Feeds

First you need to create your feeds, then Google evaluates them.

Create feeds

1. Generate your feeds. You transmit most of your inventory data to Google by feeds. To get started, create two types of feeds:

   • Merchants feed: The Merchants feed describes your merchants and merchant level action links.
   • Services feed: The Services feed describes services and service level action_links your merchants provide to your platform.

   Required and Recommended fields

   Feed	Field name	Description	Required?
   Merchant	merchant_id	Unique identifier for the venue	Yes
   Merchant	name	Name of venue	Yes
   Merchant	geo	Address of venue	Yes
   Merchant	telephone	Telephone of the venue	Yes
   Merchant	category		Nice to Have
   Merchant	action_link	Information regarding Merchant Specific Deep Link	Optional
   Merchant	brand_id	String that identifies the consumer-facing brand to use	Optional
   Services	service_id	Unique Identifier of the service provided by the merchant	Yes
   Services	merchant_id	Link to the Merchant which is providing this service	Yes
   Services	localized_service_name	Name of the Services provided	Yes
   Services	localized_description	User-visible services description	Optional
   Services	action_link	Provides information about the services related deep link	Yes
   Services	type	Type of Deep link(eg SERVICE_TYPE_DINING_RESERVATION)	Yes
   Services	description	Description about the service provided by merchant	Nice to Have

   Note: All additional fields outlined in the reference section should be ignored.

   To start, check out the sample feeds by vertical

   • Dining Reservation Feeds
   • Food Ordering Feeds
   • In-Person Appointment Feeds
   • Online/Virtual Appointment Feeds
   • Shopping Feeds
   • Shopping Feeds with Metadata

   For Merchants who have multiple services, but are serving them using a single action link, you can provide a single action link for all services associated with a merchant in the merchants feed.

   You can learn more about specifying action links in Starter integration feeds here.

   Include feed metadata in each of your feeds that instructs Google on how to interpret the feed.

   The following is a feed metadata snippet:

     "metadata": {
       "generation_timestamp": "1467993600",
       "processing_instruction": "PROCESS_AS_COMPLETE",
       "total_shards": 1
     }
   

   The messages used to describe these feeds align closely to schema.org's LocalBusiness and GeoCoordinates.

   Note: Starter integration can also be implemented in conjunction with the Reserve with Google end-to-end integration or as an add on to the end-to-end integration. In order to support this you will also be required to implement availability feeds and the end-to-end integration required fields as per this guide.

2. Export your feeds. The feeds format is described with the use of protocol buffer 3 syntax. You export the feed files in one of two ways:

   • Binary serialization of the protocol buffer data in pb3 format.
   • Derived JSON format.

   For general information on how to use protocol buffers to generate a pb3 file, see Protocol Buffer Basics: Java.

3. Upload the feeds to your SFTP Dropbox. To upload your feeds, use the SFTP dropbox information that Google provided to you and the private key that you created in Setup. The Google SFTP server is available at sftp://partnerupload.google.com on port 19321.

   Upload your files with unique names, such as a name that include a timestamp. Unique names help with troubleshooting and allow queries for the feed status.

   To determine the size of the feeds and frequency of delivery, use the following guidelines:

   • Size of feed files and shards:

     • Keep the feed file size below 200MB, and use multiple shards if needed.
     • At present we support a maximum of 1000 shards per feed.
     • Individual records are sent in one shard. They don't have to be sent in the same shard for future feeds.
     • For better performance, your data should be split evenly among the shards so that all sharded files are similar in size.

   • Frequency of complete updates:

     • A complete merchants feed is provided once a day.
     • A complete services feed is provided once a day.
   Note: Google processes feed files as soon as they're uploaded to the SFTP dropbox. If the feed is sharded into multiple files, the process begins after you upload the last file. If your feed contains errors, you receive an email with the feed error codes.

Google evaluates feeds

Once you upload your feeds, Google processes and evaluates them for quality and completeness. We look at several factors:

• Feeds meet the specifications.
• Feeds include all required fields.
• Each merchant has at least one service defined.
• The majority of your merchant data matches with Google Maps locations.

Note: To ensure a smooth integration, perform a pre-evaluation of the factors above, except for the last one, before you submit your feeds.