CPA bidding.
    • Conversion value: If you select the checkbox for “Set a target return on ad spend”, the campaign will try to meet the Target ROAS you enter. This is currently in beta. Contact your Google representative to get started. Learn more About Target ROAS bidding.
14. Click Next.
15. Select your audiences. You can add the following audience segment targeting options: custom intent audiences, your data, and in-market segments.
    • Note: For audience lists, make sure you have at least the following (more details):
      • Google Search Network must have a minimum of 1,000 active visitors or users within the last 30 days.
      • YouTube must have a minimum of 1,000 active visitors or users within the last 30 days.
      • Gmail must have a minimum of 100 active visitors or users within the last 30 days in the Display Network.
    • For Google Analytics audience lists:
      • Make sure to activate Google signals in your Analytics account.
    • For Custom intent segments:
      • Discovery ads support search keywords only.
16. Click Next to proceed to ad creation.

Ad Creation

Note: If your feed has been successfully associated with your campaign, you will find a "Product Groups" section with your merchant center account at the top of the page.

1. (Optional) Select product groups.
   1. You can choose to select a set of pre-defined product group filters that are part of your Merchant Center product feed. Use product group filters to arrange the product details from your feed.
      1. From here, you can select one or more of your top product group filters. After you create an ad group, you’ll be able to include more complicated filter combinations in the product group tab.
      2. If no product group filters are selected, all product details in the feed will be eligible for your new campaign’s ad group.
2. Enter your final URL. The final URL is where people go after clicking your ad. It can be any page of your website and should match what your ad promotes.
3. Add a logo.
   • Recommended size: 1200 x 1200px
   • Minimum required size: 128 x 128px
   • Maximum file size: 5120 KB
4. Add a headline and description.
   • The headline is the first line of your ad and can be up to 40 characters. The length of the rendered headline will depend on the site it appears on. If it's shortened, it will end with an ellipsis.
   • The description adds to the headline and provides additional context or details. It can be up to 90 characters, and may appear after the headline.
5. Add a Call-to-Action (CTA).
   • To encourage people to act, your call to action text can show in a variety of layouts. By selecting "(Automated)," Google selects the call to action for you. Some ad layouts don't include a call to action.
6. (Optional) Create an intro card. The intro card allows you to add up to one card, which may appear before product feed cards or as an alternative as a fallback when product details cannot be shown.
   1. Select an intro card image.
      1. Only one image is required, but we recommend that you select one image for each aspect ratio (16:9, 1:1, and 4:5) for the best coverage. Images added must be the same number of images and have the same ratio as images used in other cards.
         
   2. After the image is selected, enter a URL (required) and a description (optional).
7. Your intro card is now complete and editable. Click Next to continue to the review page.
   
8. Ensure the information on the review page is accurate.
   

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Product reporting and insights

In the "Products" tab, You can view up-to-date data on the performance of your ads at the product-level, and apply breakdowns to view the metrics that matter to you most. With built-in metrics tracking, you can gain a broad view of how your campaigns are performing and make informed decisions to optimize your marketing strategy.

Reporting features
Product attributes (acquired from your Google Merchant Center feed)	Merchant ID
	Item ID
	Image
	Title
	Price
Serving-ready insights (policy review details)	Product status
	Insights
Core performance metrics	Clicks
	Impressions
	Click-through rate (CTR)

You can also find product-level reporting in the "Ad groups" tab, which contains core ad group performance metrics such as impressions, clicks, and CTR, as well as shopping coverage metrics such as products submitted and products active.

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Related links

• Discovery campaigns
• Create a feed
• Create a Discovery campaign
• Troubleshoot your feed
• Short title [short_title]
• Product feeds for Discovery ads requirements