Google & YouTube

This is final rating: 1 star
My campaign is now paused. Will probably un-install after I finish this review. I am also probably too small for Google Shopping. App is a pain to set up and get running and way, too expensive for the very few sales it provided. Google also provides me no control over how my budget is spent; I tried to cut the budget into a sustainable amount by advertising only a few items which did not produce sales AND gave me another 30 day lag to re-acquire my products . I have been advertising on my Amazon Channel during the same period for comparison. In the past 30 days I sold 0 apron units on Shopify using Google Shopping; 7 apron units on Amazon advertising there. Google Shopping is not for me. Hope this saga helps you in some small way. Rest of review runs from start to the end except for this final review here at the top.

Installation in progress; 3 stars because I don't have an app opinion yet. There are some technical issues being sorted out by gurus and technical team. Support team is responsive, helpful and interested in finding solutions so they get 5 stars. Thanks to Jam, Paulo, Megan, Nicole for all your help. We will see what happens next.

Update: Today 7-20-19 I started Google Shopping on my Etsy shop and tonight my products are getting impressions. If Etsy can do it, so can you Shopify. What are they doing differently than you? I know you can figure it out!

7-22-19 Aoh'an from the technical group sent email today with instructions and a bit of code to add to my theme to fix the problem. The problem has been identified and a solution offered. Well done. Thank you, Aoh'an. I will check with Mile High to ask for help. Let's see what happens next.

7-22-19 pm Mile High is engaged and collecting information; re-check of products available for google shopping has changed from 'not-approved' to 'pending'

7-23-19 in my launch group for google some products now approved, some pending, none rejected. Now we're talkin'.

7-23-19 It is the considered opinion of the technical staff and theme developer that no intervention is required on my Showtime theme and that the warnings were of no consequence. The approved products are showing up now on google searches. So I am going to call it a day on installation.

Revue is now at 3 stars for the app; 5 stars for Shopify gurus and technical, Mile High theme developer. We will see how she runs. Thank you everyone, job well done.
7-25-19 All products in test group are now approved and show up on a targeted search; now we can evaluate the function of the app. Impressions are delivering based on the report. Thanks to all those who helped get this thing going. Let's see what happens.
7-26-19 App seems to be running. 625 Impressions, 1 site visit, $1.54 in charges. A click seems to take the customer to a staging area where a second click is required to take them to the product web page. My understanding was that a paid-for click took a customer to my product web page. Inquiry sent to the gurus for clarification.
7-30-2019 Gurus have confirmed that indeed, Google Shopping has me paying for clicks that go nowhere. This information was not in the app information so my expectations were in no way managed on this. It is too soon to say if the now very expensive cost of a click is worth it. Update: Ira sent new docs that show the information on charges-new for clicks-that-go-nowhere to be on the google shopping copy. I recommend that Shopify clarify this in their app copy as well. I have been assured that there is no additional charge for the click that actually DOES go to the website product page. I am surprised that all the bad reviews I read here did not mention all of this. I plan to let this run until the end of August to see if the expense is worth it. Right now I am being charged $2.36/website visit, have had 2695 impressions, 12 visits and 1 sale. Analytics do NOT report the number of clicks for which I am paying, only visits. Start was 7-13-19, 17 days, but the app was not running until around 7-23-19 so really more like 7 days. See you on the flip side.

9-4-19 We are currently at 4 stars for the app and product. We are getting traffic and sales, but it is a very expensive product for us smalls. Getting it up and running was not very funny, so be ready for a process. We are keeping it going, but reducing to just advertising our best seller for the next phase of testing. Support still stands at 5 stars.

9-19-2019 Down graded to 3 stars on the app. During testing phase, still ongoing, I learned that once Google has acquired products and gone through a 30-day optimization process....leave the products acquired unless you want to do it all again. Removing products, to promote fewer products with a smaller budget, means the acquiring process and optimization process starts over when you put the products back into the system. And Google does spend all the budget you give them.
There is very little control for vendors in Google Shopping. Amazon Sponsored Products is easier and more flexible. Testing still ongoing to see if a cost effective budget can be accomplished. Sigh.

