Fixing insufficient identifiers for a Google Shopping feed

There are some common issues that you may encounter when setting up a Google Shopping feed.

Brand, EAN/GTIN and MPN

Google requires that two or three of these fields to be filled for each product. Fill 'brand' 100% for every product and to try to either fill EAN or MPN (you can also use SKU here). If you can't fill two out of three of the brand, GTIN or MPN field, you'll get an error when uploading the feed into Google Merchant Center. You'll need to fix this with the g:identifier_exists field ('Fixing insufficient identifiers' in this article).

Tip: Make sure you know how to add and map fields in Channable.

Fixing insufficient identifiers

Shopping Ads uses several identifiers. In Europe and North America these are usually: BRAND, MPN and GTIN/EAN. At least two of those need to be provided. It is not uncommon to have one or two out of the three identifiers available. In order to send products that do not have enough identifiers, the field g:identifier_exists needs to be set to 'FALSE'.

The g:identifier_exists field is not one that is commonly included in product feeds, so you'll usually need to create it first. Call this new field 'identifier_exists' so that you can easily identify it. Then, in the Rules step of your Google Shopping feed, create a new rule where you set 'identifier_exists' to 'FALSE'.

Be sure to map your new field to 'g:identifier_exists' and update the feed to see the results.