Google has been working to offer the best experience to its users, and this has seen several updates in the recent past. Some of the moves have been motivated by complaints from users. One of the most recent amendments Google has made is adjusting shopping feeds to ensure making amendments is easy for users.
Everyone knows that shopping feeds can be difficult to get right and thoroughly optimised and getting something new that can eliminate this problem is not an option. For instance, the cottage industry has come up with strategies that can help retailers to overcome the nuisance of product feed formatting and handling. Google had learnt about these frustrations, so they decided to come up with new rules to make it easier for advertisers and retailers to manage shopping feeds.
The new Feed Rules released on 26th of April, 2016, will work to help retailers and advertisers to have easy feed data formatting. It is a step that helps to empower individuals who use the tool so they can customise their product data depending on what they would like to appear in feeds. With the new rules, you are able to export product data in a format of your choice, and there are options for you to apply different rules to transform the product data into attributes that conform to the Google Shopping Feed Guidelines.
Google’s product manager, Sven Herschel explained through a post on his blog that now you can set rules to alter column headers and the values added in the product data to match with what Google has issued. Specific columns have been added that will make it easier to make specific descriptions that are friendly to feeds.
Additionally, it is also easy to add missing attributes. All you need is to set rules that will calculate missing fields depending on certain conditions. Having this data will help you to explore further customization options, specifically the feed rules, which will allow you to apply custom labels and place tags to the products that have shipping labels.
As Herschel puts it, this is not the last update they are making, but marks the beginning of a series of other amendments they are about to make so users can have a better experience. Although this is the version 1 of the Feed Rules, it seems to have brought many changes on board and will help to make it easier for retailers and advertisers to manage feed formatting.
