How to modify your product feed in Google’s Merchant Center

Two types of data transformations you can carry out with feed rules to suit your use case:

• ‘Add Data Source’ – Instruct Google Merchant Center where to get the value for a given attribute.

• 'Add Modifications’ – Make amendments to the data for your desired attribute.

1. Add Data Source:

With ‘Set To’ you can:

1. Change the column name to meet Google’s product data specification requirements: E.g. Set ‘Availability’ to: ‘feed1.stock’ status or Set ‘Brand’ to ‘feed 1.supplier’.

2. Add a value to your target attribute with a static value: E.g. Set ‘Condition’ to ‘New’.

3. Combine existing columns to produce a single value. For example, if the feed data for a mobile phone looks like the table below, then with a simple ‘Set To’ rule, you can easily change the title from: '[Model X 32GB]' to 'New [Model X] 32GB from [Brand Name]' which gives more information to customers, potentially making the product more attractive and relevant to shoppers.

• The ‘Extract’ rule allows you to search for certain terms in your feed and assign them to your desired attribute (e.g. if the title or description contains the word ‘Red’ this will be automatically assigned to the ‘color’ attribute).

• ’Take Latest’ is useful when you have more than one feed providing data sets. This tool will allow you to assign the most recent pricing or availability data to your products, making sure your ads are using the most up-to-date information. For example, during a sales period if you want to use a separate feed for regular pricing and availability updates, you can do this by creating a supplemental feed and using the ‘Take Latest’ rule to update your primary feed.

Example of a 'Set To' rule:

2. Add modifications:

With ‘Modifications’ you can:

1. ‘Prepend/Append’: add words, phrases, or other feed attributes at the beginning or end of an attribute value. You may choose to do this either to improve the search query relevance with your offers or to amend your product data. E.g. add a color at the end of a title or the brand name at the beginning.

2. ‘Find & Replace’: search for words or phrases in your feeds and swap them with new values. Note that ‘Find & Replace’ operations are executed sequentially and not simultaneously. E.g. Find product titles featuring the terms like 'Sneakers' or 'Trainers' and replace this with 'Runners'.

3. ‘Split & Choose’: this is one of the most advanced feed rule options; it allows you to take any elements in a comma or arrow-separated list and use that text to populate an attribute. There are three operators to select in a ‘Split & Choose’ modification:

   • ‘Split’: Signify how to split the attribute. e.g. > ',' or ;.
   • ‘Select’: Select which of the elements should be put in the split. You can choose values like 'first' or 'last', or you can select a range of values, such as '1-second last' or '2-5'.
   • ‘Combine’: If you have selected multiple elements, use ‘Combine’ to join them together in a single value, using a separator of your choice.

4. ‘Clear data’: this tool allows you to remove the value of any attribute. You are advised to use this option with caution as once the clear operation has been applied for a specific product, no other rules will be applied. If for example you chose to clear a specific attribute, which is required though by Google’s product data specification, then this may lead to your offers being disapproved. E.g. if you'd like to remove values like ‘n/a’ from attributes such as brand or gtin, then the current value should equal ‘n/a’.