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Custom label

A custom label is one of five optional Merchant Center fields a store fills with its own values to group products in Shopping and Performance Max campaigns.

How it works

Merchant Center gives every product five optional fields, custom_label_0 to custom_label_4. You decide what each one means, for example season, price range, margin or selling rate. Shoppers never see the values. A product holds one value per field.

A label starts to work once a campaign splits products by it: through listing groups in Performance Max or product groups in Standard Shopping. Google describes the labels as filters for reporting and bidding on groups of products. In Performance Max, though, listing groups only include or exclude products and set no bids.

Values come from the main feed, feed rules or a supplemental feed. Our guide to custom labels in Merchant Center covers the setup.

Where you see it

  • Merchant Center — the product attributes custom label 0 to 4.
  • Google Ads — a dimension for subdividing listing groups and product groups; the Google Ads API calls it a custom attribute.

Example

Example store, not client data.

The tableware shop writes its selling rate into custom_label_1, and 150 of its 3,000 products get the value bestseller. One asset group includes only that value, so it can show those 150. In that asset group, the “everything else” node is excluded, and its other 2,850 products are left to a second asset group.

Not to be confused with

  • Listing group — the split on the campaign side that reads the label.
  • Labels — the portal’s eight product groups, computed from how each product behaved in ads over 12 months. To use them in campaigns, a store writes them into a custom label.

Right and wrong readings

  • Wrong: “The exact price makes a handy label.” Right: each field takes up to 1,000 unique values across the account. Beyond that, Google ignores new values, and products that carry them count as unlabelled.
  • Wrong: “Moving the values to another custom label is harmless.” Right: a listing group reads one numbered label. If the feed moves the values to custom_label_3 while the campaign still splits by custom_label_2, those products fall into “everything else”.

Sources