Glossary
Product feed terms, explained
The vocabulary of product feeds and of FeedManager, in one place — short definitions you can link straight to.
Feeds and channels
- Product feed
- A file — XML, CSV, TSV, JSON or NDJSON — that lists the products of a shop with the attributes an advertising channel or marketplace needs. The channel fetches the file on a schedule and uses it to build shopping ads, catalogs and listings.
- Feed management
- Collecting product data from one or more systems, fixing and enriching it, and publishing a separate, valid feed for each channel — usually automatically, on a schedule.
- Channel
- The destination of a feed: Google Merchant Center, Meta Catalog, TikTok Catalog, Pinterest, Microsoft Merchant Center, Criteo, a marketplace or a partner's own system. Each has its own field names, required values and limits.
- Merchant Center
- Google's tool for receiving and checking product feeds. Products that pass its checks can appear in Shopping ads and free listings; products that fail are shown as disapproved with a reason.
- Primary feed
- The main file a channel reads, containing the full set of products. In FeedManager every feed you publish is a primary feed for that channel.
- Supplemental feed
- A second file that only adds or overrides fields of products already sent in a primary feed, matched on the product id. Channels use it for fixes; FeedManager does the same on the way in with supplemental sources, so the change reaches every feed.
- Feed URL
- The web address a channel fetches. FeedManager gives every feed its own address with an unguessable token, optionally protected with a password, and serves it from a CDN.
- Fetch schedule
- How often the channel downloads the feed. It is set in the channel, and should not be more frequent than the feed is rebuilt.
- UTM parameters
- Tags such as
utm_source,utm_mediumandutm_campaignadded to a product link so analytics can tell which channel a visit came from. FeedManager adds them per feed as link parameters, without changing the link in your store, and can put them on Google's ads-only link (ads_redirect) instead. - Green claim
- A general environmental claim such as "eco-friendly", "sustainable" or "climate neutral". The EU's Empowering Consumers Directive, applied from 27 September 2026, bans generic claims of this kind that the seller can't back with recognised proof. FeedManager's wording checks flag them in titles and descriptions.
- Search Console
- Google's tool that reports how a site's pages do in Google Search: clicks, impressions, click-through rate, average position and the queries people typed. FeedManager reads it per product page as an enrichment source.
- Item status
- Merchant Center's verdict on one product: approved, limited (shown only in some places or countries), pending or disapproved, with the issues behind it. FeedManager reads it from a Merchant Center source and shows it on the product.
- Misrepresentation
- Google's policy against stores that hide who they are, what things cost or on what terms they sell. A violation can suspend the whole Merchant Center account; a clear contact page, business details, return and shipping policies and prices that match the feed are the usual fixes.
Product attributes
- id
- The identifier of a product within a feed, unique and stable over time. Changing it makes the channel treat the product as new, losing its history and any performance it had built up.
- GTIN
- Global Trade Item Number — the barcode number of a product (EAN, UPC, JAN or ISBN). Channels use it to match your product to the same product from other sellers, which usually improves reach.
- MPN
- Manufacturer Part Number: the maker's own code for a product. Used together with brand when a product has no GTIN.
- item_group_id
- The id shared by all variants of the same product, so a channel can group colours and sizes into one listing. Each variant is still sent as its own product.
- Variant
- One buyable combination of a product's options — a size, a colour, a material. Channels expect variants as separate items sharing an item_group_id, and FeedManager counts each one as a product.
- Availability
- Whether a product can be bought: in stock, out of stock, preorder or backorder. Channels differ in the wording they accept, so FeedManager maps it per channel.
- Sale price
- The discounted price a shopper actually pays, sent alongside the regular price so the channel can show a strike-through. A sale price that is not lower than the price is ignored.
- Custom label
- One of five free fields (custom_label_0 to custom_label_4) used to group products for bidding and reporting — by margin, season, stock level or performance. Channels never show them to shoppers.
- google_product_category
- A category from Google's fixed taxonomy, given as a number or its full path. It is not the same as product_type, which is your own category path.
- product_type
- Your own category path for a product, exactly as it is in your shop. Useful for filtering and bidding, and free-form.
- Shipping label
- A free text field that groups products which share shipping rules, so a channel can apply the right shipping cost.
- Landing page
- The page a shopper reaches from an ad. It must show the same product, price and availability as the feed, or the channel may disapprove the product.
- Conversational attributes
- Google fields written for AI shopping answers:
item_group_title,variant_option,popularity_rank, questions and answers, related products and document links. FeedManager derives the first three from your variants and Google Analytics.
How FeedManager works
- Source
- Where products come from: a store platform, a file by URL or upload, a Google Sheet, or the Product API. An account can combine several sources in one catalog.
- Connection
- The stored, encrypted credentials for an external system — a store, a file server or a Google account. One connection can serve several sources.
- Sync
- One run that reads a source and updates the catalog: fetch, parse, map, compare and write. Unchanged products are skipped, and products that disappeared are marked as removed.
