How can I enter a promotion into Google Merchant Center?

Google Shopping can show promotions of many kinds. This article will show you how to enter them into Google Merchant Center.

The easiest way to enter a small number of promotions for Google Shopping is by using Google Merchant Center's promotion builder. The promotion builder is located in the "Promotions" dashboard of your Merchant Center account. It allows you to manually enter individual promotions.

To add promotions manually, follow the steps below:

  1. Sign in to your Merchant Center account.

  2. Click Marketing in the navigation menu, then click Promotions.

  3. Click the blue plus button.

  4. Select the promotion category that best fits your promotion.

  5. Follow the prompts, and click Save.

The promotion builder supports the following promotions categories:

  • Amount off: Offer a monetary discount for your items

  • Percent off: Offer a percentage discount for your items

  • Free gift: Offer a free gift depending on a specific item purchase or cart value

  • Free shipping: Offer free shipping based on a specific item purchase or cart value

The promotion builder allows you to specify spend thresholds, discount amounts, gift descriptions, and more. After you select your promotion category, the tool will display all of the applicable options for your promotion. Follow the prompts to create your promotion.

If you choose to apply your promotions to specific products in your products feed, choose Create custom filters based on product attributes in the promotion builder. This option allows you to select specific collections of offers from your product feed to either exclude or include in your promotions. You can specify the items that should have a promotion applied through any of the following attributes:

  • item_id
  • product_type
  • brand
  • item_group_id

Follow the steps above for the promotions you want to create in the promotion builder.

Once your promotion is submitted, it will undergo a review by Google. You will get an email notification about whether or not the promotion has been accepted by Google for display.

Note: The most common reason for promotions being disapproved is that the promotion title is not descriptive enough. The title will be shown to your customers, and must include specifics of the offer. So "New Year Sale" will be rejected, but "New Year Sale, up to 20% off everything" will be OK.