Google free listings: the Shopify sales channel most stores leave off
Free listings put products in front of Google shoppers at no cost per click. On one store, Google orders tracked by Merchant Center went from about 2 a month to 12 after the best products were finally submitted.
What free listings are
Google shows products from Merchant Center in shopping results without charging per click. These free listings are separate from paid Shopping ads. You do not bid on them, and a store can have them running whether or not it runs a single Google ad.
How a Shopify store gets them
Shopify connects to Merchant Center through the Google and YouTube channel. A product only reaches Google if it is published to that channel. Products published only to the online store and point of sale never appear, and nothing in the Shopify admin warns you.
Check one: are your best products actually published
Open your top products by revenue and look at which sales channels each one is published to. On one beef brand, the quarter, half and whole beef products, the three highest value items in the catalog, were published to the online store and point of sale and never to Google. The products that earned the most had never been shown to a single Google shopper.
Check two: is the feed good enough to show
Titles, product types, variants and images decide which searches a product can appear for, and weak data gets products disapproved quietly. Read the diagnostics in Merchant Center and fix the product data in Shopify at the source, so the fix survives the next sync.
Check three: can you see which orders came through Merchant Center
When Merchant Center auto-tagging is on, clicks from free listings arrive with a srsltid parameter on the landing page URL. Google also adds it to some regular search results for the same store, so it tells you a visit came through Merchant Center, not that it came from a free listing specifically. It does separate those visits from paid Google ads, which carry a gclid instead. Read your orders with that in mind before you credit any one surface.
What it produced
On that beef brand, Google orders tracked by Merchant Center went from about 2 a month before the fix to 12 in August, with 9 more in the first half of September, and revenue from them went from $364 a month to $3,578 in August. That count includes free listings and some regular search results, because Merchant Center tags both. None of it was paid per click.
If this sounds like your store
This is what Google Merchant Center and product feeds fixes. See it on one store, with the before and after, in the case study.