The automated discounts feature allows you to discount your product prices effectively based on multiple real-time signals and show a discounted price on Shopping ads and on your website.
On this page
Benefits
Automated discounts allow you to effectively price products in Shopping ads. Their goal is to help you drive more conversions.
- Customise pricing: Find the optimum product discount across Shopping ads and your site's product landing pages with the help of Google's high-scale models.
- Save time: Automated, real-time price optimisation saves time, effort and cost.
Eligibility and requirements
Not all retailers are a good fit for automated discounts. Before you can participate, make sure that you meet these requirements: aggregated minimum of 1,000 product clicks a week at the merchant level (your account can have multiple participating Merchant Center IDs, but each must separately fulfil this requirement).
- Conversion tracking and feed configuration setup (detailed below).
- Merchant systems must be able to accept and honour Google-provided product prices from the URL.
- Commitment to allow Google to show opted-in products with a ramp-up volume of 1%, 20%, 50% and >50%. Learn more about launch and ramp-up.
Instructions
Step 1 of 6: Select the programme and your preferred currency
Under 'Growth', you'll find the 'Automated discounts' tab. Click on Continue, then select 'Automated discounts' and select your preferred currency for reporting. If you're using a third-party platform, indicate the name of the platform or service. Upon submitting, you can move on to the next steps to set up conversion tracking and feeds.
Step 2 of 6: Set up conversion reporting with basket data
Conversion reporting with basket data allows Google to monitor, evaluate and optimise performance in a comprehensive way.
Follow the integration guidelines to set up this feature. Bear these key points in mind (they allow Google to accurately compute profit):
- Product price: This should include the discounted price before tax.
- Cost of goods sold: All products that might be included in the basket data should have been uploaded to Merchant Center with their cost of goods sold (COGS). This ensures that all products in the basket can be taken into account in the profit calculation.
- Discount: This field is used to collect all additional variable costs, like delivery and transaction costs not reflected at checkout.
Step 3 of 6: Opt in products via feeds
The system delivers the best performance when all products are opted in. If you want to exclude some products, you can decide not to opt them in. These changes to the feed can be made at any point during the implementation process, including after you've launched automated discounts.
Opt in productsTo complete this step, provide the minimum price [auto_pricing_min_price] and product-level cost of goods (COGS) [cost_of_goods_sold] attributes in your feed for the products that you want to include. Remember that the maximum price must be the regular price attribute already provided in your product feeds. Google won't go higher than this price.
| Required attributes | Value type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Minimum price [auto_pricing_min_price] | String |
This is the minimum price. Indicate the minimum below which you don't want the discount to be applied. Follow the same formatting rules as for the price Note: This can generally equal the costs of goods sold (COGS) |
Cost of goods sold (COGS) [cost_of_goods_sold] |
String |
This is the cost of goods sold (COGS). If accurate information is not available, provide the best estimation. |
Opt out products [optional]
If you want to opt out individual products from automated discounts, remove the minimum price [auto_pricing_min_price] attribute for each product.
[cost_of_goods_sold] attribute for opted-out products. It's still used to compute the total profit from reported baskets.We recommend opting in as many products as possible in order to reach the highest gains.
Step 4 of 6: Complete URL integration
This step requires you to accept and apply the Google-recommended price for opted-in products as a new sale price on your website.
You can find example URLs for testing in Merchant Center in 'Growth', on the 'Automated discounts' tab under 'Update your shop's website'. Contact automated-discounts-support@google.com if you need different URLs for testing.
Follow these instructions for consuming the price token.
- These instructions describe Google-generated JSON web tokens and the process of consuming the product price that they contain.
- This information is technical and is most useful to people who have a strong background in web development.
- The format described here is only valid for the pilot and might change later.
Token structure
JWT tokens contain two JSON objects: header and payload.
Header
{
"alg": "ES256",
"typ": "JWT"
}
Google-generated token headers have two fields:
- alg – used algorithm, value is always 'ES256'
- typ – media type, value is always 'JWT'
If the token header contains any other fields or the field values are different to described above, the merchant must reject the token.
Payload
{
"exp": 1571673600,
"o": "tddy123uk",
"m": "140301646",
"p": 21.99,
"c": "USD"
}
Payload has the following fields:
- exp – expiry time as unix time. If the token has expired it must be rejected.
- o – offer ID, which can be used to check that the landing page matches the product. If there's a mismatch, the token must be rejected.
- m – Merchant ID. If the Merchant ID doesn't match, the token must be rejected.
- p – discounted price
- c – currency, upper case
Consuming token
The exact details around consuming the token depend on the used library but, at a high level, there are three steps: decoding and signature validation, field validation and consuming price.
