What are Custom Labels?
Custom Labels are blank fields within a Google Shopping feed that allow retailers to organize Shopping campaigns based on product groupings. While basic feeds contain generalized product attributes such as product type, brand, and size, custom labels allow for efficient product groupings to better allocate spend and increase ROI long term.
4 Easy Ways to Leverage Custom Labels
Here are four easy custom label segments to integrate into your Google Shopping Feed:
- Seasonality in Products
- Catalog Collections
- Profit-Based Products
- Product Themes
Seasonality
Leveraging seasonality in shopping campaigns allows a business to push inventory throughout the year without cycling products in and out of a shopping feed. By flagging seasonal products during peak times such as back-to-school, gift-giving season, or even actual seasons, retailers can more aggressively target products to increase visibility. Once the peak season for those products has passed, retailers can then reduce spend or pause products during off-periods.
Catalog Collections
Does your site have a bestsellers page? Clearance? Or limited edition items? Flagging these products allows for smarter bidding and stronger visibility. By leveraging a "best seller" or "promotional" custom label, businesses can focus on promoting these prioritized items while also successfully pushing inventory. Collections also allow for “cleaner,” more efficient groupings within campaign structures as product partitions in like-groups can have similar bids.
Profit-Based
With most retail verticals, not all products are viewed equally and businesses value margin as a key metric of measuring success. Therefore, it makes sense to leverage a profit-based structure within Google Shopping campaigns. By integrating margins in a custom label, retailers can build out the campaigns to reflect a margin-based structure. These campaigns can target high-margin products by setting higher bids while reducing costs on low-margin items. This allows for scalability on more profitable products while maintaining a consistent return on low-margin items.
Product Theme
Product theme is a strategic approach to tackle larger feeds with an overlap in product designs or “themes.” While this segmentation is applicable across multiple verticals, apparel retailers can leverage a product-theme based structure.
For example, if a retailer has one design that spans across numerous product types, the retailer can flag products by the corresponding theme for each item. To further this example, a retailer that sells “cat” themed mugs and backpacks, can flag all items that have the “cat” design. Now, this custom label can allow for more targeted searches related to “cat” products while also exposing consumers to a variety of the retailer’s product types in the search results.
Key Takeaways
We’re seen strong success with retailers that leverage Custom Labels. With an ever-changing landscape, product feeds allow for consistent data and information flow from your website to the search engine. This allows for intent-based visibility while focusing efforts on maintaining strong ROI and reducing high CPA.
Need some guidance on how to get started? Reach out here!
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