Add experiences in Google Shopping – free/ads
How do you add experiences to Google Shopping and PMax campaign? Thought it was done through Google Merchant Center but it doesn’t allow anything that it’s not a physical product.
Saw multiple experiences (flight airplane, hot pools, etc) in Google Shopping but not sure how to set them up?
The short answer is:
You are correct that standard Google Merchant Center (GMC) feeds are primarily designed for physical retail products and strictly enforce policies that make it difficult to list non-physical services or “experiences” like flights or hot pools.
The solution lies in using Google’s vertical-specific ad types and, for a powerful programmatic approach, leveraging the Merchant API (the successor to the Content API for Shopping) combined with specific feed strategies that align with Google’s allowances for non-traditional inventory.
The experiences you saw are likely running through Google Ads campaign types that support non-product feeds, such as Hotel Ads or Things to do campaigns, or they are highly structured data entries made programmatically via the Merchant API, potentially as part of a feed for a related physical item or a local inventory ad.
To manage these non-traditional feeds at scale, the Merchant API is the most cost-effective and flexible technical tool, allowing you to bypass manual GMC limitations and push data directly to the Google Ads ecosystem for Performance Max and other campaign types.
The long answer is:
The core problem is the product data specification required by Google Merchant Center, which mandates attributes like shipping, gtdin, and condition that simply do not apply to non-physical experiences or services, leading to product disapprovals.
While you cannot use a standard Shopping product feed for non-physical services, you can advertise them effectively on Google’s surfaces using specialized ad formats and the appropriate API for data synchronization.
The “experiences” you observed are almost certainly being run not as traditional Shopping Ads, but as ads that tap into Google’s other specialized vertical inventory, such as Things to do, or Hotel Ads for accommodations and flights.
These verticals have their own structured feeds and campaign types within Google Ads, which can be optimized via the Google Ads API.
However, for product-like programmatic management of data that can interface with Performance Max, the most advanced solution is utilizing the Merchant API.
This API provides a sophisticated way to manage your inventory data feed—including product inputs and complex data sources—allowing for granular control and automation that is impossible through the manual GMC interface.
For instance, if you are a tour operator, you could use the Merchant API to create and manage structured data feeds that conform to the specifications required by the specialized ad formats like Things to do.
By integrating your inventory system (CRM or booking platform) directly with the Merchant API using a middleware built on Google Cloud Platform, or a similar cloud-based environment like Stape’s server-side solution, you can ensure real-time price and availability updates, a critical factor for ephemeral experiences.
This API-driven approach is highly cost-effective because it eliminates manual data entry, minimizes product disapprovals due to outdated information, and ensures that your unique inventory, even non-physical experiences, is available to the powerful automation of Performance Max campaigns across Google’s entire ad network.
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