Why is it important for Google Merchant Center to phase out Word Feed?

Recently, some advertising and e-commerce pros were surprised when they logged into Google Merchant Center and saw that the Feeds tab had disappeared.

As Mike Ryan, head of insights at Smarter Ecommerce, told me, feeds are the heart of Google Merchant Center.

Feed is (was) the term for structured data added to the platform by merchant accounts, such as product catalog feeds. There are also specific feeds such as Amazon, Google, Meta, etc.

However, there may also be feeds for data about product details, category information, out-of-stock or promotional changes, and creative elements of ads.

To those outside of e-commerce, this may seem trivial, but there's a thriving mini-industry of companies dedicated solely to feed management: Feedvisor, Feedonomics, Shoppingfeed, ChannelAdvisor, and VersaFeed are just a few.

By dropping the word feed across its Merchant Center UI, Google is sending a clear message to ecommerce players: Google cares more about its own data collection and algorithms than about information sourced from specific accounts.

What is it in one word?

The removal of the word “feed” is a sign that Google is becoming less reliant on information provided by brands and merchants for its marketing services. For example, instead of relying on your account's product feed, Google Merchant Center pulls data from sites and apps and interprets it itself.

“I'm one of those people who believes words have value,” Ryan said. [Google].

However, feeds aren't going away completely in Merchant Center: they've been renamed to Data Sources and are now buried more discreetly in the Settings section.

The new data source language emphasizes that brand-provided feeds no longer define the data stream, but are just one option among others: user-provided data sources and Google-provided data sources are now used in place of feeds.

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While the focus on a few word changes may seem like overkill, similar changes by Google have been impactful.

Ryan pointed out that Google AdWords dropped Words to become Google Ads in 2018, which was a precursor to Google search shifting its emphasis from keyword matching to something called broad match, which also shifted power to Google's algorithm and took away control from advertisers.

There are other examples: In Google products like the new Google Analytics (GA4) and Performance Max, the tab previously called Analytics is now called Insights. While a seemingly innocuous change, it represents a structural overhaul of how advertising and analytics work.

Rather than analytical data that can be exported to a spreadsheet and added to a brand’s CRM, the platform now reports Insights, which are interesting and actionable reports based on the aggregate results of campaigns.

For example, campaign analytics may show that 50,567 device or cookie IDs were targeted and subsequently converted, while insights may inform the advertiser that they had over 45,000 total conversions, with 10,000 each in Chicago and Dallas, and that those conversions were more prevalent among women coming from social media.

The insights can get more complex and involve other data sets, such as Google, Amazon, and Meta incorporating their own first-party data, or retailers overlaying data for sales, but the main idea is to continually provide useful campaign reporting that drives additional ad spend, without the user-level specificity that comes with analytics.

Don't feed the animals

The change from Analytics to Insights is similar to the end of Feeds in other ways too.

Kirk Williams, founder of paid search agency ZATO and who runs the Merchant Center Mastery account, posted a video explaining that feeds are like a spreadsheet, with different rows and columns representing product attributes.

Instead of managing these data feeds like a livewire, Google is encouraging advertisers to think in terms of data sources. You don't have to micromanage your price and promotion feeds — just update the prices on your site and Google will absorb that information. Google will analyze your site and pretty much everywhere your products appear.

Williams added that Google isn't ready to get rid of feeds entirely just yet, saying the company still frequently makes mistakes about the data it provides.

But that hasn't stopped the speculation, especially since it's been three weeks since The Trade Desk caused industry-wide headaches when it used the word “premium” in a piece of content marketing.

Sources 1/ https://Google.com/ 2/ https://www.adexchanger.com/marketers/why-it-matters-that-google-merchant-center-is-ditching-the-word-feed/ The mention sources can contact us to remove/changing this article

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