Customising your Google Shopping feed

The Google Shopping Feed plugin lets you change what Google sees without touching your store's products. You can keep products out of the feed, rewrite titles and descriptions for Google, add custom labels for your campaigns, and set attributes such as gender, age group and condition. You can do this product by product, in bulk from a spreadsheet, or with rules that apply themselves every time the feed is built.

Considerations

• Everything on the Products and Rules tabs is feed-only. Excluding a product or giving it a custom title never changes the product in your store.
• When two settings disagree, the plugin uses them in this order: a product's own override wins, then automated rules, then custom field mapping, then the values it reads from the product's options. Leave a field empty to keep the automatic value.
• Changes take effect on the next feed run. Click Generate Now on the feed, or wait for the schedule.
• Custom labels are how you group products in Google Ads campaigns, for example winter-sale or best-sellers. Google allows five per item, numbered 0 to 4.

Exclude a product or change how it appears

1. From your Orbit dashboard, go to Plugins. Under My Plugins, click Open on the Google Shopping Feed row, then open the Products tab.
2. Find the product. Search by name, SKU or handle, or click Add filter to narrow the list by status, category, brand, product type, custom type, tags, price or stock. The Feed status filter shows only products that are in the feed or excluded, and Custom labels shows products with or without labels.
3. Click Edit on the product's row.
4. Tick Exclude this product from the feed to keep it out of Google.
5. Enter a Custom feed title or Custom feed description to replace the store's wording for Google only. Leave them empty to keep the store's own.
6. Fill in Label 0 to Label 4 with the custom labels you use in Google Ads.
7. Set any attributes Google needs for this product: Gender, Age group, Condition, Colour, Size, Material, Pattern, Energy class, Adult item, Is bundle, Multipack qty, Unit measure and Base measure.
8. Add Product highlights, one per line, up to ten. Google shows these as short bullet points on the listing.
9. Click Save. The row shows badges for its labels, a custom title and exclusion.

To undo everything for a product, open its editor and click Remove override.

Edit many products at once

1. On the Products tab, filter the list to the products you want, then tick them. Ticking the box in the header selects the page. To go further, click Select all followed by the number of filtered products.
2. Click Exclude from feed or Include in feed.
3. To label them, choose a label slot, type the value and click Apply label. An empty value clears that slot.

For larger changes, work in a spreadsheet:

1. Click Export CSV. The file has one row per product with its exclusion, custom title and description, five labels and every attribute.
2. Edit the columns you need. Use yes or no in the excluded column. Leave a cell empty to keep the automatic value. Do not change the product_id, handle or sku columns, because the import matches rows on them.
3. Click Import CSV and choose the file. The plugin reports how many overrides it updated and how many rows it could not match.

Set up automated rules

A rule assigns an attribute or excludes products based on conditions, and it runs on every feed generation. Use rules for anything that changes over time, such as labelling every product under £20 or keeping out-of-stock variants of one brand out of the feed.

1. Open the Rules tab and click the New rule button.
2. Enter a Name.
3. Choose the Action: Assign attribute or Exclude from feed.
4. Choose what it Applies to: Whole products or Single variants. A product rule matches when any of its variants match. A variant rule checks each variant on its own, so it can exclude one size without touching the rest.
5. For an assign rule, pick the Attribute (a custom label, gender, age group, condition or energy efficiency class) and enter the Value.
6. Under Conditions, choose Match ALL (AND) or Match ANY (OR), then build each condition from a field, a comparison and a value. Fields are product title, variant title, brand, product category, handle, SKU, price, inventory quantity and tag. Text fields use comparisons such as contains and is one of, where you enter one value per line. Price and inventory quantity use is less than, is at least and the other number comparisons.
7. Click Add condition for more, then click Create Rule.

Rules run in the order listed. If two assign rules set the same attribute, the later one wins. An exclude rule that matches stops there. Use the switch on a rule to turn it off without deleting it. Deleting an exclude rule returns the affected products to the feed on the next run.

Send your custom fields as Google attributes

If you store details such as a manufacturer part number or a material in product custom fields, the feed can send them as the matching Google attribute.

1. On the Feeds tab, open the feed and click the edit button.
2. Under Custom Field Mapping, choose a field from Add a field to map. Your custom fields appear here after the first product sync.
3. Pick the attribute it maps to: MPN, GTIN, Brand, condition, gender, age group, colour, size, material, pattern, energy class, adult item, bundle, multipack, unit pricing measures, product highlights or a custom label.
4. Repeat for each field, then click Save Changes.

Tip: Mapping a part number field to MPN is the quickest fix for products with no barcode. Google accepts an MPN together with a brand in place of a GTIN.

Related guides

• Setting up a Google Shopping feed
• Adding custom fields
• Adding SKUs and barcodes
• Managing plugin plans and billing