How to create a Google Merchant Center (GMC) for LimeSpot with a sub-domain and transition to the LimeSpot created GMC account.
Note: This process is applicable to any merchant wanting to change their website URL.
1. During the onboarding process, LimeSpot creates a new Google Merchant Center (GMC) Account for you. Use an alternative domain instead of your main domain on this GMC. Easiest alternatives are yourstorename.myshopify.com (or yourstorename.mybigcommerce.com) which are already available to all merchants.
2. Use LimeSpot's Product Validation and Fix Tools to solve any issues that might exist on your products, and Publish them to the LimeSpot created GMC Account. These products will be set up to use URLs from the alternative domain that was configured on the previous step (e.g. yourstorename.myshopify.com)
3. Wait until all products are approved by Google (usually 3-5 business days).
4. Start running 1-3 limited campaigns with $20-50/day budget per campaign via the LimeSpot Ads platform. These campaigns will be serving products from the new GMC Account.
If you would like to compare results with your current setup, these limited campaigns created in the new GMC Account could be similar to the campaigns that you are already running, so the results are comparable.
Wait for at least 2 full weeks to ensure Google training is performed and campaigns are fully optimized.
We suggest covering all (or the majority of) your products in these campaigns, so Google trains its machine learning against those products within the 2 week period.
5. When you are ready to move all your campaigns to the LimeSpot GMC Account, first ensure you have duplicates of all your current campaigns running via the LimeSpot Ads platform with their associated budgets.
Notes:
In order to get the best possible results on Google Shopping, you need to start with a low daily budget (e.g. $20-50/day) and gradually increase the budget every few days when the campaigns are fully optimized at every step.
You can decrease your current campaigns' budget gradually at the same time to get to $0 for the old campaigns overtime, and allocate all the budget to the new ones. Alternatively, current campaigns could optionally be stopped all at once (recommended).
When all current campaigns are retired and transitioned to the LimeSpot Ads platform, you can disconnect your main domain from your current GMC Account, and connect it to the LimeSpot GMC Account using the built-in tool.
6. Go to LimeSpot Admin panel > Acquisitions > Google Shopping > Settings and click on SETTINGS button.
7. Enter your main domain URL (including https://) in Website URL box and click SAVE. LimeSpot domain update tool will claim the new domain and if successful, updates all your products’ URLs to the new domain while preserving all other information (i.e. Identifiers, training, custom labels, etc).
Note: There might be a slight disruption in your running campaigns (reduced performance or temporary errors) for a period of 2-6 hours until the new product URLs are published/applied in all internal Google Ads systems.
8. The transition is now complete.
Your product details are enriched.
Products are served from your main domain.
All your campaigns are fully optimized and running on your new GMC Account (LimeSpot created GMC Account)
LimeSpot automatically handles gTag on your storefront and tracks conversion actions for the 4 major events (i.e. Product View, Page View, Add to Cart, Purchase).
You can now delete your current GMC Account.