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Feed: Microsoft Advertising (Bing Shopping) - Setting up Microsoft Local Inventory

Sarah B
Sarah B
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The following information is from articles on Microsoft Help referenced below.

What are Local Inventory Ads?

Local Inventory Ads are an advertising format for your Microsoft Shopping Campaigns that allows you to showcase your products and local retail store information to nearby shoppers on Bing.com.

 

Local Inventory Ads are currently available in Australia, Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and United States.

Enhance your Local Inventory Ads with curbside pick-up

You can enhance your Local Inventory Ads by adding a Curbside pick-up badge. This feature lets potential customers know they can take advantage of curbside or contactless pick-up from your retail store.

To be eligible for curbside pick-up, you must:

  • Be fully onboarded and have live Local Inventory Ads running.
  • Provide a curbside or contactless pick-up option for customers purchasing products on your website but prefer to pick up the item at your retail store.

Contact your Microsoft Advertising account manager to learn more about curbside pick-up.

Setting up Local Inventory Ads

1. Provide store location data

You must import store location data from your Google My Business account to Microsoft Advertising. This is currently the only way to get your store location data set up Local Inventory Ads. You can set up an automated feed for your location data by linking your Microsoft Advertising account to your Google My Business account.

  1. From the global menu, click Tools and then Business location feed.
  2. Click Choose import options and sign in to your Google My Business account.
  3. Select the account you want to import and click Continue.
  4. Optional: Filter import details. When you add a filter, only locations that meet the conditions will be imported to Microsoft Advertising.
  5. Click Import.

2. Upload online products information

Upload online products feed through Microsoft Merchant Center. If you are already using Microsoft Shopping Campaigns, this step may not be required. See our template for Microsoft Advertising.

3. Submit local products information

For Local Inventory Ads, you must create and submit a local products feed. A local products feed contains all the products that you sell in your stores with attributes describing the products. 

If you already have a product feed for online products, then it is not clear whether you are absolutely required to submit an entire new feed for local product data. Channels make it possible for you to submit different catalogs for online and local to support scenarios in which products are available online but not in store, and vice versa.

If you need another feed template for local products, then clone the main Microsoft feed template and upload it to Microsoft as a local product feed.

4. How do I submit local product feeds?

After creating a local products feed, you need to create a local products inventory feed for your Local Inventory Ads. The local products inventory feed is needed for the list of products that you sell in each store specifically.

  1. From the global menu at the top of the page, click Tools and then Microsoft Merchant Center.
  2. From the page menu, click Feeds.
  3. Click Create feed.
  4. Enter the Feed information. Enter the Feed name, select the Location, and select Local product or Local product inventoryfrom the Feed type.
  5. Select the Input Method. You can manually upload, upload via FTP, automatically download from a URL, or import your feed file.
  6. Click Create feed.

5. Enable shopping campaigns into Local Inventory Ads

After you sign in to your Microsoft Advertising account:

  1. Go to the Campaigns page.
  2. Select the shopping campaign you want to use for Local Inventory Ads.
  3. Click on the Settings tab.
  4. Under Shopping settings, check the Enable local inventory ads box.
  5. Click Save.

Channel and channel exclusivity

Now that local inventory ads are enabled for your shopping campaign, you can set filters by channel and channel exclusivity.

  • Channel:
    Local store: Automatically filter to products that are sold in local stores, including products that may also be sold online.
    Online: Filter products that are only sold on your website.
  • Channel exclusivity:
    Multi-channel: Filter products that are sold both online and in store.
    Single channel: Filter products that are sold only in store or online.

You can show products sold only in local stores but not online by setting the filters to “Channel”: “Local stores” and “Channel exclusivity”: “Single-channel”.

 

Contact Microsoft Advertising Support

 

Reference:

How do I create local product inventory feeds? (microsoft.com)

What are Local Inventory Ads? (microsoft.com)

Setting up Local Inventory Ads (microsoft.com)

Import business location data (microsoft.com)

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