Properly Set Up Feed Rules In Google Merchant Center

Introduction

Google Shopping Campaigns are an effective way to drive traffic, convert user clicks into sales, and increase ROI. However, even after optimizing your product listings and ad copy, there is still room for improvement. Properly setting up feed rules can help you achieve these goals by improving the performance of your Google Shopping Ads campaigns. Feed rules can automate many updates whether you have 1 product or million products.

Merchant Center and Data Feeds

Google Merchant Center is the platform that you use to manage your product data feeds and upload them to Google Shopping. Merchant Center is where you’ll create and manage your product details, like title, description, image URLs, price, availability and more.

To get started with Google Merchant Center:

• Sign up for a free account on http://www.google.com/merchants
• If you have an existing AdWords account (e-commerce only), sign in with it now or create a new account if needed
• Click “Get Started” on the Home page of your new Merchant Center dashboard

Why Use Feed Rules?

Google Merchant Center feed rules are the most powerful and flexible way to manage your product data quality. Feed rules let you control how Google processes, calculates and optimizes your product data for ads. They let you specify product attributes, update and even change those fields.

Feed Rules are not easy to use and require some technical knowledge before implementation. In this article we’ll discuss some common scenarios that can benefit from using feed rules as well as some best practices for getting started with them!

Google Shopping Feed Rules Settings And Options

Google Shopping feed rules are an essential part of any successful Shopping campaign. They allow you to set up your rules for product you select based on certain criteria or apply those rules to every product in your catalog.

Here are some common questions that arise when setting up feed rules:

• What are the limitations of feed rules?
• What mistakes should be avoided when setting up rules?
• Who should use feed rules and is it right for my account?

How to set up Google Shopping feed rules in Merchant Center?

• In Merchant Center, click on the “Products” tab, then click on “Feeds”.
• Click on the feed you want to edit.
• Click on a plus button, which means create new rule.
• Click on “Processed attributes” and drop down menu will appear
• Choose the attribute that you would like to set up rules for and you are on your way to creating the first rule!

What are the limitations?

You can only create one rule per attribute. At first it may not seem that big of a deal, but for example, you need to add “energy efficiency class” for products that are being advertised in the EU and each product may have different class, but you can only choose 1 class. Meaning, the products you specify would need to meet the criteria for that 1 class and to add other classes, you may need to add a supplement feed for the less common products to update or add the “energy efficiency class.”

In general, it’s safe to use these features as long as they don’t cause an error in the production environment:

What mistakes can be avoided when setting up rules?

Setting up rules can be a bit tricky, but don’t worry! There are some basic things you should avoid when setting up your rules.

• Don’t apply new rules without testing the draft first. This mistake happens all too often. When you create a rule, it is automatically added to your live feed and can cause problems in your merchant center if done improperly. To test your draft, go back into “Create Rule” and select “Test Feed Rules.” You’ll see how each rule works and what values will be sent to Google Merchant Center if that product has been sold.
• Don’t use rules to create new products (also known as product splits). Because it’s possible for multiple products within one SKU string, this creates duplicate product IDs for every variation of that SKU string which will not work with our system or yours!

Who should use feed rules and is it right for my account?

Everyone should learn to use feed rules, because sooner or later you will need to make use of the awesome tool Google has provided us with in order to have an optimized feed. It is right for your account whether you have a feed with 1 product or millions of products.

Conclusions

Feed rules are a powerful tool for optimizing your data feeds. They allow you to define how products are imported and exported, which can help you avoid unnecessary traffic and sales. They also allow you to improve the performance of your Google Shopping campaigns.

By using feed rules, merchants can avoid duplicate content issues that can affect the quality of their account health scores, as well as avoid penalties ranging from temporary suspensions to permanent bans on their accounts due to incorrect product information or other violations of Google policy.

Setting up feed rules to optimize your data feeds can significantly improve the performance of your Google Shopping Ads campaigns.

Setting up feed rules to optimize your data feeds can significantly improve the performance of your Google Shopping Ads campaigns. For example, if you have a large number of products in your feed that don’t have images, setting a rule that excludes those products from any ad campaign will help ensure that they are not shown in ads (and therefore do not compete with other products in the same ad groups).

PS

You can optimize your Google Shopping Feed to make sure that you’re sending the right inventory to the right places. You can also use feed rules to create an ad group for people looking for specific products or services, drive traffic from search engines, and more! The setup process is quick, but not easy—we recommend creating at least one feed rule today so you can start seeing results as soon as possible. Please remember, test the changes before you apply draft rules!