Merchant Center is making a change that will simplify showing your products in multiple countries.
What's changing
Currently, Merchant Center allows products to show in one of two country groups. The change we’re making is to merge the country groups into one global list, allowing you to more easily show products in all supported countries.
For example, products from a feed with a country of sale of Spain, previously would only be able to show to countries in Group A (Austria, Belgium, Czechia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, and United Kingdom). With the changes we are making, those products can now be set up to show in any country (not just restricted to Group A as before) where free listings or Shopping ads are available.
What this means for you
- If you’re targeting multiple countries at the feed level, this will make it easier to use just one feed per language for all countries. When adding additional countries to your feed, you’ll now see the entire list of countries where your products can show.
- If you’re using the shipping attribute to target additional countries, your products may start showing in additional countries. In addition to allowing you to specify shipping costs at an individual product level, the shipping attribute also allows you to specify countries where individual products should be shown. Some merchants currently have configured shipping attribute settings for one or more products indicating they want to show them in countries in both Group A and Group B. If this applies to your product data, with the upcoming change, those products will start showing in countries across both groups, when previously they only showed in one of the groups. If these products are included in a Shopping campaign in Google Ads, this may impact your campaign traffic. If you don't want your products to show in these countries, please update your shipping attribute information and/or location targeting in Google Ads.
To update your shipping attribute information:
- Review the 2 letter ISO 3166-1 country code information you're providing in the "country" sub-attribute of your shipping attributes. If your feed has a ‘country of sale’ for any country in Group A, then you'd review your information for any "country" sub-attribute information specifying a country in Group B.
- Alternatively, if your feed has a "country of sale" for any country in Group B, then you'd review your information for any "country" sub-attribute information specifying a country in Group A. These are the ‘cross country group’ products that could start showing in additional countries when we merge the country groups into one.
- For example, if your feed has a "country of sale" of Spain and you identify that some products in this feed that have a shipping ‘country’ sub-attribute of “US”, those products won’t show in the US now, but could start showing after the change.
- If you identify products that are “cross country group” that you don’t want to start showing in additional countries, simply update your shipping attribute information for those products to remove those additional countries. For example, for the feed with a country of sale of Spain in the example above, if you don’t want the products with shipping "country" sub-attribute of “US” to show in the United States after the change, update the shipping attribute for those products to remove “US” from the shipping country sub-attribute.