Google Shopping Categories 101 – Everything you need to know!

Google Shopping categories play an important role in making your products appear in the most relevant Google search results. However, it’s troublesome for merchants to set up or edit product categories properly. 

Don’t worry because we are going to offer you the master tip to bulk edit product categories with zero effort and more.

What are Google Shopping Categories?

Google Shopping Categories or Google product categories are the groups we use to identify products in a feed. 

It tells Google which categories your products belong to. By categorizing products on Google Shopping, merchants can optimize the product feeds to meet Google’s algorithms. 

It means whenever people search for a term, Google will choose the most related product categories of yours to display in results. Therefore, make sure that you categorize your products accurately. 

If you do not assign any categories to your products, or your categories do not match with Google, then Google will apply the most appropriate ones to your products automatically.

Why is it important to set up Google Shopping Categories right?

In fact, setting the right Google Shopping categories for your products is really important and even compulsory. 

Without the right product categories, your Google Shopping ads are the first things to be affected. Your ads will display unrelated product categories, and it leads to low conversion and bad impressions, regardless of quality score. 

Overall, the incorrect product categories will reduce the quality of your ads and also increase the price of clicks. 

In addition, if your product categories are completely inaccurate, your product feeds will be listed as low-quality ones by Google. This may cause ad disapproval or even worse, account suspensions.

So, if you don’t want to throw your ad budgets over windows for nothing, get your product categories right. You can learn more about how to optimize Google Shopping ads here.

A little tip when categorizing your products on Google Shopping is to make it as specific as possible. The more detailed and clear your Google Shopping categories are, the higher opportunities your products are shown in google search results. Check out the Google Product Taxonomy – the list of categories provided to help you define values easier.

For example, you are selling bird cages, then these are should-do and should-not-do for your product categories:

SHOULD-DO: Animals & Pet Supplies > Pet Supplies > Bird Supplies > Bird Cage Accessories > Bird Cage Bird Baths

SHOULD-NOT-DO: Animals & Pet Supplies > Pet Supplies (This one is too general)

Another game-changing tip that can help you get the best product categorization is to automate it. Let’s blow your mind with a tool that can bulk assign categories to a great number of products at a time.

How To Bulk Edit Google Shopping Categories With ‘ZERO’ Effort.

In case you already categorized products improperly, you can edit your Google Shopping categories. 

Instead of multiple troublesome steps you must go through to change product categories one by one, we present you with an ultimate tool to bulk edit your Google Shopping categories effortlessly.

It’s Socialshop – The best tool to sync, list, optimize product feeds on Facebook Shop and Google Shopping for Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce store owners.

With this Shopify app, we will free you from complicated manual works to change the Google Shopping categories for your products by automating it all.

Sync Products to Google Shopping Automatically

Before you start, you need to add product feeds first.

Socialshop enables you to sync a large number of products from your Shopify/ WooCommerce/ BigCommerce store to Google Shopping automatically in minutes.

Just by a few clicks, your product feeds are available to sell on Google Shopping without any manual uploading.

To list products on Google Shopping easily and fast with Socialshop, do as instructed:

Go to Socialshop > Feed Center > Add Feed > Connect with Google Merchant > Create Feed > Done

Feed Center is where you manage all product feeds. You can edit, delete or click on Add Feed to create a new one.

Here you can choose to sync your product feeds to Google or Facebook. Or you can create Facebook Catalog and sync products easily just by clicks.

Automate Product Categories For Google Shopping

After you sync your product feeds to Google Shopping, you can edit product categories right in your feeds.

Follow these steps to bulk edit Google Shopping categories to your product feeds:

Step 1: Go to Socialshop > Feed Center > Click on the feed containing the products you want to categorize > Mapping Category

First thing first, you go to Feed Center and then you click on the Google Shopping product feed that you want to edit product category.

After that, you go to the Category Mapping tab and add more mapping.

Step 2: In Mapping Category, you Add more mapping > Select Collection > Select a Google Product Category > Preview > Save & Resync > Done

In this section, you select the product collection first before you categorize your products.

Once you finish editing your Google Shopping category, proceed to Preview to check out the product category in reality.

Categorize Specific Products With Conditions

In case you want to categorize some specific products in your feed, you can assign categories for them by setting conditions.

Once you set it up, only the products that meet your conditions will be assigned to the categories you picked. You can also set up sub-conditions to modify the main conditions better as you want.

Final thoughts

In brief, product categories have a great impact on how your products will appear in search results but also affect your Google ads in multiple aspects. 

Therefore, you must ensure the accuracy of your product categories. Besides, we also offer you Socialshop – one of the best Shopify apps to help you bulk edit product categories for Google Shopping. 

Through this article, we expect that our sharing will help you understand Google Shopping categories better and also enable you to categorize your products easier than before.

Good luck and happy selling!