Merchant Center holiday feed updates to make before Q4

Short answer: Before the holiday season, add three things to your Merchant Center feed: video links for key products, loyalty data if you have a member programme, and conversational attributes that describe products the way shoppers ask about them. Google uses these fields in shoppable formats and product recommendations. Fix feed quality first, because new fields do not rescue a broken feed.

What did Google announce for the 2026 holiday season?

On September 16, 2026, Google announced a set of Shopping and Merchant Center updates for the holiday season. For an e-shop, only the parts that change what you put into your feed really matter:

• Video link attribute. Google says it automatically powers visual, shoppable ad formats.
• Loyalty data. It shows member perks and member pricing across Google.
• Conversational attributes. In Google’s testing, attributes submitted by a brand were used 50% of the time in relevant product recommendations.
• Core feed best practices. Google says merchants who adopt them see on average a 5% increase in conversions the following month.

One caveat for European stores: AI performance insights in Merchant Center are generally available only in Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand and the U.S. If you sell in Slovakia, Czechia or Germany, you will not see them. Everything else in this article you can do regardless of country.

Which feed updates should you make first?

Not every store needs all four. This is how I would prioritise them for a typical EU e-shop:

Feed update	What Google uses it for	What you need	Who should do it
Core feed best practices	Better matching and serving of all products	Correct prices incl. VAT, availability, identifiers, clear titles, good images	Everyone, first
Conversational attributes	Relevant product recommendations	Factual answers to questions shoppers ask about the product	Stores with products people compare or ask about
Video link	Visual, shoppable ad formats	An existing product video at a stable public URL	Stores that already have product videos
Loyalty data	Member perks and pricing across Google	A real loyalty programme with member prices or perks	Only stores that already run a programme

Do not start a loyalty programme or shoot videos for 2,000 products just because Google added a field. Use what you already have, and put the rest of your time into the feed basics.

How to prepare your feed before Q4 step by step

1. Look at the problems first. Open Merchant Center and go through disapproved and limited products. Every product with an issue is a product that cannot sell in December.
2. Fix the basics. The price in the feed must match the price on the landing page, including VAT. Availability must be current. Titles should start with what the product is, not with an internal code.
3. Pick your holiday products. In most stores a small group of products brings most of the revenue. Take your bestsellers and your gift products, often 20-50 items, and work on those first.
4. Add video links to those products if you have a real product video. A generic brand video on every product adds nothing.
5. Write conversational attributes for the same products (see below).
6. Add loyalty data if you run a member programme, and check that the member price Google shows matches what a member sees on your site.
7. Tag the changed products with a custom label, for example custom_label_0 = holiday_update, so you can measure them separately later.
8. Write down the date of the change and set a date 30 days later to check the result.

Check the current attribute specifications in the Merchant Center Help Centre before you build anything. Google’s announcement does not list every field in detail, and I would not guess field formats.

How to write conversational attributes that get used

Think about what a shopper asks before buying: “Is this suitable for sensitive skin?”, “Will it fit a 60 cm balcony?”, “Can a ten-year-old use it?”. Answer those questions with facts.

• Describe use, fit, compatibility, material and who the product is for.
• No superlatives. “The perfect gift” answers nothing.
• Write in the language of the target country. A Czech feed with Slovak text is a common mistake in multi-country setups.

What I see in the accounts I run

In most e-shop accounts I audit, the feed is a byproduct of the shop platform. A plugin exports it, and nobody has opened it in months. Titles are the CMS product name, descriptions are copied from the manufacturer and are identical across every competing shop.

That matters more than any new attribute. Shopping and Performance Max campaigns can only show what the feed says, so a vague feed caps your results no matter how you set bids. If you are still deciding on campaign structure, read Performance Max vs Search, which should you run first?

The part almost nobody fills in is the shopper-language description of the product. That is also where a small store can beat a big one, because you know your products and can answer real customer questions. A marketplace with 100,000 SKUs cannot.

Most common mistakes with holiday feed changes

• Changing the feed in Black Friday week. Products get re-reviewed and campaigns need time to adjust. Make changes weeks, not days, before peak demand.
• Video links that go nowhere useful. A dead link or a video that has nothing to do with the product is worse than no video.
• Ad copy instead of attributes. Conversational attributes should inform, not sell.
• Loyalty prices that do not match the site. If the shopper cannot get the price Google showed, you lose trust and risk product issues.
• Expecting AI performance insights in the EU. They are not available there yet.
• Blaming the feed for a website problem. If checkout is slow, shipping is expensive or prices are not competitive, a richer feed only brings more people to a page that does not convert.

How to measure whether it worked

Google’s 5% figure is Google’s average, not a promise for your store. Do not compare November with October either, because holiday demand rises for everyone.

Compare the labelled products with the rest of the catalogue over the same weeks instead:

• Change in conversion rate for updated products, minus change for untouched products.
• Illustrative example: say updated products moved from 2.0% to 2.4% and the rest from 2.0% to 2.2%. Roughly 0.2 points is what you can attribute to the feed work.

This only works if conversion tracking is clean. If your GA4 data includes test or staging traffic, fix that first with a GA4 hostname include filter.

What to do first

This week, clear the product issues in Merchant Center and fix prices, availability and titles for your top holiday products. Then add conversational attributes and, where you have them, video links and loyalty data, and tag everything you changed so you can measure it in 30 days.

If you want someone to review your feed and Shopping campaigns before Q4, take a look at how I work as a PPC specialist or see all PPC and performance marketing services including a free advertising audit. Email me and I’ll reply within 24 hours.