Which definition corresponds to a free product listing?
Correct Answer
Free product listings appear on the Shopping Tab and provide an opportunity to highlight products and drive customers to your website at no cost.
Key takeaways
Free listings show products on the Shopping tab at no cost per click.
They read the same Merchant Center feed as paid Shopping ads.
They sit outside the ad auction, so there is no bid, budget or position control.
Why is this the correct answer?
Free product listings, now branded as free listings, put your products on the Shopping tab without any cost per click. They are surfaced organically from the same Merchant Center product data your paid Shopping ads use, which is why a retailer who has already built a clean feed gets them with very little extra work. They sit outside the ad auction entirely, so there is no bid, no budget and no position to buy. The trade-off is control: you gain reach at no cost, but you cannot prioritise particular products the way a paid campaign can.
Why are the other options wrong?
Free product listings are paid Shopping ads that are converted due to low impressions and clicks.
Free listings are not demoted paid ads. Nothing converts a Shopping ad into a free listing because of weak performance; the two are separate surfaces that happen to read from the same feed.
Free product listings participate in an ad auction and offer insights and controls to optimize performance and prioritize key products.
This describes a paid Shopping campaign. Free listings do not enter the ad auction, and precisely because there is no auction there are no bids or prioritisation controls to apply.
Free product listings use product information directly from the website to curate no cost ads without a product feed.
A product feed is still required. Google can supplement feed data with information crawled from your site, but free listings are fed from Merchant Center, not curated from the website on their own.
Frequently asked questions about this topic
How do I turn on free listings in Merchant Center?
Free listings are enabled through the Merchant Center programme settings, and the practical requirements are the same ones paid Shopping already demands: a valid product feed, accurate price and availability, and compliance with the Shopping policies. If your products are already serving as paid Shopping ads, the feed work is effectively done.
Do free listings replace paid Shopping ads?
No, they complement them. A product can appear both ways, and free listings tend to add incremental reach on the Shopping tab rather than cannibalising paid clicks. Paid campaigns remain the way to buy visibility on the main Search results page and to push specific products.
Topics in this question
About the Shopping Ads Certification
The Shopping Ads Certification checks that you can run retail campaigns end to end: product data in Merchant Center, linking it to Google Ads, and choosing between Standard Shopping and Performance Max to drive sales and value.
Exam guide and all 407 Google Ads Shopping questions →Related Google Ads Shopping questions
- 1Which definition corresponds to a free product listing?Explained
- 2Which of these choices describes a free product listing?Explained
- 3What are free product listings?Explained
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- 5You’re setting up a product feed in Merchant Center for the first time, and you realise that you don’t have availability for each product. What will happen if you try to upload the feed in Google Merchant Center?Explained
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