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Google Shopping PLA Update: AdWords_Publish Attribute

By Tinuiti Team

Google Shopping sent out an informative email to merchants this Wednesday outlining changes to the AdWords_Publish Attribute.

What you Should Know:

The column in sellers feeds which allows retailers to dictate which products they would like to have live  is going to have a new name, and will apply to Google Shopping as well as Google Commerce Search, the program that can utilize Google Search technology on your retail site.

Basically the new column (excluded_destination) will work the same way as the old column (adwords_publish) with the added feature that you can now exclude products from Google Commerce Search. Retailers need to make sure they update their feeds with the new column name to ensure Google processes it correctly.

Google Shopping Changes to the Adwords_Publish Attribute:

What: Google is discontinuing the adwords_publish attribute to replace it with excluded_destination come Spring 2013.

Why: To improve the feed specification process and give merchants more control over their ads.

Why Merchants Would Want to Remove A Product:

1) The product isn’t allowed according to Google’s product requirements.(It’s a weapon, banned supplement,etc.)

2) The product doesn’t perform well.(It doesn’t meet your goals, or generates too many clicks.)

You should lower bids and manage your campaign carefully in this situation.

3) You don’t want the product included in your on-site search results powered by Google Commerce Search.

Here is the full email from Google Shopping Support:

Hello,

Thank you for your participation in Google Shopping. We’re reaching out to you today to tell you about some upcoming changes to the ‘adwords_publish’ attribute. We plan to retire the ‘adwords_publish’ attribute and replace it with the ‘excluded_destination’ attribute in Spring 2013. We’re making this change in order to streamline our feed specification and to provide advertisers with a more effective way to control how their ads are served.

In a recent review of the products in the below Google Merchant Center account(s), we noticed that you’re including the ‘adwords_publish’ attribute in your data feeds.

Merchant Center Account ID: [Redracted]

While the ‘adwords_publish’ attribute won’t be retired until Spring 2013, you can make the changes below to your feed(s) starting today. In order to transition your feed from the ‘adwords_publish’ attribute to the ‘excluded_destination’ attribute, you’ll need to make the following change to your data feeds targeting the US:

— Replace the ‘adwords_publish’ attribute with the ‘excluded_destination’ attribute and include the value ‘shopping’. This will exclude the product from appearing in Product Ads on both google.com and google.com/shopping. To learn more about the ‘excluded_destination’ attribute, please visit: http://www.google.com/appserve/mkt/5TGNB6FelBAomNVVmJvzY1

— If you’re no longer using the ‘adwords_publish’ attribute, you may remove it from your feed.

* Note: The above instructions are only for feeds targeting the US. If you want to exclude product listings from Product Ads in countries other than the US, include ‘product ads’ as the value in the ‘excluded_destination’ attribute.

Starting Spring 2013, once the ‘adwords_publish’ attribute is retired, products that include ‘adwords_publish’ with a value of ‘false’ may result in errors that prevent the products from processing or the attribute and the ‘false’ value may be ignored and the products may serve in ads.

We thank you for your attention to this upcoming attribute change.

Sincerely,

The Google Shopping Team

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