Google's Loyalty Program Just Expanded to Australia. Here's What to Do About It.

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On March 25, 2026, Google expanded its Merchant Center loyalty program feature to 14 countries. Australia is on the list. Most eCommerce store owners have not set it up yet.

The short version: if you run a loyalty or rewards program, you can now surface member pricing and exclusive shipping offers directly inside Google Shopping ads, AI Mode, and Gemini, before a shopper ever clicks through to your site. Some retailers have reported up to a 20% lift in click-through rates when showing loyalty offers to identified members.

This article covers what the feature actually is, where it shows up, whether it is worth your time, and how to set it up if you decide to proceed.

What Google's Loyalty Program Feature Actually Is

This is not a loyalty platform. Google is not building you a points system or a membership database. What Google has done is add a layer of annotations to Shopping ads and AI surfaces that lets your existing loyalty program benefits show up directly in search results.

Specifically, the feature lets you display:

• Member pricing (a lower price visible only to loyalty members)
• Exclusive shipping offers (free shipping, faster delivery for members)

These show up as a tag or callout alongside your product listing. A shopper who is already a member of your program will see "member price: $X" or "free shipping for members" before clicking your ad. A shopper who is not a member may see a prompt to join.

The mechanism behind this is Customer Match. You upload your loyalty member list to Google Ads, and Google matches those users to signed-in Google accounts. When a matched user sees your Shopping ad, they see the member version of your listing.

Where It Shows Up

The AI Mode expansion is worth paying attention to. As covered in our Shopping AI guide for eCommerce advertisers, Google AI Mode is one of the fastest-growing discovery surfaces in paid search. Adding loyalty signals to this layer means your program benefits can influence purchase decisions earlier in the research process, not just at the moment someone clicks an ad.

The Numbers

The 20% CTR lift figure comes from Google and applies to cases where loyalty member pricing is shown to identified members via Customer Match. It does not apply to all users, only those matched to your member list. If your Customer Match list is small or your match rate is low, the impact will be proportionally smaller.

Is This Worth Setting Up?

That depends on one thing: whether you already have an active loyalty program with genuine member benefits.

Set it up if:

• You have an existing loyalty or rewards program with a sign-in mechanism
• You offer real member pricing (a meaningfully lower price, not a cosmetic discount)
• You offer exclusive shipping benefits for members (free shipping, priority delivery)
• You have enough members to build a Customer Match list of reasonable size

Do not bother if:

• You do not have an existing loyalty program
• Your "member pricing" is the same as your public sale pricing
• You have fewer than a few hundred loyalty members (Customer Match match rates are imperfect, and a very small list will generate minimal impressions)

How to Set It Up

The setup runs across two platforms: Google Merchant Center and Google Ads. Here is how it works end to end.

1. 1
   Activate the loyalty program add-on in Merchant Center

   In Google Merchant Center, go to the add-ons section and activate the loyalty program feature. This makes the loyalty program fields available in your account.

2. 2
   Configure your loyalty program details

   Enter your program name, program label (a unique identifier), and the tiers in your program (if you have multiple membership levels). Each tier should have a distinct set of benefits you will configure in the next step.

3. 3
   Add member pricing and shipping attributes to your feed

   You will need to update your product feed to include loyalty pricing and loyalty shipping attributes. Member prices go in a separate attribute from your public price. If you have multiple tiers, each tier gets its own price attribute. This step usually requires a developer or your feed management tool.

4. 4
   Upload your Customer Match list in Google Ads

   In Google Ads, go to Audience Manager and upload your loyalty member email list as a Customer Match audience. Google hashes the emails and matches them to signed-in Google accounts. The match rate typically ranges from 30% to 70% depending on the quality and recency of your list.

5. 5
   Link the Customer Match audience to the loyalty program

   Connect your Customer Match audience to the loyalty program configuration in Merchant Center. This is what tells Google which users to show the member version of your listing to. Without this connection, the loyalty pricing and shipping attributes will not display.

6. 6
   Allow time for review and propagation

   Google will review your loyalty program setup before annotations go live. Allow a few days for approval. Once approved, monitor your Shopping campaign performance reports to track the impact on CTR for matched users versus non-matched users.

The Customer Match Connection

Customer Match is the engine behind this entire feature. If you have not used Customer Match before, the short explanation is this: you upload a list of customer email addresses to Google Ads, Google matches those emails to signed-in Google accounts, and you can then show those users a different version of your ads or listings.

For loyalty program annotations, Customer Match is what enables Google to know whether the person looking at your Shopping ad is already a member of your program. Without it, Google cannot personalise the listing, and the member pricing will not appear.

A few practical notes on Customer Match for this use case:

• Minimum list size for Customer Match is 1,000 users (after Google's matching process)
• Match rates vary. A list of 5,000 emails might result in 2,000 to 3,500 matched users
• Lists need to be kept updated. If members leave your program, remove them from the list
• Google requires that you have explicit consent from customers to use their data for advertising purposes

If you already use Customer Match for remarketing in your Google Ads account, you may already have a list that is suitable. Check your audience manager before creating a new one.

For a broader look at how your product feed quality affects Shopping performance, including the attributes that influence where and how your listings appear, that article covers the fundamentals.

What the AI Surface Expansion Means

The extension of loyalty annotations into Google AI Mode and Gemini is more significant than it might appear.

Traditional Shopping ads show your listing to someone who has already typed a search query. AI Mode operates differently. Shoppers describe what they want in conversational terms, and AI Mode synthesises a shortlist of recommendations. The products that surface are influenced by signals including product data completeness, review quality, and, now, loyalty signals.

If a shopper who is already a member of your loyalty program uses AI Mode to search for a product you sell, the system can surface your listing with member pricing visible in the recommendation. That is a meaningful difference from generic results. It takes an anonymous query and connects it to an existing commercial relationship.

Most Australian eCommerce stores are not yet using this. That window does not stay open indefinitely. The practical note here is not urgency for its own sake, it is that the effort to set this up is low relative to the potential payoff if you already have the underlying program in place.

If you want a broader understanding of how AI surfaces are changing the discovery layer in Google Shopping, the Shopping AI eCommerce guide covers that in full.