About This Guide

This guide aims to provide Storebuilders and prospect Local Feed Partnership providers with a set of integration best practices to have their merchants display their offers on Local Inventory Ads (LIA) and Free Local Listings. It highlights the various Google APIs required to efficiently manage large numbers of Merchant Center, Google Ads and Google Business Profile accounts. While navigating the guide, you can expect to find the following guidance for most all sections:

• Introduction and Business Impact
• Tech guidance (API & others)
• UX guidance with screenshots
• Known issues & tips

Getting Started Overview

What is a Trusted Partnership for Local Feeds Providers?

Merchants who have a physical presence can benefit from Local Inventory Ads and Free Local Listings through Google's Local Feeds Partnership (LFP) integration. The Local Feeds Partnership integration helps retailers use Local Inventory Ads or Free Local listings through a point-of-sale (POS) or inventory data provider. The process requires the following steps:

1. Set up the necessary Merchant Center accounts.
2. Identify 5 to 20 suitable merchants that meet our minimum data quality requirements.
3. After 5 successful, successive, inventory checks, you achieve the status of Trusted Partner and no further inventory checks before onboarding new merchants are required. Those 5 merchants should be representative of the larger set of merchants.
4. LIA Ad Campaigns can be created after a merchant is live with free local listings and inventory ads.

The goal of this guide is to provide the reader with the basic knowledge needed to onboard as a Local Feeds Partnership provider with Google. Furthermore, provide guidance and best practices for enabling Local Inventory Ads, Local Inventory Product Feeds and POS integration.

Data requirements

As a Local Feeds Partnership provider you need to make sure you have permission to submit data on your merchant's behalf. Data needs to be accurate and refreshed periodically. There are 3 main sets of data: product and inventory data and store identification:

• Product data refers to the offer static values (description, size, colour etc..). This data can be refreshed within a 30 days window. Google uses GTINs as strong identifiers to ingest merchant's offers, most of the offers should have one. A provider could only provide GTINs using the POS provider endpoint and Google match the offer automatically. In case the GTIN is not available, a combination of different signals make the ingestion easier. More information on the product data specification page.
• Inventory data refers to quantity and price. This data should be refreshed as soon as it changes on the merchant's side to guarantee the best possible user experience. This is store-specific information.
• Store identification refers to the store code either from the Google Business Profile linked to the Merchant Center account or from a dedicated store feed if the Business Profile is not available. This information is necessary to map offers to a particular store.