Making good use of Google Shopping’s custom labels

The use of Google Shopping’s custom labels helps vendors organise their products according to a certain number of customised settings (seasonality, price, margin, profitability, etc.), and thus optimise their campaigns by modulating their strategy and marketing investments.

Here are a few things you should know before using custom labels:

• Custom label configuration is only possible in the Merchant Center or in your product feed management interface (such as Lengow).
• Up to 5 labels per product can be created, for example: “season”, “high ROI”, “performance”, “margin incurred”, “CTR and conversion rate”, etc. These labels are numbered 0 to 4.
• Each label can be associated with five possible values. For instance, the “season” label can have the following values: “spring”, “summer”, “autumn” and “winter”. Only one value can be allocated per product and per label.

Once your custom labels have been created, you can draw information from them which could help you adapt your marketing strategy. A few examples:

• For a “season” label. If you are selling swimming costumes or ski suits, seasonality is key. This label will help hone your strategy according to the month of the year, so you can highlight a product category in peak season, and slow things down in low season.
• For a “margin incurred” label. You can segment your products according to the profit margin made, rather than focusing solely on prices. This way, you can increase advertising expenses for products displaying the best profit margin, and reduce them for products making less money.
• For a “performance” label. Focus your efforts on products that sell well, and reduce marketing expenses for those that have a hard time taking off. This will lead to a positive ROI all year round.

To save time, you can add labels to your product feed using a data feed management tool: this is the best way of optimising your Google Shopping custom labels, and of modifying them as regularly as needed.