Welcome to the second installment of Revel's strategic feed series. In this segment we delve into custom labels. We’ll unveil their potential to surface strategic insights that inform impactful and tailored digital marketing campaigns.

What Are Custom Labels?

Custom labels are five open attributes in Google Merchant Center feeds that allow marketers to create filters for Shopping and Performance Max campaigns. Unlike many other feed attributes, Custom labels do not play a role in what queries your ads match to, or what shows in your shopping ads. Think of them as a marketer’s secret weapon, working quietly behind the scenes.

Impact

Custom labels can elevate any PPC account from a one-dimensional catch-all to a strategic, revenue-driving power house. There are two main ways in which custom labels can be put to work in your PPC campaigns across Shopping and Performance Max: reporting and segmentation. Often, the first lends itself well to the second.

From a reporting standpoint, custom labels empower you to pinpoint the most meaningful attributes for your product assortment, and to gather data against these segments from the day custom labels are applied. This will illuminate trends and efficiencies you weren’t able to see before.

This newfound wealth of reporting layers sets the groundwork for strategic campaign segmentation, from both a performance and messaging standpoint.

From a performance standpoint, identifies areas of efficiencies that may benefit from additional visibility, and areas of inefficiencies that necessitate more budget control. Grouping items by custom labels that exhibit similar performance is a proven strategy to unlock efficient scalability in your campaigns.

From a messaging and targeting standpoint, grouping items by custom labels allows you to tailor text, image, and video assets to a dedicated subset of products, and to target that messaging to the right audience.

Revel’s Top 10 Custom Labels List

1. Age Group & Gender

Age group and gender are two feed attributes that already exist outside of custom labels. However, you are not able to break out product groups in your campaigns based on age group and gender. Messaging is often distinct among these segments, so using a custom label allows you to get the right products alongside the right messaging in front of the right audience; a fundamental alignment for marketing success.

2. Item Group ID

Item group id is another feed attribute that exists outside of custom labels, but is also unavailable for use in campaign group breakouts. When you set one of your available custom labels to item group id, you’ll unlock the ability to collect data and bid on a particular product as a whole. This is especially beneficial for apparel accounts. It gives you the ability to surface product-level trends quickly without any additional data manipulation. This way, you can see if a style with a lot of impressions isn’t getting your desired click response, or if a product with a lot of clicks has a conversion rate problem to diagnose.

3. Sale vs. Full Price

Sale and full price purchase behavior are very different, so why keep sale and full price products in one campaign, optimizing towards the same goal? Use a custom label to distinguish sale vs. full price products and use it to segment product groups. This unlocks the ability to separate sale and full price items allowing you to better tailor messaging and audience signals in Performance Max.

4. Price Point

If there is a wide range in price point in your data feed, it’s likely there are trends in how the lowest-price point items perform against the highest. A significant range in average order value can also make it challenging for a tROAS Smart Bidding strategy to hit its stride and reliably scale. Not to mention, the audience segments purchasing on either side of the spectrum likely have different search themes and characteristics. For these reasons, using a custom label to funnel your products into different buckets by price range can be beneficial to your PPC account. We’d recommend a thorough analysis before applying these custom labels to ensure the ranges are data-informed.

5. Margins

Knowing the margins for the products in your data feed and applying them as custom labels can help you set well-informed ROAS goals for each margin tier that you identify. You can set a lower tROAS for high-margin products, and ensure that lower-margin products are still driving profitable returns by setting higher targets there.

6. Top Products

Setting your top products apart from the rest using a custom label opens up opportunities in your PPC account. Doing so lets you allocate budget to and bid on these items to strategically maximize visibility and opportunity for the top items . If these can perform and scale efficiently, you allow more room for new arrivals or less reliable ROAS-drivers to get traffic.

7. Low Click or Impression Volume Products

When you have a large product catalog (about 400 ids or more) it’s very common that a subset of products will fail to get visibility. Smart Bidding strategies can latch onto a group of reliable performers, and block other products from even getting the chance to get impressions, traffic, and conversions. Use a custom label to identify products below a certain impression or traffic threshold that makes sense for your account. Then, break these products into a separate shopping campaign to understand these items’ full potential, and unlock incremental revenue.

8. Collection

Many retailers operate on a drop schedule, releasing seasonal or monthly new arrivals. Custom labels can be set up to bucket products based on their collection. Collection custom labels are valuable because they allow you to map the right products to the right text, image, and video assets. Another useful application of collection custom labels is a new arrivals campaign. This pushes intentional budget and visibility to items that are new to the feed. These may otherwise take longer to ramp up and drive revenue. Lastly, collections custom labels allow PPC marketers to phase out old collections with reduced room for error, and increased efficiency.

9. Seasonality

Using custom labels to group certain product types, or products whose titles contain certain terms by seasonality allows you to set up corresponding campaigns. This is beneficial to help you mirror shifts in demand as you shift between seasons. Seasonal custom labels give you more leverage over each bucket’s budget and bid target.

10. Variant Availability

As a shopper, nothing is more frustrating than finding a product you love and discovering it is out of stock in your size. This experience often leads to low on-site engagement and low conversion rates. In a data feed with hundreds of products, this level of inventory management can’t be monitored manually. Instead, you can set up a custom label to identify products with “X or fewer” sizes with available inventory. Then, using this custom label to break out product groups, you can limit the click volume that goes to such landing pages. This strategy should improve conversion rates and reduce wasted spend.

Consult with Revel’s team of data feed professionals to get custom labels set up for your business. Start making more informed, strategic PPC decisions today!