How to add a feed rule: a Merchant Center guide

The Merchant Center enables retailers to update and optimize the many attributes of their products for the purpose of improving the performance of their Google Shopping ads. If you consult with a Google Shopping specialist or expert, you may be advised to make changes to your product titles or add additional attributes to help boost visibility and available search traffic for your product SKUs.

If this is the case, Google’s Merchant Center provides an easy way of making these changes to multiple products, especially if you’re working with a large inventory.

Read our handy guide to using the excluded destination attribute

Why should I use Google Merchant Center feed rules?

Why would you want to use a feed rule? At Bidnamic, we’re all about data, and fleshing out the relevant attributes for your products is critical to ensuring they show up only when it’s relevant to do so. But updating the values for a number of different attributes for even a dozen or so products is time-consuming, and let’s face it, we all know you could be using your time better elsewhere.

Feed rules provide an automated way to add extra attributes or information to products. You can use certain conditions, so that even if you add new inventory to the Merchant Center, your feed rules will automatically apply. This means that if you introduce new products to your website (and therefore the Merchant Center), you won’t need to create a new supplemental feed.

What’s more, retailers may wish to optimize their product titles in the product feed, to include as much information as worthwhile to ensure their product serves for the most relevant searches. Yet, they may not want to include all this information in the product titles on their website.

By applying this super relevant information using feed rules, retailers can update and optimize their entire catalog, without affecting the product copy (or aesthetic) of their website pages.

How do Merchant Center feed rules work?

It’s actually quite simple. At its most basic, the feed rules work as the following: if X, then Y. That’s still a bit vague though. If an attribute of your product has the value ‘X’, then your rule applies to it.

For instance, let’s say Black Friday’s coming up and you want to add “Black Friday Sale” to the product title of only products with a specific brand name. You would instruct the Merchant Center to apply your new rule to all products with the value “Example Brand Name” in the brand attribute.

You then choose what you want to happen to all of these selected products, in this case prepending or appending “Black Friday Sale” to the product title. Once you’ve applied your new rule, your product titles will reflect your change.

Additional modifications can also be applied to your feed rule, making changes to your inventory much smoother.

What are the different kinds of “modifications'' in feed rules?

• Prepend - adding the desired word or text to the beginning of the selected attribute value. e.g. Product title.
• Append - adding the desired word or text to the end of the selected attribute value. e.g. Product title.
• Find and replace - finding word or text in your product feed and replacing with the desired word or text. E.g. replacing “pregnant” with “maternity”.
• Split and choose - splitting a phrase into segments to select some of them.
• Clear - clearing an attribute field of any value.

Step-by-step guide to adding a feed rule in the Merchant Center

1. In the Google Merchant Center, click “Products” and then “Feeds” in the sidebar along the left-hand side. Then select the feed you wish to make changes to.

2. Select the round blue button with a plus in the center. You can type to search an attribute, or choose from “Processed attributes” or “custom processed attributes”.

It may be that you’re altering the values of this attribute. On the other hand, search using an attribute value which groups products (e.g. size) to make adjustments to a separate attribute value (e.g. product title).

3. Input your desired rule. In our example, if the title contains “Apple”, the feed rule will automatically change the title to “Apple iPhone 7”.

Retailers can be more specific in their feed rule creation by using Modifications, found further down the same page.

4. Review your new rule and click “Save as draft”.

You will then see your new draft rule in a list alongside any other existing feed rules. From here you can test the rule before applying it to your feed. That's it, you're all done!

Find out even more about Merchant Center here