Configurable Products in Data Feed – How?

This seems like a very common problem for Magento storeowners, but I find hardly any advice or solutions to it.

Specifically in Google’s feed requirements.

• Magento 2 does not allow you to provide a parent item a price. Ok, so submit the children, right?

• Except, the children are flagged “Not Visible Individually” generally, leading to 404.

• While most product feed plugins allow you to provide the parent’s information, is this good practice? If I have multiple children, I could just provide a singular parent URL for every child, right?

• What if the children are different price? Now I am being flagged because the higher price is not what is displayed by default in Magento as a user, its usually the “cheapest” option’s price.

• Magento DOES allow you to preselect options, but its not the most user intuitive method. Most feed plugins generally do not offer this as well for providing child product information in the URL.

I’m looking for advice from any store owners here – how did you solve this? A specific plugin? Subscribe to a third party service? Configurable products aren’t some unique thing to Magento storeowners, and neither is using Google Shopping. So how to combine the two with no fuss?

I did some initial research and came away with two options: Use parent information period (URL, image, etc as necessary), or use the item_group_id field, but when using that Google says you need to group items by specific variant types (color, size, material…) — but what if our items fall under NONE of that?

Thanks in advance