The different Shopping Ads destinations

There are different shopping destinations that you can find in your Merchant Center, and each shopping destination has a different goal, use, and setup. 

Paid Ads

Paid Ads are regular shopping ads, these are the ads you pay for through Google Ads. Your products are shown on Google shopping by Paid Ads when you load your products in the Merchant Center and create and publish a campaign on Google Ads. If you wish to run these ads, you must have a budget in your Google Ads account or have your credit card connected.

Local Inventory Ads

Google's local inventory ads are designed to help physical stores lead foot traffic directly to their stores. Shoppers use the online local storefront to view in-store inventory, get store hours, directions to your stores, and more.

To show your local products on Google, you must enable local inventory ads or free local product listings in the Merchant Center:

1. Sign in to your Merchant Center account

2. Click Growth in the navigation menu

3. Click Manage programs

4. Click Get started on the local inventory ads or the free local product listings program card

5. Choose the country where your physical stores are located

Next to enable local inventory ads in your Merchant Center you also need to enable this in your Google Ads account. You can do this by navigating to Settings > Shopping campaign settings > Additional settings > Local products, checking the "Enable ads for products sold in local stores" box and clicking Save.

Free Listings

Free listings are ads that are shown on Google for free. Your products are shown on Google shopping by Free listings when you have loaded your products in the Merchant Center and have activated Free Listings. If you want to be eligible for Free Listings you need to meet the following requirements from Google:

• Follow google’s policies for showing products in free listings.

• Follow google’s Shopping ads policies.

• Add your return policy information to your website to show information about returns in your free listings. 

• They also recommend adding your return policy in the Merchant Center.

• Set up “Shipping” settings or add shipping costs via the shipping [shipping] attribute to product data. 

If your Free Listings aren’t showing after switching your Merchant Center from your current CSS to Producthero CSS, you can navigate to this blog post.