General information
The feeds are the most important settings of the app. Good advertising starts with good product feeds, so pay more time on your feeds settings and it will pay off.
Where to get more help
First place to seek for help is the chat icon on the bottom right of your screen. You will find both instant answers and be able to seek for more help from our support team - we love to hear from you!
On the feed editor screens you can get more in-context help by clicking on these "Guide me" buttons
Then our knowledgeable goat will appear and guide you through the relevant form or input. You can click (or touch on mobile) anywhere on the dark screen to go to the next guide or click Skip to end the help mode.
In the feed editor you can also seek out for "Help" buttons on the different inputs.
We are just a click away
PRODUCT GROUPS
Feeds are hosted in product groups. In each product group you define 3 things:
- Which collections to be included. You can include just part of your portfolio in feeds by collections. You can optionally edit collection level feed settings for each of the collections included.
- Which collections to be excluded or customized with collection feed settings.
- The feeds in the group include all the group's products to Google Merchant Center.
So you need to keep in mind which products that have been included in the group to specify the right feed settings (e.g. Google product category, gender, age group, ...).
Products refer to the products inside your Shopify store. They can include 1 or multiple variants. Please differentiate them from items, which are reflects of your product data inside Google Merchant account generated by the product feeds.
Generally an item is generated from a variant in your store, but a variant can generate multiple items if it is included in more than a product feed. By using variant filters, you can choose to feed only the first variant, a specific variant or all variants of a product. In it's turn, a single variant will then create 1 or several items (e.g. when included in multiple feeds) in Google Merchant Center.
Besides, your merchant account can include items which were generated from feeds in the past, or even product feeds created by other apps. If you want your merchant account to include only the items from the app, clean it up first by deleting the feeds/products inside Google Merchant Center.
The app will skip the products which are not published or does not have an image (both are required by Google to avoid disapproval).
This explain why the number of products made available to feed and the number of items reported on the Dashboard of the app are generally not the same.
THE FEED EDITOR
Simple and advanced input modes
Most of the fields on the feed editor page have 2 input modes, Simple (the default) and Advanced. To toggle between the input modes, click on the buttons at the top right corner of the field.
Simple input mode
In the Simple input mode, a single expression is entered into the field. Although the expressions can include tokens which pull in the product data and even allow regular expression search/replace, not much logic can be specified for feed data building. In the screenshot, all the products in the feed will share the same Google product category setting, which is "Apparel & Accessories > Clothing > Shirts & Tops".
In Advanced input mode, you can use rule-based feed settings to derive the final feed data from the product data depending on different criteria.
The feed editor page sections resemble the way Google organization the product data specifications. It is divided into multiple tabs to be managed more easily:
- Metadata
- Target
- Basic product data
- Product category and Product identifiers
- Detailed product description
- Promotion ID and Custom Label
- Shipping
- Tax
- Local product data
- Summary and Feed preview
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