Google adds Merchant Center Feed Rules to make formatting shopping feeds easier

Let’s face it, shopping feeds are a pain. Such a pain that an entire cottage industry has sprung up to help retailers with the nuisance of product feed formatting and management. On Tuesday, Google released Feed Rules to make it a little easier for those advertisers and retailers managing Google Shopping feeds on their own to get feed data formatted correctly.

“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,” Sven Herschel, product manager for Google Shopping, explained in a blog post.

From the new Feed rules tab in Merchant Center, you can now set rules to change column headers and values used in your product data to match those used by Google — e.g., “for women” to “female” as shown in the screen shot from Google below.

Additionally, you can add missing attributes by setting rules that can automatically populate missing fields with a fixed value or different values based on certain conditions.

Once you’ve got your data all set, then you can use Feed Rules to apply custom labels to products and tag products with shipping labels.

Herschel adds that this is just version 1 of Feed Rules, and Google will be looking for feedback on the feature and suggestions for additional capabilities. Select “Send Feedback” on the gear icon in Merchant Center to send Google your thoughts.