With Shopping campaigns and Performance Max campaigns that use a Google Merchant Center feed, custom labels are a powerful tool for managing which products appear in your ads. You can use custom labels to subdivide products in your campaign based on criteria you define, such as seasonality (for example, 'Winter', 'Summer'), sales performance (like 'Best Seller', 'Clearance') or any other attribute relevant to your business. These custom labels allow you to precisely include or exclude specific sets of products from your advertising efforts. The values you assign can then be used for monitoring, reporting, and setting bids in your Shopping and Performance Max campaigns.
This article explains how to set up and use custom labels in your product data within Google Merchant Center. When configured, these labels can be leveraged in your Google Ads Shopping campaigns and Performance Max campaigns to control product visibility by including or excluding specific items. Custom labels are for your internal campaign management and won't appear directly in your Shopping ads to customers, they are crucial for refining your product targeting.
Before you begin
You'll need to have access to your product data in Google Merchant Center and be willing to add custom label attributes to your products.
Instructions
Custom labels in your product data let you subdivide products in your campaigns using values you define. You can have up to 5 custom labels, numbered 0 through 4.
First, you define what each custom label represents and decide on its possible values. For example, you might define custom_label_0 for "season" with values like "winter" or "summer." Then, you assign one value per product in your Google Merchant Center account.
After you've set up custom labels in your product data, you can use them to create more granular product groups in your Shopping and Performance Max campaigns with a Google Merchant Center data source. This allows you to manage bids and monitor performance for specific product subsets, like "winter" products.
Example of custom labels
Step 1: Decide on your own definitions and possible values for the custom label attributes.
| Custom label | Your definition | Your choice of possible values |
|---|---|---|
custom label 0 |
Season | Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall |
custom label 1 |
SellingRate | BestSeller, LowSeller |
custom label 2 |
Clearance | Clearance |
custom label 3 |
Margin | LowMargin, HighMargin |
custom label 4 |
ReleaseYear | 1900 to 2100 |
Step 2: Assign appropriate values to each product in your product data.
id |
custom label 0 |
custom label 1 |
custom label 2 |
custom label 3 |
custom label 4 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Item #1 | Winter | BestSeller | LowMargin | ||
| Item #2 | Summer | HighMargin | 2013 | ||
| Item #3 | Clearance | 2012 |
Keep in mind
Each custom label can only have one value per product. It isn’t necessary for an item to have a value for one or more custom labels. For example, some of your clothing items may not be considered seasonal, so you wouldn’t assign a value to those items for “custom label 0” in the example above.
- It may take up to 24-48 hours for newly created or edited custom labels to appear in Google Ads.
- Your custom label may not sync in Google Ads if you're exceeding or close to the attribute limit in Google Merchant Center.
- Limits: 1–100 characters, up to 1,000 unique values account-wide for each custom label attribute (up to 5,000 labels total).
