2.2 Multi Country Targeting
Introduction/Business Impact
To upload your merchants’ product data from your catalog to Merchant Center, we recommend optimizing the product data you send to Merchant Center as much as possible. By minimizing the number of offers for one product you send, this will allow you to take advantage of benefits such as currency conversion which reduce the amount of potential errors and issues.
UX Guidance
We recommend allowing the merchant to choose which countries they want to target before they decide on how to integrate their shipping. You can provide a list of countries for them to choose and then let them decide on how they want to integrate their shipping. With this method, it is clear which countries you decide to create shipping services for the merchant.
Tech Guidance
Decision on how to implement multi country targeting
There are two options when using the APIs to set up multi-country targeting either by:
Account level and product level country targeting (Recommended): Using a combination of providing full shipping details via the Shippingsettings (setting up shipping services) and referencing these settings on an item level by providing the Product Shipping country value only on the item level through the Content API.
Product level country targeting only: providing shipping information on each item definition through the Content API but this approach only allows for a subset of the shipping attributes to be configured. We don’t recommend this approach because it doesn’t allow the same details with setting shipping at an account level.
Account level and product level country targeting (Recommended):
Set up shipping services at the merchant’s account level, defining the destination countries, currency, shipping cost and estimated delivery times. Learn more about shipping settings and how to retrieve and update these settings not only for your MCA, but all of your sub-accounts too.
Add ProductShipping attribute to all offers/items specifying all the countries your merchant wishes their product to be discoverable in and it can be shipped to. Learn more about the shipping field and more details with an API example.Through the Content API, only specify the 2 letter country code leaving the shipping price and shipping service attributes empty (they are optional as you have shipping service configured at an account level and the shipping price will be populated from your shipping service settings defined in step 1).
The shipping services are set up in the same currency as the merchant’s offers.
Product level country targeting only
- Add ProductShipping attributes to all your offers/items specifying the ship-to country, service level and price for all the countries you want products to be discoverable in. Learn more about implementing shipping at a product level and more Content API details with an API example.
Optimizing how you send your product data
We recommend optimizing how you send your merchants’ product data when targeting multiple countries. If you are using account level shipping and product level country targeting, organize an offer by language only and add the relevant countries you are targeting in the shipping sub attribute.
This method will make it easier to optimize the numbers of offers you send, make changes more easily based on language, and take advantage of the automatic currency conversion. Learn more about how targeting multiple countries works in the Merchant Center.
Understanding how products feed label work
We recommend setting up your offer so you do not need to delete the entry to remove the offer history. One of the main ways to avoid unnecessary deletion is how you use the feed labels.
We recommend not submitting a country code in this field because this could potentially confuse you with which countries to target in the Product Shipping field. The feed label can be set to any random text (Up to 20 character limit, A-Z, 0-9). Learn more in detail about using feed labels with the Content API.
Other things to be aware about when setting up your products to target multiple countries:
Free Listings and Paid Ads
Ads and free listings do not serve in countries included in the disapprovedCountries list for that destination within the productstatuses object.
For Free Listings, ProductShipping country in the product are the field that drive targeting for Free Listings
Paid Ads only
ProductShipping country in the product drives geo targeting and is picked up by the Ads API.
You can still exclude some products from serving in your Shopping ads in those countries by populating the shoppingAdsExcludedCountries attribute for the products resources with the countries you want to exclude.
Additional FAQ with how multi country targeting works:
How does currency conversion work?
For example, products submitted in EUR but shown to a Swiss shopper will be shown with both the CHF value (auto converted) and the EUR original value.
Once the user clicks on the offer and lands on the merchants page/site they will continue the purchase in euros ultimately paying in euros. This UX makes the currency conversion transparent to the user, whilst being helpful to show the converted price.
Are the products auto translated, does the feed content need to be translated?
The products are not translated via the currency conversion and the submitted product titles and descriptions are not required to be translated before submission.
The product will be presented in its original language which was submitted to users in the cross border countries that understand and/or search in that language. There are large populations of multilingual users in many countries and having discoverable content in multiple languages increases the assortment and variety of products they can discover.