Having deal with shopping feed aren’t very fun to deal with. I think everybody can agree on that. It’s such a pain to deal with, that there’s a cottage industry that has risen up to help retailers with the nuance of product feed formatting and management. Google released Feed Rules on Tuesday to make it easier for those advertisers and retailers who manage Google Shopping feeds on their own to make it easier getting feed data formatted correctly.
Sven Herschel, product manager for Google Shopping, explains in a blog post:
“You can export and submit your product data in your own format, and use different rules to transform it into product attributes and values that follow the Google Shopping feed specification, directly in Merchant Center.”
You can now set rules from the new Feed rules tab in Merchant Center to change column headers and values used in your product data to match those used by Google. As an example, you can have it change from “for women” to “female” as shown in Google’s screen shot below:
Not only that, you’ve got the option to add missing attributes by setting rules that can automatically populate missing fields with fixed values or different values based on certain conditions.
After you’re getting all the data set up, users can use the Feed Rules to apply custom labels to products and tags with shipping labels.
One thing to keep in mind, according to Herschel, this is just the first version of Feed Rules. Google will be looking for feedback from users on the feature and suggestions for additional capabilities. If you use the Feed Rules feature and there’s something you’d like to say about it, you can “Send Feedback”on the gear icon in Merchant Center.