With your eCommerce storefront up and running, and your product feeds optimized for different marketing channels, you’re now ready to take the next step to compete in new markets around the world. Without a Multi-Country product feed strategy, you’re losing out on new, prospective customers who want what you have to offer.
So, how exactly do you create accurate, localized feeds that display your products to customers in various countries? The answer depends on what channels you’re using to sell your products.
In this post, we’ll take a look at how to create a Facebook and Google international product feed strategy for new, global markets.
Google Shopping: Multi-Country and Multi-Language Feeds
To set up your Multi-Country and Multi-Language feeds let’s start by looking at product feed requirements for certain countries in Google Merchant Center.
- Create your primary feed, select your language and country.
As a starting point, it’s a good idea to see if your desired country appears on the approved list of countries for Google Shopping. Once a country and language have been selected, it’s time to set the rules for your product data.
- Setting up specific rules for your product data.
Feed rules are what help make your product feeds compliant and optimal for Google Merchant Center. Once you have selected your country and language, set your specific product feed rules to minimize errors.
- Using supplemental feeds.
Supplemental feeds are additional sets of crucial product data that will help further differentiate your products by highlighting additional attributes. The purpose of a supplemental data feed is to add missing data to your primary feed like a product’s sale price in the location’s native currency and language. Having both primary and supplemental feeds are highly beneficial for differentiating your products from your competitors.
- Understanding Country Groups in Google Merchant Center.
Google Merchant Center has created pre-determined country groups (Group A and Group B), which allow your product listings to appear to more customers outside of your core area. Depending on the primary country you have selected, your product listing will automatically appear in another country if both countries are within the same Country Group. This option gives you the advantage of marketing your products in more than just the initially selected country.
Learn more about Country Groups within Google Merchant Center and how they work.
Now that you have selected your primary country, you’ve enabled your products to appear to your intended audience in a given area. By selecting a specific language, you’ve also enabled your ads to appear to those who speak that language, whether they are in the selected country or not.
These small updates to your feed can significantly improve the discoverability of your product listings.
- How to opt-out products from Shopping ads in individual countries.
You also have the freedom and ability to exclude some products from certain countries. Simply use the shopping_ads_excluded_country attribute when setting up your catalog through Google Merchant Center to pick and choose which countries you don’t want your shopping ads to appear in.
Google Merchant Center: Common Errors for Multi-Country Feeds
In order to prevent product listing disapprovals, Google Merchant Center will automatically analyze your product data and notify you if any key issues or errors arise. Here are a few of these common errors:
- Missing ID in the feed catalog
- Currency and country mismatch
- Stock & availability errors
- Shipping information & tax information issues
- Errors with product images
- Errors with product descriptions
Although these common errors can cause some setbacks, the great thing about Google Merchant Centre is that errors are flagged, and you will be notified automatically. On top of that, by partnering with a sophisticated feed management solution, you’ll have access to a number of benefits that make these common errors feel like a bump in the road.
Benefits of Using A Feed Management Platform for Google Shopping
Having your product feeds optimized for international markets through Google Merchant Center means that your customers in other countries will see your products listed in their native language and currency. By offering that kind of tailored shopping experience to your customers, you’ve already got an advantage over your competition.
A solution that includes feed management software and a managed service to properly categorize your products based on the intended country and language will help you sell more products around the globe.
Facebook & Instagram: Feeds for Multiple Countries & Currencies
There are three different types of feeds you need to set up on Facebook and Instagram to successfully advertise and sell your products in international markets.
- Catalog feed (which serves as the primary feed)
- Language feed
- Currency feed
With the help of a leading tech partner, like Highstreet.io, all three of these feeds can be consolidated into a single master feed, for optimal performance.
Steps to Set-up Your Multi-Country and Multi-Language feeds
As a merchant, there are two steps to successfully set -up your Multi-Country and Multi-Language feeds to maximize your performance on Facebook and Instagram:
STEP 1: Create a catalog feed for a default country and language
When it comes time to develop accurate product feeds for Instagram and Facebook, you’ll want to start by selecting your desired countries and languages. Start by creating a catalog for your default language and country. Then, you’ll want to upload a data feed containing all of your product data to a catalog feed.
Note: Your products must be present in all countries you’ve selected, but if this is not the case, the catalog file must be the one associated with the country with the highest number of products.
To help get you started, you can download a country-specific feed template from your Commerce Manager tab through your Facebook Business Help Center.
STEP 2: Upload your data with the correct information and attributes
Once you have your country and language feeds determined and selected, you’ll need to upload these feeds to your catalog (primary) feed, while making sure that you’re providing the correct information, such as:
- Country-specific pricing
- Product descriptions
- Language Code
- Country Code
- Stock availability
- URLs by country (location)
Facebook & Instagram Ads: Common Multi-Country Feed Errors
Below is a list of some common errors that can lead to product disapprovals on Facebook and Instagram. While many of these are similar to the common errors of Google Merchant Center, it’s important to understand how to effectively resolve these errors in order to avoid any major setbacks.
- Inaccurate pricing data
When implementing pricing data, be sure to include a 3-digit ISO 4217 currency code, such as EUR, rather than a currency symbol, such as €. If your price includes a decimal point, use a period (.) as the decimal, not a comma (,).
Here’s a good example of the correct usage:
Correct: 5.99 EUR
Incorrect: 5,99 €
- Missing ID in the feed catalog
Entering a product that is not in the catalog feed will result in an error. If a product doesn’t have a translation for a particular language, or if it’s unavailable in a particular country, then it can be omitted from the language or country feeds respectively.
Alternatively, if a product is missing in the Catalog feed, it means it can’t be present anywhere else, and Facebook throws an error if you try to upload a translation for a product that is not present in the Catalog feed.
Some other common issues include:
- Currency and country mismatch
- Shipping information & tax information issues
- Stock & availability errors
Luckily, with the help of a versatile feed management partner, these potential issues can be handled with ease, freeing up your time so that you can focus on what you do best: selling your products.
Benefits of Using A Feed Management Platform for Facebook & Instagram Ads
Whether it’s optimizing your feeds, categorizing your rich data into specific Country Groups, or resolving issues with inaccurate product data, a quality shopping feed provider will handle the time-consuming back-end headaches of developing and managing international Instagram and Facebook product feeds.
How Highstreet.io Can Help
Our platform and managed service not only helps to optimize your product feeds for marketing channels and marketplaces but also helps merchants create effective Multi-Country and Multi-Language feeds that are accurate and compliant.
When clients submit their catalogs to the platform, it generates consolidated master feeds. They contain all of the different products and product data for the different countries and languages and automatically sort the feeds based on countries.
With this entire process handled by Highstreet.io, merchants no longer have to worry about the time-consuming process of manually sorting catalogs for specified countries.
Discover how we can help you create Multi-Country and Multi-Language feeds to expand your product catalog’s reach and improve your revenue.