An overview of product attributes

Each channel, whether it’s a marketing platform, marketplace, or anything else, will need a certain amount of information to be able to list your products. This information will be used to describe your products to your customers and configure settings like tax, shipping and campaigns.

Attributes range from the title, price, and image to the color, fit, size, material and so on. Some attributes are used for filtering and discovery.

Terms and definitions for products

• Product. Word that describes the actual product that your potential customers would be searching for on Google
• Item. Word that describes a product once it's been added to your product data, either in a text feed, XML feed, or API. For example, an item is one line in your text feed
• Variant. Word that describes a product that comes in different variations. For example, a shirt that comes in different sizes has size variants

Product data specification or schema

A product data feed specification helps you know how to format your product information for different channels.

The data feed specifications (aka spec) or schema is the rule book for what a system expects from your data

Submitting your product data to each channel in the correct format is important for creating successful ads and listings for your products. Channels use this data to make sure that it's matched to the right queries and meets the expected customer experience.

Examples of Required Attributes

When submitting feeds, be sure to include any mandatory fields to prevent products or feeds from being disapproved. While every channel has its own requirements, most of them include:

Types of attributes in Google

• Basic product data
  The product information you submit using these attributes is our foundation for creating successful ads and free listings for your products. Make sure everything you submit is of the quality you'd show to a customer.
• Price & availability
  These attributes define the price and availability for your products. This information is shown to potential customers in your ads and free listings. If your products' prices and availability change often, keep in mind that you'll need to let us know about all the updates to be able to show your products.
• Product category
  You can use these attributes to organize your advertising campaigns in Google Ads and to override Google’s automatic product categorization in specific cases.
• Product identifiers
  These attributes are used to provide product identifiers that define the products you're selling in the global marketplace. We use product identifiers to understand what you're selling. When we understand what you're selling, we can help boost the performance of your ads and free listings by adding valuable details about the product and serving it in a more relevant way to users.
• Detailed product description
  These attributes are used to submit particular product characteristics that users commonly search for. The attributes can help you control how your products show when you show products that have variants. These attributes are also used to help potential customers filter by attributes when searching for products on Google.
• Shopping campaigns and other configurations
  These attributes are used to control how your product data is used when you create advertising campaigns in Google Ads.
• Destinations
  These attributes can be used to control the different locations where your content can appear. For example, you could use this attribute if you want a product to appear in a dynamic remarketing campaign, but not in a Shopping ads campaign.
• Shipping
  These attributes can be used together with the account shipping settings to help you provide accurate shipping costs. Users rely on the shipping costs to help make choices about what to buy, so it's important to take the time to submit quality shipping information.
• Tax
  These attributes can be used together with the account tax settings to help you provide accurate tax costs.

Types of attributes in Amazon

• Required
• Images - These attributes provide links to images for a product
• Variation - Populate these attributes if your product is available in different variations (for example color or wattage)
• Basic - These are attributes that are important to buyers and should be populated for all your items. Some are required to create an offer.
• Discovery - These attributes have an effect on how customers can find your product on the site using browse or search
• Product Enrichment - These attributes create rich product listings for your buyers.
• Dimensions - These attributes specify the size and weight of a product
• Fulfillment - Use these columns to provide fulfillment-related information for either Amazon-fulfilled (FBA) or seller-fulfilled orders.
• Compliance - Attributes used to comply with consumer laws in the country or region where the item is sold
• Offer - These attributes are required to make your item buyable for customers on the site
• B2B - These B2B offer attributes are required to make your item buyable for business customers on the site 

Industry standards and common data models

Google's feed specification became so widely used that newcomers simply use their format as a means to onboard sellers rapidly. It is typical that many channels accept a Google formatted XML or Plain text feed file. 

Source product attributes in GoDataFeed

When you import your product data into GoDataFeed, you’ll need to map your source attributes to our system’s attributes in order to standardize your catalog.

Mapping your data to our standards lets you unify multiple data sources and then build and customize feeds for all of your marketing channels.

GoDataFeed has 19 standard attributes as well as room for up to 200 custom attributes.

You can set up anything in any way, to provide the range of customer experiences needed to effectively sell your products.

Learn more

Product ID, SKU, MPN, GTIN, UPC, ISBN, EAN, and more – GoDataFeed Help Center