Displays the name of a product group. Google Shopping campaigns use product groups instead of keywords to determine when items in your Merchant Center account appear on a search results page.
To create product groups, you set up filters that progressively subdivide your inventory until you reach a level of specificity that meets your managment and reporting needs (such as "BrandA sneakers", "BrandB sneakers", "Other brands' sneakers" and so on). Once you've set up product groups, you can set bids that are appropriate for the products in each group or exclude products from being advertised.
Names in the Product group column
For each row in the Product groups tab, the Product group column identifies a separate product group, named as follows:
- All products: This product group matches all products in your inventory and appears by default in all Shopping campaigns.
You can set up filters that subdivide this group into smaller groups of products.
- Inventory data: For each match for a filter, you'll see a product group named after the inventory data that matched the filter. For example, if you filtered the All products group by brand, you'll see one product group for each brand in your inventory, with names such as "BrandA," "BrandB," and so on.
- Everything else in product group: When you set up a product group, the Shopping campaign automatically creates a group named "Everything else" to contain products that don't match the filter.
Hierarchy information in the Product group column
The result of using filters to subdivide your inventory is a hierarchy of product groups, with All products at the top and Everything else at the bottom. The Product group column uses different conventions to indicate the location of a product group within the hieararchy depending on the current scope:
- Ad group: when you scope to an ad group and click the Product groups tab, you'll see child product groups nested (indented) below the parent product groups.
- Advertiser, Engine account, or Campaign: When you scope higher than an ad group, the Product groups tab uses dimmed text to indicate that a product group is below the second level of the hierarchy. For example, just above the name of the Sneakers product group, you'll see BrandA > Shoes > Outdoor to indicate that "Sneakers" is a child of "Outdoor," which is a child of "Shoes," which is a child of "BrandA," which is a child of "All products."
Icons in the Product group column
The icons that appear in the Product group column depend on the current scope:
: Appears at any scope. Click the icon to see:
- The filter criteria that created the product group.
- The list of inventory items in the product group.
: Appears when scoped to an ad group and when a product group has been subdivided. Click the icon to manually add or remove child product groups.
You can also change the filter that's used to subdivide the product group, but be aware that changing the criteria will regenerate all product groups. You'll lose all reporting metrics for the previous product groups.: Appears when scoped to an ad group. Click the icon to manually subdivide a product group.