What is Google Manufacturer Center?

This is the transcript from our new video so it may not read as well as a normal blog post would.

Link to Google Manufacturer Center Sign Up Form

On the 22nd of July, 2015, Google launched the Manufacturer Center. It’s currently only available to U.S. manufacturers at the moment. As with everything that Google does, they typically launch in the U.S. to a small test sample group and then they roll it out to the other countries.

It is still in alpha version, so it’s very, very early in the testing phases here. If you are interested in being part of this, you can go ahead on to their interest form, which we’ll pop up in the top corner of the upper screen, and you can actually register interest. That will then get manually reviewed, and then Google will let you know if you’ve been allowed into the beta testing phase.

What is this? The Manufacturer Center basically allows you to have more control over the listings that are appearing on Google.com, Google Shopping, and other Google services. Currently, this has only been controlled by the advertisers that are advertising on Google Shopping. The manufacturers don’t really have any control over what people are saying about their products and how they’re displayed in the search results, which it can be good, but it can also be quite dangerous, because not all the information that’s being displayed can always be accurate.

With the Manufacturer Center, manufacturers can go ahead, upload information about the different products that they offer, and they can include accurate descriptions, listings, titles, images, and all the other information that they’ve got about their different products so that the product results that we’re seeing are a lot more accurate.

If you are a manufacturer and you manage to get through into the beta testing phase, you need to go ahead and create yourself an account. Once you’ve done that, you will need to submit the different brands that you offer, which Google then manually review to make sure that they’re happy that these brands are going to be actually advertised on there correctly.

The next stage from that is you can either upload a data feed or you can upload each product for manual submission. I would probably recommend going down the data feed route and only then using the manual submission if you’ve got one or two that you need after that, but 9 times out of 10 I think the data feed would be a much better use of your time. Otherwise, you’re going to be there for a while adding each thing manually.

The benefit of this for advertisers and manufacturers, as I said earlier, is the information that we’re going to see in the search results is going to be a lot more accurate. Not only that, from a manufacturer’s perspective, they can get a lot more insight into what people are searching for, how often their products are being shown, and how often they’re being clicked through. They can actually understand whether the information that they’re uploading to the data feed into the Manufacturer Center whether it needs to be adapted, whether it’s not enticing enough to get people clicking through, whether the images are too generic, whether they’re not standing out in the crowd of the large scale competition that’s around at the moment. There’s a lot of information the manufacturers are going to be able to understand about their products and understand about how people are actually searching and interacting with their products that they’ve never had before.

I think this is a really, really good thing and an interesting thing that Google have released. I think over the next 6 to 12 months we’re going to see this develop even more. Do stay tuned. If you are a manufacturer, as I say, and you’re U.S. based, go and register your interest and put yourselves forward. I’m looking forward to seeing this come into the U.K. in the coming months as well. Thank you.