Getting started

This guide will take you through the steps needed to set-up, develop and launch a new Things to do feed.

Initial Setup

To create accounts and SFTP endpoints Google requires you to provide SSH keys to use as upload credentials. Once this is provided, Google will create two SFTP end points (one for development and another for production) and a Things to do Center account for you.

Generate a Secure Shell (SSH) key pair for SFTP dropbox

Please follow Generate a Secure Shell key pair for an SFTP dropbox to generate a pair of public and private SSH keys. This pair of keys is used to securely log in to the Google-provided SFTP dropboxes. The public key has the following format:

ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAADAQABAAABAQCXsM9ycbHV6E6t2L+B4p/uYHn9Q0jmu5gUXMYnFnnf4l39xrznfDo8KCASzRrqUkRnuzrno059CvZVzcljkbwWLzKKoE1EwbzHL3nYahMB4MdYNWhBbHbB+ybq6RNO7hkoKDBIQCfqQDY0FEB6sV3d3F1WYl0bAMjp15yyZJzMKa/rRnZKWetHlcL1X+gFWmW2hQ93foPD463gb58/25GujjsS/tzjngw7UJMVkm08U1QEY3z3DE/R++7ovJozTCzH0CTNDN0AH3/oSC3dmG+yDh3ZXFATjWjyPXJSOziNrp9TXgJhlqSmoHcPvpotMVjx21kIZ+T+SusQmnG+hK+L [e-mail]

Don't include new line breaks in the key.

Key Point: Keep track of your public key and secure your private key. You will need to provide the public key to Google and make use of the private key when uploading feed data to Google.

Note: For increased security, you can provide two different SSH keys, one for production and one for the development environment.

Once the keys are created, please send them to your Google representative at which point two feeds will be created on your behalf.

Access to the Things to do Center

The Things to do Center is a partner portal that allows you to view and manage your things to do feed. There you can configure the feed credentials, view issues found in the feed and see the latest referral stats for each product.

Access is provided to you once the initial set-up has been completed by Google. As part of the initial onboarding, Google will reach out to you and ask for a list of users who will be owners of the Things to do Center. Each user on that list will be granted access and have owner permissions. These users can grant new users access to the Things to do Center as well as add additional owners.

Note: A Google connected email address is required for login to the Things to Do Center. Please see Create a Google Account for details on how to link Google accounts.

Development and Testing

Once account and endpoints have been created, your Google representative will reach out to you with access details of the end point and Things to do Center. As you develop the feed, you can upload to the development end point at any point and check the processing results in the Things to do Center.

Uploading feed

Once you have received the feed details, you can upload feed created feed directly to the endpoint below:

SFTP URL: partnerupload.google.com.
SFTP Port: 19321
Username: username provided by Google

The private key matching the public key generated in the previous step will be needed for authentication. See Connect to your SFTP dropbox for a detailed example of connecting to SFTP dropbox.

Testing and validating feeds

Automated feed validation and ingestion occurs once a feed has been uploaded. Upload history, status and error messages can all be accessed via the Things to Do Center. During development and testing, you may freely upload to the partnerdev feed endpoint to trigger validation.

Once development is complete, partners can start uploading feeds to the production endpoint on a regular basis. After the first feeds have been uploaded, please reach out to your Google representative to trigger the launch process.

Launch to Production

Before turning the feed on to production, the Google team will do one final QA round on the production feed uploaded. Any feedback from the QA will be provided directly to your team and once all outstanding issues have been resolved, the Google team will launch your feed by enabling it in the backend.

Note: New activities uploaded have to go through Google's tagging pipeline so it will not be publicly visible immediately.

Things to do ads integration

Once feed integration has been completed, please reach out to [e-mail] with a list of Google Ads accounts which may have access to the feed content to start the Ads integration.