Google Shopping custom labels

What Google Shopping custom labels do

Google already lets you split campaigns by brand, category, product type, condition and item id. Custom labels add the dimensions only you know: which products earn the most, which are seasonal, which sell fastest. Google's own examples are season, selling rate, price range, margin and release year.

The labels do nothing on their own. They pay off when a campaign uses them: a Performance Max listing group per margin band, a Shopping product group for bestsellers with a higher target, a seasonal campaign that only includes summer-26 items. If no one will build a campaign on a label, the slot is better left free.

Price band label: a regex per band

Textfinity's conditional mapping compares text: is equal to, includes, is in list, is in google sheet list, matches regexp. So a conditional price band matches the price string with a regular expression, one branch per band, and the else branch catches the top band; map from a price column without the currency suffix. The advanced transform compares numbers instead, in one expression: if calc{[price]} < 20 then "0-19" else if calc{[price]} < 50 then "20-49" else if calc{[price]} < 100 then "50-99" else if calc{[price]} < 250 then "100-249" else "250-plus". The price column must not be blank for that.

if    [price] matches regexp ^1?[0-9](\.[0-9]+)?$  → "0-19"
else if [price] matches regexp ^[2-4][0-9](\.[0-9]+)?$ → "20-49"
else if [price] matches regexp ^[5-9][0-9](\.[0-9]+)?$ → "50-99"
else if [price] matches regexp ^(1[0-9]{2}|2[0-4][0-9])(\.[0-9]+)?$
                                                → "100-249"
else                                            → "250-plus"

Margin and bestseller labels: data the feed does not have

A store export carries price but rarely cost, and never last quarter's sales. No rule can produce a margin or bestseller label from data that is not there. Once cost is present on every row (a blank cost fails the rule), the advanced transform can compute the margin: if calc{([price] - [cost]) / [price]} > 0.4 then "margin-high" else "margin-standard". Sales data, and cost when the store does not export it, has to arrive from outside: a Google Sheet that finance keeps, or a sales export, joined onto the catalog by SKU as a merged source (with a row for every product, since an advanced rule fails on a product the sheet does not match), or kept as a list of SKUs the rule checks against.

Two patterns work. If the sheet already holds the band (margin_band = margin-high), rename that column into custom_label_1. If someone maintains SKU lists instead, check membership with is in google sheet list. Either way, the sheet's owner refreshes it on their schedule and the next sync picks it up.

if    [sku] is in google sheet list "Bestsellers 90d" → "bestseller"
else if [units_90d] is equal to "0"                   → "no-sales"
else                                                → "steady"

custom_label_1 → rename [margin_band]   (merged finance sheet)

Season and stock labels from tags, category and inventory

Seasonality usually already exists as a tag, a collection or a category path. A regex over tags catches several spellings at once; the else branch labels everything else evergreen, so no product drops out of a seasonal split. Stock labels combine a tag for clearance with a regex on the inventory count for low stock. Change the season vocabulary at the start of each season, not mid-campaign.

custom_label_3:
if    [tags] matches regexp (?i).*\b(summer-26|swim|beach)\b → "summer-26"
else if [tags] includes "winter-26"                            → "winter-26"
else                                                         → "evergreen"

custom_label_4:
if    [tags] includes "clearance"           → "clearance"
else if [inventory] matches regexp ^[1-5]$ → "low-stock"
else                                    → "in-stock"

Custom labels in Merchant Center or in the feed

Merchant Center can set labels too, with attribute rules (needs the Advanced data source management add-on) or a supplemental sheet keyed on id. That is fine for one label on Google only. Setting them in the feed keeps the rules next to your titles and filters, lets you check each product's value before Google fetches the file, and sends the same labels to Meta and Microsoft, which use the same attribute names. Margin from a cost column works in both places: a Calculate rule in Merchant Center, an advanced expression in the feed.