Category column (inventory item)

Displays the value of an item's google product category attribute from your Merchant Center inventory feed.

Empty column in Search Ads 360

If you've correctly defined a category in your Merchant Center feed but the Category column in Search Ads 360 is empty, your feed may be targeting a country that Google Ads does not fully support for Shopping ads.

If the Category column in Search Ads 360 is empty:

• Shopping campaigns that use the feed cannot subdivide product groups by the Google product category attributes, such as Category level 1.
   
• Inventory campaigns that use the feed cannot use Google product category attributes in rules or templates.

As a workaround, you can upload the same category information in custom labels or other custom attributes. For example, if you upload category data as custom labels, you can break out product groups by custom label and create inventory rules and templates that use the custom labels.

You can use this column in a formula column by specifying the Inventory_item_category variable.

View this column

1. Navigate to an advertiser.

2. In the left navigation panel, click Inventory management.

3. Click the Inventory items tab.

4. If the column isn't already in the reporting table:

   1. Click the Columns button above the performance summary graph.

   2. Next to Available columns, type the column name in the search box.

   3. Click + next to the column name in the Available columns list.