Creating the perfect product feed for Google Shopping is not always a walk in the park.

– The right feed creates relevance for your customers, which makes both them and Google happy!

Depending on which CMS you use, there are various challenges you may encounter when building or mapping your product feed. For example, you might be missing product data or a specific attribute that needs to be added. As a result, there are many tools, plugins, and third-party systems designed to make the process as straightforward as possible. Some are free, while others (read: most) require a monthly subscription.

However, one tool that is often overlooked is Google’s own solution in Google Merchant Center (GMC). In some cases, a third-party system may be necessary depending on the issue, but many minor adjustments can be made directly in Merchant Center – whether you are missing a specific attribute or need to edit attribute values in your feed.

In this post, I will introduce essential tools you can use in GMC via feed rules, enabling you to enhance your product feed with extra layers and thus improve performance over time.

Product titles

Product titles are the most crucial factor in determining whether your products are found in a search. Of course, all other parameters also have an impact, but the product title has the greatest influence, as it identifies the item you are selling.

You can use feed rules in GMC for many things when it comes to your product titles. Not only to improve the titles themselves, but also to use the content from your titles to enhance other parts of your feed.

The most straightforward example is when you are missing some text in the title – for instance, if you need to add a brand. When creating user rules, there are two main approaches: you can add a source, or you can make a change. Adding is used to insert a value into an attribute that is currently empty. A change is made when you need to edit an existing value in an attribute.

So, to edit your title to include a brand, you should use “Changes”.

Under changes, you have three primary options, as well as some advanced settings:

You can insert something in front of your title, append (after) it, or use find & replace. Find and replace works as you would expect from other systems and is mainly used to edit text within titles. Choose the function that suits where you want the brand to be inserted.

You can then either type your own value to be added or insert a dynamic value from another attribute. If you already have the brand in the brand attribute, you can pull the brand into the title from there:

Use the preview function to check if your changes work by hovering your mouse over the blue field in the top right corner:

If you want to preview a specific product, you can also search for the product ID in the function.

After this, save your changes as a draft, then click apply to implement your changes:

Using conditions

When setting your rules, you may often want to apply them only to specific products, so you do not make changes to your entire product feed.

To address this, you can set certain conditions so that you only change the products you need to:

For example, a rule could apply only to a certain category, if the title contains something specific, or to all products with a particular brand. Use the attributes for the rest of the feed to define when your rules should apply. Again, use the preview and save your changes.

Populate attributes without data

After some time, you will become more familiar with the feed rules interface. Now you can begin enriching your feed with any missing data. The more relevant content you can provide in your product feed, the better.

It can be worthwhile to work with fields such as:

• Colour
• Material
• Size
• Gender
• Energy class
• Brand

To do this, use the second method of “Add source”. The principle is the same, where you can again set the right conditions for which products should have specific values. We often see that clothing brands include the colour in the product title, but it is still missing in the field designated for colour in Google. Here, you can easily set a condition so that when, for example, “Red” appears in the product title, the “colour” attribute should be given the value red. This makes it easier for Google to understand that the product is red and display it in relevant searches.

You should now have some basic tools to help improve your product feed. There are always more technical elements to work with that can further increase your visibility on Google Shopping.

If you need advice or assistance, you are always welcome to contact us here at WeMarket.