Google Shopping.

Anyone searching for a specific product on Google often first sees a row of product tiles with an image and price. These come from Google Shopping. For a shop to appear there, it needs a Google Merchant Center account and a product feed: a list of every item with title, description, price, availability, image, brand and identifiers such as the GTIN. Shop systems such as Shopify generate this feed automatically through an integration.

There are two routes to visibility. Free product listings appear without click costs, mainly in the Shopping tab. Shopping ads are booked through Google Ads, nowadays mostly as part of a Performance Max campaign, and appear prominently above the search results. Unlike search ads, you do not book keywords: Google uses the feed to decide which searches a product matches. That is why the quality of the product titles matters so much.

An example: a Swiss shop for made-to-measure clothing names its items 'Shirt model 4'. Google can do little with that. After the revision the title reads 'Men's shirt, white cotton, slim fit, Kent collar'. The product now matches far more specific searches. The same work also improves the organic visibility of the product pages.

For shops in Switzerland a few points matter in particular: prices in Swiss francs including VAT, correct shipping costs in Merchant Center, an accessible returns and privacy page, and product pages whose price matches the feed exactly. Discrepancies lead to disapproved items. In Europe, Switzerland included, Shopping ads can also be run through comparison shopping services (CSS). The technical foundation for this, the product feed, is managed in Google Merchant Center.