07/06/17 // Written by Matthew Patterson

Setting up custom labels for shopping using feed rules

When it comes to optimising and working with shopping campaigns on Adwords, one of the key elements that you need to become familiar with are custom labels.

Custom labels are a great way to help improve performance of your shopping campaigns by allowing you to quickly segment items and drive traffic to the products which are of most value to you and your business.

Adding custom labels can however be a little tricky if you’re not familiar with working with products, or adding them may require a small amount of developer time, which may cost money.

You’ll be happy to know, however, that there’s a really quick and simple way that you can add some custom labels and general optimisations from within your Google Merchant Centre dashboard by setting up feed rules. There’s no working with XML feeds, no messing around with 1,000s of SKUs, just a few quick steps and you’ll be up and running.

Using feed rules in the Google Merchant Centre is a great way to quickly make some small changes, fix feed errors or as mentioned some basic custom labels. Keep in mind though, if possible, it’s always best to work with the feed directly and make any updates or changes to to the feed itself.

How to set a custom label using Google Merchant Centre

The first thing you’re going to want to do is log into your GMC (Google Merchant Centre). Once logged in, go ahead and click on “products” on the left panel and then click “feeds”.

You should then see your feed name, and then right on the far right you should see how many items you’ve uploaded and how many were uploaded successfully. Directly underneath that you should see “set rules”, click that to move on.

You should now be on a new page with 4 tabs across the top. If “feed rules” is blue then you’re in the right place.

Scrolling down the page you should see a drop down box on the left labelled “add attribute”. You’re going to want to click on that and then scroll through until you see custom label 0 or whichever you’re wanting to use.

Once that’s selected, you’re going to need to select “create a value based on criteria in the feed” as we’re wanting to take the data that’s already in the feed and assign it a grouping. So, whether we’re looking at attributes such as brand, price, availability etc this is the option that you’ll need to select.

You can now start to build the label, so you’re going click on the drop down box where you will be shown a list of possible fields to base the label on. These include availability, brand, condition, description, Google category, GTIN, ID, image link, item group ID, link, MPN, price and product type. So, your choice here completely depends on your goals.

In this example, we’ve selected price as we’re wanting to create a label to group SKUs based on their item value. Once you’ve chosen you will then need to select an operator.

In this case we’ve selected “less than or equal to”.

You can then, on the right, add in a value, in our example we’ve put 100. Please note you don’t need to put the pound sign as this will cause your label not to work.

So our feed rule states, if price is less than or equal to 100. You can then give the rule a name, so we’ve called this “all less than 100”.

If you’re wanting to add another grouping to this label, then click on +condition at the bottom of the box and then repeat the process.

Note, it’s best practice to keep all feed rules under 1 label using similar grouping values. So in this case we’re using custom label 0 to group all of our SKUs by price and then submitting up to 1,000 different values.

If you’re looking to group price ranges, for example all items that are between 101 and 200, then all you need to do is set your first value to greater than or equal to 101, then click the “and” under the box and then add in the next value less than or equal to 200, give it a name and that’s it.

Once you’re happy with your groupings, click continue at the bottom. You’ll then see the new label shown in the table with a yellow warning sign. Don’t worry, you just need to save it. Click save and apply rules at the bottom.

You’ll then get a lovely message from Google saying that they’re processing the changes to the feed. Once completed the yellow turns green and you’re done. This process varies depending on the amount of values and rules you’re setting up.

After a few hours you should then see the new label within AdWords ready to go.

So, just to recap, using the Google Merchant Centre to create some basic custom labels is a simple yet very effective way for you to begin grouping products within the feed, not only to help with your optimisations helping you drive traffic to what matters the most, but to make your day to day management much easier.