- Changes-only sync
- A sync that reads only the products a store changed since the last read instead of the whole catalog. FeedManager does this for Shopify and WooCommerce between full reads, which still run once a day.
- Store webhook
- A signed message a store sends when a product is created, updated or deleted. FeedManager's Instant updates take only the product's id from it and read that product again through the connector about a minute later.
- Field mapping
- The list that says which source field, constant or template fills each field of the normalized product schema. Anything unmapped is kept as an attribute.
- Normalized schema
- The common product structure every source is mapped into, based on the Google Merchant Center specification, so rules and channels work the same way whatever the source.
- Attribute
- Any extra field a source provides that is not part of the normalized schema. Attributes stay available for rules, filters and custom feeds.
- Rule
- One transformation applied while a feed is built — set, copy, template, replace, regular expression, case, truncate, strip HTML, maths, lookup, split or join, remove flagged words — with an optional condition.
- Scheduled rule
- A rule or filter group with an "Active from" and "Active until" time. Outside its window it does nothing, and the feed is rebuilt at the moment the window starts or ends — for a Black Friday title or a seasonal exclusion, for example.
- Wording check
- A check a feed build runs on the titles and descriptions it writes: promotional text, capitals, green claims, medical claims and the account's banned words. It warns and counts; the rule action "Remove flagged words" takes the words out.
- Filter
- A condition that decides which products belong in a feed. Conditions on stored fields are pushed into the search index, so large catalogs stay fast.
- Product tag
- A named group of products that belongs to the account rather than to one feed — a campaign, a season, best sellers. It survives every sync and can be used in feed filters and rules, the product list, AI runs and the API. Not the same as a custom label, although a rule can turn one into the other.
- Dynamic tag
- A product tag whose products come from a rule — conditions and an optional ranking such as "top 10% by purchases" — re-evaluated on a schedule, so products enter and leave it by themselves.
- Change signal
- The last change FeedManager saw in a product's price, availability or stock between two syncs — what makes segments such as "price drop", "back in stock" or "restocked" possible without a full history.
- Creative set
- In FeedManager's Creative Studio, a template with campaign texts, a product selection and sizes that draws one image per product and size — 1:1, 4:5 or 9:16 — and draws it again when what the image shows changes. Feeds use it with a placeholder such as
{creative.summer_sale.4x5}, and write the image only while it still matches the product. - Brand kit
- An account's brand name, colours, fonts, price format and logos, which every Creative Studio template reads, so a ready-made design takes on the brand's look without editing.
- Promotional overlay
- Text or graphics added on top of a product photo — a price, a discount badge, "free shipping", a logo. Common in social catalog ads; Google Merchant Center doesn't allow them on product images and disapproves the product.
- Lookup table
- A two-column table used by a rule to translate values — your categories to Google's, supplier colours to yours, sizes between systems.
- Channel template
- A ready-made feed definition for one channel: its field names, formats, required fields, allowed values and limits, used to validate every item before it is written.
- Feed run
- One build of a feed file, with the counts of exported, filtered and invalid items, warnings, duration and the first errors — kept as history.
- Revision
- A saved snapshot of a feed's definition. FeedManager keeps the last 50, shows what changed between them and restores an earlier one in a click.
- Supplemental source
- A file, upload or Google Sheet that changes or adds fields of products other sources already bring — prices and stock from an ERP, custom labels, better titles. Rows match on the product id, SKU, GTIN, MPN or item group; it never creates or removes products.
- AI value
- A value AI suggested for a product field and a person approved — a category, a colour, a title. It is stored next to the source's value, never over it, and a feed uses it only where it maps it, for example as {ai.title}.
- AI credit
- The unit AI work is paid in. Each action costs a fixed number of credits, adjusted for the model; plans include a monthly allowance and packs add more. Answers that failed or weren't usable are not charged.
- Catalog health score
- A score from 0 to 100 for how complete a catalog's product data is across 16 fields, with the gaps ranked by how many products — or, with GA4 connected, how many viewed products — they affect.
- Enrichment source
- A source that adds data to products that already exist instead of creating them — Google Analytics 4 metrics such as views, purchases and revenue, Shopify Analytics sales, Google Merchant Center statuses, clicks and price benchmarks, and Google Search Console clicks, impressions and queries.
- Instant price and stock updates
- A switch on a Google Merchant Center feed that sends the price, sale price and availability of changed products to Merchant Center through Google's API ahead of the next file, and takes each value back once Google has read a file that holds it.
- Page check
- FeedManager's daily comparison of a product page with the row a feed sends for it — price, currency and availability — on a store domain you confirmed, to find mismatches before Google does.
- MCP server
- An endpoint that AI agents such as Claude or Cursor call through the Model Context Protocol. FeedManager's lets them read catalog, feed and build data, start syncs and builds and tag products with an API key.
- Product API
- The interface for pushing products into FeedManager from your own systems, up to 1,000 per request, with idempotency keys and per-item errors.
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