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Using Rules in the New Merchant Centre: T-Time with Tillison

Are you struggling to work with your shopping feed data? In this instalment of T-Time with Tillison, Mark Tillison explains the basics of the new Google Merchant Centre Rules, demonstrating how to create a rule in the Google Merchant Centre, setting the condition of your products, identifier exists, working around possible GTIN issues and creating a custom label based on product ID.

Using Rules in the New Merchant Centre: T-Time with Tillison

The basics of Google Merchant Centre rules

(1:20) Mark begins with a simple rule which is setting the condition of your products. In the Google Merchant Centre you can find the rules in ‘Products’ and ‘Feeds’ then ‘Feed Rules’. This is where you are able to see all the current rules you may have.

Begin by clicking on ‘Create Rule’. Remember you have to start with the attribute you want to create a rule for, in this case we are going to choose Condition as our attribute, this may be new, used etc.

Secondly we are going to create our source, in this case we are going to set all our products to ‘new’. The reason you might want to do this is if your Google Shopping Feed currently didn’t have this data in it as you will need this information for your Google Shopping Campaign. Be careful by doing this because it will override any existing data in your feed.

How to set condition to New when Condition is empty

(3:06) You may want to set a rule for a selected group of products if they have missing or incorrect data. To do this, choose ‘condition’ and then ‘has no value’ and set condition to ‘new’.

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However, if your product is not new and is used or refurbished then it will say it is new, so be careful when attributing this rule.

How to set Identifier Exists to No when GTIN is empty

Deep Dive: Incorrect value [identifier exists]: Merchant Centre Disapproved Products

(4:00) Moving onto a slightly more complicated rule: ‘Identifier Exists’. The Identifier Exists attribute is used alongside GTIN. Some products may have already have a GTIN and this will come from your shopping feed, but some products may not. In these instances, we need to tell Google not to look for a GTIN and so the identifier exists field needs to be set to ‘No’.

To do this we start by creating a rule, and choosing ‘identifier exists’ and ‘condition’ then ‘has no value’. Also, you can choose the ‘OR’ option to say that if the GTIN or MPN has no value then we set identifier exists to ‘no’. In summary this rule will identify products from your shopping feed that have no GTIN and set the identifier exists to ‘no’.

How to create custom label based on product ID

(5:30) Finally, if there are certain products you do not want to advertise on your Google Shopping, you can set a rule to say that the products with a particular ID have the availability of ‘out of stock’. However, Google will still crawl your site and will continue to advertise these products even if you have this rule in place as your website says they are still in stock. Therefore, in order to make them not appear on Google Shopping you will need to create a different rule.

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In the Google Merchant Centre you can create a ‘custom label 0’ and ‘1,2,3,4…’ which gives you the freedom to create whatever custom attributes you want. In custom label 0, you choose ‘condition’ and then you can choose ‘ID’ contains ‘xyz’ and you can choose the OR option to add another, for example ‘ID’ contains ‘123’. Then you set to ‘Do Not Advertise’ and this will match any products where the ID contains ‘xyz’ and ‘123’ and set the custom label zero to do not advertise.

Equally you could pick a category and product type to select the products you do not want to advertise. Mark recommends only using this rule when you have a small amount of products.

If you found this episode of T-Time with Tillison useful, subscribe to our YouTube Channel for more tips and advice on how to use the Rules in the new Google Merchant Centre.

Do you have any questions about the new Google Merchant Centre? Get in touch with your questions in the comment section, or click below to find out more about our audit and coaching sessions.

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