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The Pros and Cons of Google Merchant Center Feed Rules

By Tinuiti Team

Introducing Google Merchant Center Feed Rules

Google is currently experimenting with “Feed Rules” a new feature within their Merchant Center. The beta program (currently available in a limited number of Merchant Center accounts) offers a way for retailers to transform their data directly within GMC.

With Feed Rules, retailers can export and submit their product database “as is” and then transform their attributes and values to meet the Google Shopping feed specification requirements.

feed-rules

Once retailers specify feed rules for a feed, all their future uploads are processed according to those rules. Essentially, if a retailer is able to apply a feed rule to address errors in their feed, they will likely be able to resolve a number of errors at once.

For retailers that don’t know how to manipulate fields in the feed, this could be a helpful tool – but unfortunately much like Google’s Direct Feed Import – for any large scale businesses this feature has limitations in terms of scalability.

Disadvantages of the Google Merchant Center Feed Rules:

tien-ngyuen“This is good for merchants without a real data feed provider or solution. The main problem is you can’t really do things en masse (e.g. if you want to update labels for 100 SKUs). It does seem like you would have to do it one by one,” Tien Nguyen, Director of Technology at CPC Strategy said.

“It’s an interesting feature, although it’s still going to be much more optimal to manipulate the data directly in the feed itself.”

How Feed Rules Function:

A product feed is how a retailer communicates their inventory to a given product advertising channel. Shopping channels like Google will cross reference this data with shopper search queries and your bids to determine ad visibility. While most marketers understand the importance of uploading feeds – it’s often lost how critical it is to optimize the feed data and sync it with a comprehensive Google Shopping strategy.

Feed rules transform data and tell Google how you want the Merchant Center to interpret the product data you’re submitting.

As seen in the example below retailers can create and define feed rules for attributes including availability, age group, condition, color, count, brand, custom labels and more.

Pro-Tip: Custom Labels are considered one of the most valuable attributes that marketers can use to reduce COS and increase efficiency. Located with the feed, Google Shopping Custom Labels can be used to subdivide products into specific categories for advanced monitoring, reporting and bidding. 

feed-rules4

With feed rules retailers can:

 

For example, you might submit a feed with column headers (as seen in the example below). These column headers are not recognized by the Products Feed Specification, so the feed will show errors.

feed-rules

According to Google, instead of changing your column headers each time you create your feed, you can apply a feed rule to map each of these attributes to the required attributes from the Products Feed Specification.

feed-rules

Once a retailer has rules in place to transform their data to meet the requirements in the Products Feed Specification, they can submit their data feed formatted exactly the way it is.

Pro-Tip: Feed rules are applied to individual feeds. Setting rules for one feed will not affect how the other feeds in your account are processed.

For smaller retailers, (new to Shopping), this tool could be initially be useful. Unfortunately, any retailers seeking an advanced shopping strategy will eventually require a data feed specialist to optimize their feed. It’s a starting point – but large scale feed manipulation will still require a service provider as your catalog continues to grow.

To find out more about GMC Feed Rules, email [email protected]

Additional Resources

Why Retailers Should Avoid The Google Merchant Center Direct Feed Import

How to Optimize Your Product Feed

How Google Shopping Custom Labels Impact Your Campaign Strategy

 

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