Google Shopping custom labels provide a mechanism to categorize your inventory beyond the standard product attributes like category or brand. By utilizing these fields, you gain the ability to group products based on internal business logic, such as seasonal trends, profit margins, or clearance status. Google Shopping feeds support up to five custom labels numbered 0 through 4 to organize products for campaign management. This structure allows for precise bidding adjustments and budget allocation across your entire catalog in Google Ads.
What are Google Shopping custom labels and why should you use them?
Custom labels function as metadata tags that exist within your product data feed. Unlike standard attributes, these labels are entirely optional and defined by your specific business needs. When you assign a label to a product, that information is sent to the Google Merchant Center. Once the feed is processed, you can filter your products inside your Google Ads Shopping campaigns using these specific tags. This is a practical way to isolate high-performing products from low-margin items without needing to reorganize your entire website structure or change your physical inventory labels.
In a typical account, marketers often use these labels to manage products that require different bidding strategies. For instance, you might have a group of items that are currently on sale and another group that represents your core collection. By labeling these as ‘Sale’ and ‘Core’, you can create separate campaigns with unique bidding strategies for each segment. This control is useful when you want to push specific inventory during high-demand seasons or clear out older stock without affecting the performance data of your primary catalog.
How do you structure your custom labels for maximum impact?
Planning your labeling strategy is more important than the technical implementation itself. Because you are restricted to five labels, you must choose categories that provide the most value for your specific industry. Before you add anything to your feed, sit down with your sales data to identify the attributes that influence your advertising decisions most frequently. Common patterns for successful retail accounts include tagging products by price bracket, profit margin, or the specific season the product belongs to.
A common approach is to reserve Label 0 for profit margins, Label 1 for seasonal relevance, and Label 2 for inventory status. For example, a home goods retailer might use Label 0 to distinguish between ‘High Margin’ and ‘Low Margin’ items. This allows the marketing team to bid more aggressively on high-margin products that generate more revenue per sale. Meanwhile, Label 1 could be used to identify ‘Holiday’ items, enabling you to ramp up visibility as the winter season approaches and scale back once the peak shopping period concludes.
How do you technically implement labels in your product feed?
The implementation method depends on how you manage your product feed. If you use a spreadsheet for your feed, you simply add a column for each custom label you intend to use. You must name these columns ‘custom_label_0’, ‘custom_label_1’, and so on, up to ‘custom_label_4’. Ensure that you consistently use the same value names for each label so that your data remains clean and easily filterable within the Google Ads platform.
If you are using a third-party feed management tool, the process is usually handled through a rule-based interface. These tools allow you to map existing product data to custom labels automatically. For example, you can set up a rule that states: ‘If Price is greater than 100, set custom_label_0 to High_Price’. This is an efficient way to manage your labels as your inventory changes, saving you the manual effort of updating individual rows in a spreadsheet every time a price changes or a new product is added to the inventory.
How Alien Road applies custom labels
At Alien Road, we approach custom label implementation by first performing a deep audit of the client’s current sales data. We look for segments that are underperforming due to a lack of bidding precision. For instance, in a typical engagement with an e-commerce brand, we start by mapping their internal SKU categories to the five available custom labels. We prioritize labels that directly correlate to the client’s business goals, such as clearing stagnant inventory or pushing high-velocity items during specific weeks.
Once the labels are defined, we map them within the feed management platform to ensure that the data is flowing correctly into Google Merchant Center. We then verify the setup by checking the ‘Products’ tab in the Google Ads campaign interface to ensure the labels are visible and ready for use in segmentation. Finally, we build custom campaign structures that utilize these labels as the primary filter for product groups. This methodology ensures that every ad dollar is directed toward products that meet the client’s current strategic objectives.
Common mistakes to avoid when using custom labels
One major error is assigning too many different values to a single label. If you have fifty different values for ‘custom_label_0’, your campaign structure will become impossible to manage. Keep your values simple and descriptive. Another mistake is forgetting to update your labels as your business needs change. A label that was useful during a summer promotion is likely irrelevant in the winter. Set a recurring task to review your labels every quarter to ensure they still align with your current business goals.
Checklist for a healthy label strategy
- Audit your sales data to identify the top three attributes that drive your business decisions.
- Ensure all custom label values are consistent (e.g., use ‘Summer_Sale’ instead of mixing ‘SummerSale’ and ‘summer_sale’).
- Avoid using more than five labels, as Google Shopping feeds support exactly five.
- Review your label assignments every 90 days to remove outdated tags.
- Check that your feed management tool is correctly mapping your product data to the Google schema.
Can you use custom labels to improve your ROAS?
Custom labels are a primary tool for increasing Return on Ad Spend because they allow you to separate high-converting products from those that drain your budget. When you group your best-sellers into a specific label, you can apply higher bids to that group while keeping bids conservative for low-margin or slow-moving items. This tactic effectively optimizes your budget by ensuring that the most profitable products have the highest visibility on the Search Engine Results Page.
Consider a case where you have a wide range of products with varying profit margins. If you bid the same amount for all of them, you are likely overpaying for low-margin items and under-bidding on your most profitable ones. By using a custom label to distinguish these, you can bid aggressively on the high-margin items to capture more volume, while limiting the spend on lower-margin items. This is a common pattern used by successful retailers to ensure their ad spend remains efficient regardless of the total number of products in their catalog.
What is the best way to monitor label performance?
Monitoring the performance of your labeled segments happens directly inside the Google Ads interface. After you have applied your labels and organized your campaigns, navigate to the ‘Products’ tab within your Shopping campaign. From there, you can add ‘Custom Label’ as a column in your reporting table. This allows you to see the exact clicks, impressions, and conversions for each of your label values. Use this data to identify which segments are performing well and which ones require a bid adjustment.
If you notice that a specific label value is generating a high number of clicks but very few conversions, you should consider decreasing the bid for that segment. Conversely, if a label value shows a high conversion rate and a low Cost Per Acquisition, you should increase the bid to capture more traffic. This iterative process of review and adjustment is the core of effective campaign management. By repeating this process on a monthly basis, you ensure that your campaigns remain aligned with your business goals.
Comparing standard attributes vs custom labels
- Standard attributes like brand and category are fixed and shared across all retailers.
- Custom labels are flexible and unique to your specific business operations.
- Standard attributes are helpful for Google’s algorithm to classify your product types.
- Custom labels are designed specifically for your internal campaign management and bidding control.
- Both are required in your product feed to provide a complete picture to Google.
Where to start this week
Start by identifying one business problem you want to solve with your shopping campaigns. Perhaps your high-margin items are getting lost in the noise, or you need to clear out seasonal stock before the quarter ends. Choose one of the five available custom labels and define a simple value system for it. Update your feed, process the changes in the Google Merchant Center, and then create a filter in your Google Ads campaign to test your new segmentation. By focusing on a single, clear objective, you can see the results of your labeling efforts in your performance reports within just a few days.
Keep reading: Google Advertising · Advertising