How do feed rules work in Google Merchant Center?

When it comes to advertising on Google’s Shopping network, the quality of your product feed is everything. Having the correct attributes included and properly formatted in the feed is often directly decisive for how well your advertising performs.

For many e-commerce platforms, however, there are no built-in functions to ensure feed hygiene when the primary product feed is created. One option is to use paid third-party services to make changes or add new attributes. Another option is to use the feed rules that come standard in Google Merchant Center. While these don’t offer as much flexibility as third-party tools, they can still solve many of the problems you may encounter with feed formatting. Plus, it’s completely free.

To find the feed rules, go into Merchant Center, click on Products and then Feeds in the left-hand menu. Then click on the feed you want to edit and select feed rules from the menu above.

By clicking the + sign, you’ll then have the option to modify attributes in the feed or create new ones based on the data already available in the feed. For example, if the attribute “brand” is missing in the feed, but the product titles contain brand names, you can create a rule that searches the product titles for brand terms you define, and assign them as values under the new attribute “brand”:

If the situation is the opposite – that you want to use the existing “brand” attribute and add it to the product titles – that can also be done with the help of feed rules.

Getting good returns on your investments in Google Shopping ultimately depends on how you set up your strategy and optimize your advertising in Google Ads. But the first step in that process is making sure your product feed is in good shape. The feed rules in Merchant Center are a great tool that can help you fix the most common issues in this area. If you’d like to dive deeper into the topic, you can find Google’s help page on feed rules here.