Google product categories for feed managers

The job the column does

google_product_category is optional — Google assigns a category to every product — but the value you send is what Google accepts for category-specific attribute rules and Google Ads targeting, and the same column feeds Meta catalogs and Microsoft Shopping. A wrong or invalid value is rejected and may keep a product from appearing. So the column is worth getting right, and the catalog is too big to do it by hand.

The workflow

Export the catalog you already have — from the store, from Merchant Center, from your feed tool. The Bulk Mapper guesses which columns are title, description, brand, product type and ID, and you confirm them. It classifies the first ten rows free on the same engine and thresholds as the full run, so you can see whether the mapping is right before spending anything.

The run returns three files. full.csv is every input row with the category, ID, path and confidence appended. supplemental-feed.csv holds only the rows at confidence 0.90 or above, with the two columns Merchant Center needs. needs-review.csv holds the rows below 0.85, each with the runner-up — that is the list worth a human’s attention.

Rows between 0.85 and 0.90 are deliberately in neither the feed nor the review file: probably right, but not confident enough to upload unseen. Filter full.csv on the confidence column to find them.

Shipping it

Upload supplemental-feed.csv as a supplemental data source, linked to your primary source. It matches on id, so it only works if your export carried the IDs Merchant Center uses — check that before the run, not after. The full procedure, including the add-on that reveals the Supplemental sources tab, is in override Google’s automatic category.

When Google publishes a new taxonomy version, re-run only the rows whose category changed rather than the whole file.

What it costs

One credit classifies one distinct row. Rows with the same title, description, brand and type are charged once, rows without a title are skipped and not charged, and a row that cannot be classified is refunded. The exact count appears after the free preview, before you spend. Credit packs start at $9 for 2,000 rows and nothing renews or expires — see pricing.

Making it a routine, not a project

Categories drift as a catalog grows: new products arrive without one, and an import rule writes the wrong value into a batch. Re-running the catalog in verify mode every so often turns that into a short list of rows that disagree with the classifier, instead of a clean-up project once a year.