18 terms
The product feed glossary
The words you meet between a store export and a Shopping listing, defined plainly — the feed attributes Google documents, the Merchant Center settings that trip people up, and the scores SellerSort puts on categories and reviews.
Categories & taxonomy
- google_product_category
- An optional product-feed attribute that places a product in Google’s fixed product taxonomy, sent as a numeric category ID or as the full category path.
- product_type
- An optional feed attribute holding a category you define yourself — your own taxonomy, written as free text — used to organise bidding and reporting.
- Google product taxonomy
- The fixed, published tree of product categories — 5,595 entries under 21 top-level branches — from which every google_product_category value must come.
- Category ID
- The numeric identifier of one entry in Google’s product taxonomy — for example 209 for Socks — accepted as the value of google_product_category.
- Category path
- The full text form of a taxonomy entry — every level from the root down, joined by “ > ” — accepted in place of the category ID.
- Leaf category
- A category at the end of a branch of the taxonomy — one with no subcategories beneath it — and so the most specific place a product can be filed.
- Taxonomy version
- The dated release of Google’s product taxonomy file — the current one is 2021-09-21 — which determines which categories and IDs exist.
- Confidence score
- The probability SellerSort attaches to a suggested category, banded as strong (0.90 and above), fair (0.85 to 0.90) or weak (below 0.85).
Feeds & Merchant Center
- Google Merchant Center
- Google’s service for submitting and managing the product data behind Shopping ads and free product listings, organised into data sources of product attributes.
- Primary data source
- The Merchant Center data source that defines which products exist and supplies their core attributes; supplemental sources can only modify products it contains.
- Supplemental data source
- A Merchant Center data source that adds or overrides attributes on products already in a primary source, matched by product ID; it cannot add or remove products.
- Advanced data source management
- A Merchant Center add-on, enabled under Settings → Add-ons, that makes the Supplemental sources tab and its options available.
- Product ID (id)
- The required feed attribute that uniquely identifies a product in Merchant Center, and the key that supplemental data sources match on exactly.
- Feed label
- The label (shown as the data source label) that groups product data in Merchant Center; supplemental data must match it, along with the language, to apply.
- Custom label
- Five free-text feed attributes, custom_label_0 to custom_label_4, used to group products in Shopping campaigns by criteria such as margin or season.
Reviews & analysis
- Review sentiment analysis
- Classifying each customer review as positive, neutral, negative or mixed, so the tone of thousands of reviews can be counted rather than read.
- Review severity
- A score from 1 to 5 of how serious the problem in a review is; SellerSort counts reviews at severity 4 or above as urgent.
- Actionable review
- A review that needs a response from the seller — an unresolved problem, a direct question, or something owed to the customer.
Questions
Where do these definitions come from?
Terms about Google’s feed attributes are written from Google’s Merchant Center Help pages, which each entry lists under Sources. Terms about SellerSort’s own scores describe how the tools behave and quote the thresholds they use.
Is google_product_category the same as product_type?
No. google_product_category takes a value from Google’s fixed taxonomy; product_type is your own free-text category. Both entries explain the difference, and there is a guide comparing them.
Want the value, not the definition? Paste a product title into the Category Finder, or read the guides for the full procedures.