Complete headache and not even remotely intuitive. Wanted to like it because I use Google Adwords. Frustrating.

The most pathetic app by Shopify!
I used the earlier app and it worked like a charm, the new google shopping app is pathetic! PLesae someone take charge and rectify it.
The products are synched with merchant centre, but the app doesn't update it. GTIN and images are perfect, but google cant find it, don't know how to Contact. Please someone with knowledge can get in touch to help?

Didn't work in the end. Very frustrating. Especially when this happens on the last steps. The App says everything is fine. Google Merchant Center says: Data is not correct. No idea where to fix it and I am REALLY sick of reading Trouble Shooting" articles. Fix them yourself - Google & Shopify. Thanks!

no problem installing or running the app, easy no issues. Not being able to set your ads is the biggest problem with this app. You are not setting your keywords, pictures or what it says. I see my ads all the time and they look like crap. It will flash whichever picture for the product without any explanation on what it is. In proper google ads, my keyword is about 1.80 per click. In this campaign, my rate is 0.11 per click. Also the bounce rate is way high, so this app actually hurts my shop standing with google

I found the app easy to set up BUT the app is displaying the wrong price for some (but not all) products.
Specifically, it appears that in some cases the logic is selecting the lowest price of the available variants for a given product rather than the actual variant price. For example; My product X has variants x, xx and xxx. If variant x = $10, variant xx, $20 and variant XXX $30; the Ad is displaying variant xx price as $10, rather than $20.
I logged the issue but no help forthcoming to date (it's been a few days). The issue was raised via a customer asking for variant xx at the 'advertised price'.

I will say it does its job of submitting products to google merchant centre.... however, that is as far as I can say as for how good the app is.

Easy to filter through google shopping fields? No. One at a time or not at all.
Easy to find your products based on the google shopping ID? No.
Download a .csv or excel file of the google shopping feed, and reimport to update the google shopping fields? No.

These are all simple, and obvious tasks, and without the ability to carry these out it is extremely difficult for high-number-of-products stores like ours!

There were so many errors with my product feed that my Merchant Center account was immediately suspended. Suspended! This app really is as bad as the other 1-star reviews, I'm so shocked it was created by Shopify.

The app pulled data from all of the wrong fields and there is absolutely no way to check why or how that happened. Not to mention, if you do make a mistake on your own data entry there's no way to resend the feed once you make corrections - especially not if your account's been suspended! There's like no functionality or action buttons in the app. Just a connection that you have to trust is working.

It didn't pull the SEO data as requested, but instead sent the super long descriptions on my website that had html coding, etc. Really weird.

So, I found myself waiting for Shopify's tech team to research the errors while also waiting for Google to respond to my request for reinstatement - but in reality I had no improvements or answers for Google in order to explain why my product feed was so poorly done!

This app has been unfairly voted down by people that I feel perhaps don't properly understand Google Shopping. The app exports your Shopify product feed and connects it directly to Google's merchant center so you can start publishing shopping ads. Having previously used Magento where we managed this process manually by exporting and uploading spreadsheets to Google merchant centre on a regular basis I can assure you this app provides a simple yet invaluable bridge between Shopify and Google Shopping and ensures our feed is always kept up to date. A little knowledge of Google Ads and Shopping Ads is probably useful, and I think this is the reason for many of the negative reviews. I haven't tried any of the paid for apps which I would assume provide additional extras for the subscription fee, but in a nutshell if you simply want to connect your Shopify product feed to merchant center then this is exactly what this app does with little fuss.

Unable to add identifierExists to the feed.. So anyone with custom products suffers because you can't add 'false' to the value. Any errors in the merchant centre costs £££ www.annalise.co.uk