Decoding and signature validation
The Base64URL encoded token is passed in the pv2 URL request parameter:http://my.site.com/blacktee?pv2=eyJhbGciOiJFUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJjIjoiVVNEIiwiZXhwIjoxNTcxNjczNjAwLCJtIjoiMTQwMzAxNjQ2IiwibyI6InRkZHkxMjN1ayIsInAiOjIxLjk5fQ.Qlyr1dQ0vLUJx-iQKwkYE2uLHfYCLVEVGZkAq4fwGTSpMDQCbtzDJr5uGHG8dNKaKV5OlYDxLpW40tQVVe2gkQMost of the libraries combine decoding and signature validation into a single function, where 'token', 'ES256' (algorithm) and 'public key' are inputs and 'token_body' is the output:
token_body = decode(token, 'ES256', public_key)Public key for validation:
MFkwEwYHKoZIzj0CAQYIKoZIzj0DAQcDQgAERUlUpxshr67EO66ZTX0Fpog0LEHc nUnlSsIrOfroxTLu2XnigBK/lfYRxzQWq9K6nqsSjjYeea0T12r+y3nvqg==
Field validation
In case the selected library accepts key and algorithm in the previous step and forces their use despite header options, there's no need for additional header checks. Otherwise, the header fields need to be checked according to the guidelines above. For more information, review the JSON web token best current practices.
No matter which library is used, the o, m and p fields must be validated against merchant-side data. If they don't match, then the token must be rejected so that customers can't copy tokens across products and/or merchants. The merchant may check the exp field and reject the token if it has expired but this isn't mandatory.
Consuming price
If all the fields are valid and the token has not expired, the merchant must use the price provided in the p field. The price must be used for the remainder of the customer session (at least 30 minutes), including checkout. For items added to the basket, the price needs to be persistent for at least 48 hours.
Merchants can use their existing coupon functionality to discount the price if it fulfils the requirements listed on this page. In particular, the price on the landing page must match the price in the token. Just adding the discount on the checkout page is not enough.
Testing
After the integration has been completed, it will be tested in three steps:- Functional testing (done by merchant)
- Key validation (done by merchant with Google-provided token)
- Full end-to-end test (done by Google)
Functional testing
The easiest way to test during and after development is to generate a temporary key pair. This gives the merchant full control over the tokens so that they don't need any help from Google. A valid key pair can be generated with this command:
openssl ecparam -genkey -name prime256v1 -noout -out privkey.pem
openssl ec -in privkey.pem -pubout -out pubkey.pem
Tokens can be generated with jwt.io or similar tools using ES256 as an algorithm.
Key validation
In order to validate that production keys are correctly configured, a token signed with a production key is required. Google can provide such tokens on request. Since creating them requires manual work, tokens should only be requested once the functional testing is complete.Step 5 of 6: Google review
After the implementation steps have been completed, request Google to conduct a full review by clicking the button 'Request verification'. The review will go through end-to-end testing that covers multiple scenarios. It'll be completed within the Google Network to ensure that the integration is functioning correctly. Google will let you know if it finds any issues as shown on the last setup page.
If there are issues found, resolve the issue and submit a follow-up review request by clicking the button again or contacting automated-discounts-support@google.com. You'll have to resubmit review requests until all issues have been resolved.
Step 6 of 6: Kick-off
Launch schedule
After your review has been completed, we'll contact you and request authorisation to start the ramp-up process according to the schedule below. The time between each ramp-up stage will generally be less than seven days.
Ramp-up schedule:
- First stage: Discounts shown to 1% of customers
- Second stage: Discounts shown to 5% of customers
- Third stage: Discounts shown to 20% of customers
- Fourth stage: Discounts shown to 50% of customers
- Final stages: Discounts shown to more than 50% of customers
Google will let you know when each new stage begins. You can check your ramp-up percentage in Merchant Center at any time by navigating to the 'Performance' tab and clicking Automated discounts.
Ramp-down
Google regularly runs quality checks to ensure that the integration continues to work properly. If we detect substantial issues with your integration at any point after launch (e.g. if price passing is not being followed through to the landing page), we will:
- Ramp down the percentage of customers exposed to the discounts until it's at 0%
- Communicate with you immediately
- Provide specific suggestions on how to fix the issue
In order to ramp back up to the previous launch stage, submit a request for a Google review. Once the review has been completed and no issues are found, automated discounts will be reactivated.
Reporting
You can check your performance at any time by navigating to the 'Growth' tab and clicking the 'Automated discounts' tab. Your performance metrics, including incremental impressions, conversions and other metrics, will appear on your scorecards. These are updated daily.
Need any help?
If you have a question that this page can't answer, email automated-discounts-support@google.com.