Are Organic Clicks in Google Merchant Center from the Feed only, or can schema markup or the website in general trigger them (even before the Feed was uploaded)?
Hey everyone,
I’ve got a question about organic product listings in Google Merchant Center (GMC) — specifically, the performance data shown under free listings.
I recently submitted a product feed to GMC and started seeing clicks and impressions under the “organic” performance section. That’s great but now I’m trying to understand what’s actually driving those clicks.
Are these organic Shopping clicks solely the result of submitting the product feed to Merchant Center? Or could they have been happening already due to schema.org product markup on my site, even before submitting the feed?
I’m trying to assess the real impact of setting up the feed vs what may have already been happening via SEO and structured data.
If anyone has experience with this or has tested it (especially across Google Shopping, Search Console, and GMC), I’d love to hear what you found.
Thanks in advance!
The short answer is:
Organic clicks displayed in the Google Merchant Center (GMC) under the Free Listings performance report are primarily driven by the Product Feed submitted to GMC.
While the presence of Schema.org product markup on your website certainly helps Google understand your products for broader organic search results (including rich snippets and standard organic listings), the specific “organic” impressions and clicks reported within GMC’s free listings section are attributed to the feed-based product listings that appear in the Google Shopping tab, Google Search surfaces, and other eligible placements.
To get a comprehensive view and integrate this data with your overall marketing metrics, you should use the Google Analytics Data API to extract and analyze GMC data alongside other organic channels, and potentially the BigQuery API to centralize all performance data for a single source of truth, offering a cost-effective, server-side data synchronization approach.
The long answer is:
The core distinction lies in how Google classifies and reports product experiences.
The Free Product Listings in GMC are powered by the Product Feed, which is the canonical source of information for these specific product surfaces, including the Shopping tab.
Therefore, the performance metrics reported in the GMC Free Listings section are a direct result of that feed being processed and displayed.
The Schema.org product markup on your website is critical for classic SEO – for example, it can drive rich snippets like star ratings or price in the standard Google Search results, which are clicks that are typically tracked in Google Search Console and standard Google Analytics organic traffic, not the GMC Free Listings report.
To precisely measure the impact of the feed versus the impact of general SEO/schema, you need an integrated data approach.
This is where API integration becomes essential and highly cost-effective compared to manual data manipulation or relying on disparate systems.
You can use the Google Analytics Data API to pull detailed performance data from Google Analytics 4 (GA4), where you should have distinct tracking in place for Free Shopping Clicks versus general organic search traffic.
Furthermore, you can use the BigQuery API to push your GMC product feed data (via a Scheduled Query or transfer service) and your GA4 data into a central data warehouse, allowing you to run sophisticated analyses that correlate the presence and performance of specific products in the feed with click and conversion data, ultimately proving the ROI of your GMC setup.
The Merchant API can also be leveraged for programmatic feed updates, which is the ultimate cost-saver for large or frequently changing inventories, ensuring your feed data is always fresh and maximizing the efficiency of the GMC-driven organic clicks.
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