A Guide to Creating Feed Rules for Your Product Ads
Shopping ads reign supreme when it comes to advertising products for a low cost with higher-than-normal conversion rate. Once you’ve managed to make it over the first hurdle of creating a shopping feed, it’s useful to know how to make quick changes at scale without needing to utilize your dev resources. Below I’ve outlined a step-by-step guide to making adjustments to your shopping feed.
Table Of Contents
Accessing Feed Processing Rules
To access your feed rules you’ll first need to log into your Google Merchant Center account. Once you’re logged in follow these steps:
- On the left-side navigation click on Products, which will then expand to show a sub-menu. From there, click on Feeds.
- Click on the feed name you’d like to adjust.
- At the top of the page, click on Feed Rules. You should now see a screen similar to the one below. This is where all the magic happens.
Adding Feed Processing Rules
As an example, let’s say your product feed consists of different apparel items (clothes, shoes, socks, etc.) and you want each product title to include the color of each product. To begin the process of doing this you’ll click on the blue circle with the plus sign “+” to add this processing rule. Since we’ll be updating the product titles you’ll want to type in title and select it from the Processed attributes drop-down (see image below).
Now, you’ll be redirected to a new page with Attribute: title at the top of the page. If you selected a different attribute, then title will be replaced by whichever attribute you selected on the previous screen.
Since we are modifying titles, you’ll want to scroll down all the way down to the bottom of the page where it says Modifications. Click on Add Modification.
Creating a Feed Processing Filter
If you are creating a rule that applies to only certain products then you’ll first want to create a filter so that the rule you’re about to create only applies to the products you want. If the rule you want to create applies to ALL products in your feed then you can skip onto the next paragraph. Given our example of adding color to all product titles, let’s filter down our product list to ONLY those products that have a color value. You can do this by following these steps:
- Click on Conditions: None, which will then open a drop-down menu
- Type in Color and select it from the drop-down menu so that feedname.color is showing. Feedname here will be whatever the name of your feed is.
- Click on the contains drop-down and change this to has a value. Now, you’re telling Google Merchant Center to apply this rule you’re about to create ONLY to those products that have a color value.
Creating a Rule
Now, it’s time to add a rule. Following the example where we want to add color to the end of every product title, you would click on Append. You’ll now see a drop down. Type in a space and then hit enter. You’ll now see a second option appear, here you’ll want to type in color. Select the option with feedname.color. Again, feedname will be the title of your feed. Click Ok. For reference, the space here makes it so there is a space that appears between the product title and the product color. You could also put ‘ – ‘ if you prefer to separate the title from color.
Click Save as Draft at the top of the page.
Testing Feed Processing Rule
After you’ve saved your rule as a draft, you should test your feed to make sure everything is working properly. You can do this by clicking Test Changes found on the Feed Rules tab of your product feed. It should take about 10-20 minutes for Google to re-process your feed using any rules you applied. Once completed, you’ll see the option to Show Test. Click on this to see in detail what changes occurred.
On the test results page you’ll see the status summary. You’ll want to scroll down to the Attribute change summary section. This outlines which attribute(s) were changed and how many products were changed. If you click on the drop down next to the attribute you can see examples with the current title and the new title. In our example, one would expect the current title for a product titled “graphic t-shirt’ to say ‘graphic t-shirt’ whereas the new title would be “graphic t-shirt white”. If you see any errors such as a missing space for instance you can always go back to the feed processing rule and update to include to include a space.
The next section on the test results page you’ll want to look at is the Issue Summary. Here you can see if any new issues will be introduced if your rule goes live. If no new issues are introduced then you should be good to go. Hit the back button at the top of the page to return the main feed rules tab.
Updating Your Feed with New Processing Rule(s)
Click Apply on the Feed Rules tab and your rule is now active. The final step is to re-process your feed. You can do this by clicking on Processing at the top of the page. Click on Re-Process Feed. It will take a few minutes for your feed to be re-processed and at least 30 minutes until the changes appear in your Google Ads account.
Have you tried using feed rules? Tell us about it in the comments.
Written by Mikhail Cherniss
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