Google Manufacturer Center (GMC) is a free platform that “allows manufacturers to provide better and more accurate information about their products to improve the shopping experience on Google.com and other Google services.”1
As the name implies, GMC is a Google product, and therefore can leverage the largest search engine in the world in terms of usage. It has a 70.07% market share on desktop search and Bing, in second place, only garners a 13.17% market share.2 With these numbers, it’s no surprise that most people use Google when looking for something online, especially when they’re shopping:
Many brands have realized the benefit of using a platform designed specifically to help consumers find you on Google sites. With GMC, you can, in essence, use all of Google as a marketing and sales channel for free. Here are the key three ways GMC benefits brands:
1. Enhances presence on Google. Submitting rich product content to GMC, such as highly descriptive information and images, helps highlight your products on Google Search and the Shopping tab. How? The product content that brands submit to GMC feeds Google’s shopping catalog, which powers shopping experiences across their multiple channels (e.g. Google Express, shopping app, Google Voice, Google Assistant, etc.). Therefore, it’s important for brands to also know how to optimize their product information on GMC.
2. Improves brand experience. Historically, product information from retailers may present products in different ways, which can be confusing and frustrating for shoppers. With GMC, brands can create consistency and ensure that shoppers see the same, enriched product content across all the different Google sites. Furthermore, providing consistency helps build credibility and trust with consumers.
3. Provides business insights. As brands submit product data to GMC, they leverage analytics on single product variants and groups, which reflect the products’ ad performance on Google. Performance metrics include clicks, impressions and impression rate (CTR)5 that go all the way down to the GTIN (UPC/barcode) level. This enables brands to understand how a clothing line, for example, is performing against another line, resulting in improved decision-making. GMC also gives brands access to data from retailers (in aggregate) who sell their products on Google Shopping.
Improving your presence on Google via GMC requires a system that helps you deliver accurate, complete, rich, up-to-date and channel-ready product content. Efficiently delivering high-quality product content to multiple channels, like GMC, involves optimizing processes and promoting collaboration across the organization. By leveraging a Product Information Management (PIM) system brands can easily manage and validate product data and then ensure they can deliver enriched and up-to-date product content to multiple channels. With a PIM system, you can be sure your product content is GMC-ready.
However, not all PIM systems are created equal. Contentserv provides a quick, effective and effortless way to deliver product content into GMC via our Google Manufacturer Center connector. The GMC connector provides automatic and convenient product content syndication from the Contentserv PIM system to Google Manufacturer Center. This ensures that you can maintain accurate and up-to-date product information in GMC at all times, and all with just a few clicks.
1 https://support.google.com/manufacturers/answer/6124024
2 https://www.netmarketshare.com/search-engine-marketmarket share-share
3 https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2020-july-global-statshot
4 https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/consumer-insights/consumer-trends/online-shopping-mobile-search/