Implementation guide

Step 3: Choose products for your promotions

This article provides details about how you can apply promotions and map them to products in your feed.

Once you create a promotion, apply it to all of your products or specific products. It’s important to tell Google which products are eligible for your promotions. This step helps you make sure shoppers see the correct promotions for your products.

All products

If your promotion applies to all products that you sell, use ALL_PRODUCTS as the value for the product_applicability attribute in your Promotions feed. 

You only need to create one promotion_id for a promotion that applies to ALL_PRODUCTS (e.g. one entry for the set). You can have up to 500 live promotions at one time.

Specific products

If your promotion applies to specific products that you sell, use SPECIFIC_PRODUCTS as the value for product_applicability attribute in your promotions feed. 

How to resubmit a promotion disapproved for mapping issues

If your promotion_id is not mapped to any items in your products feed, Google rejects your promotion. Once you map your promotion_id and upload  your products feed again, resubmit your promotion in the Merchant Center. 


Note: If you don't request a retest, the promotion will remain as “disapproved” and will not show in search results. 

To resubmit your promotion, follow the steps below:

  1. Sign in to your Merchant Center account.
  2. Click Marketing in the navigation menu, then click Promotions. 
  3. Create a new promotion and resubmit after updating the promotion rules or settings to comply with our Policy and SKU requirements. After your updates are complete, click the Submit button.

How to create a promotion for specific products via the products feed

As of October 2018, this is no longer required.

When multiple promotions apply to specific products, you can create promotions by selecting “Apply promotion to products that meet these conditions” in the promotions builder tool, or mapping them to the promotion_id of items in your feed. Promotion groups help to optimize your feed and you can group promotions by discount amount, titles, or other categories. Mapping promotion IDs to your products feed is optional. To map the promotion_id to all eligible products in the products feed, follow the steps below according to your setup.

Option 1

Text (spreadsheet) or tab-delimited files

  1. Add the promotion_id attribute to your products feed as a new column.
  2. Find your promotion’s promotion_id in your promotions feed.
  3. Add the ID to the promotion_id attribute for each product the promotion applies to in your products feed. Map multiple promotions to an item by separating each promotion_id in the cell with a comma.
  4. Upload your products feed to Merchant Center.

Learn more about using Google Sheets as feeds or view a sample tab-delimited feed. 

Only add the promotion_id to products that are definitely included in the promotion. If your promotion is tied to a product that is excluded, Google rejects the entire promotion. 
Avoid excessive or duplicate promotions. You can group promotions by discount amount, titles, etc.. You do not need to create a separate promotion for each item. Grouping your promotions optimizes your feed and eases the mapping process through the use of promotion_ids.

Option 2

XML files or API 

Feed type Instructions Content

XML

 Insert the content to the right within an item entry. To add multiple promotion_ids to an item, insert multiple lines. Replace PROMOTION_ID with the actual promotion_id. <g:promotion_id>PROMOTION_ID</g:promotion_id>
API Insert the content to the right within an item entry. To add multiple promotion_ids to an item, insert multiple lines. Replace PROMOTION_ID with the actual promotion_id. <sc:attribute name="promotion_id">PROMOTION_ID</sc:attribute>

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