Content API for Shopping and Google Ads API updated for country targeting

Updates to the country targeting for shopping products, with the introduction of the feedLabel field, have begun.

Recent updates to the API. Last month we announced that Google was removing the country targeting requirements were being removed and replaced with a new feedLabel field. Today Google announced updates to those changes including:

For Google Ads

• Any Google Ads account can set the feed_label field in ShoppingSetting for Shopping and Performance Max campaigns. You can set feed_label in the Google Ads UI and the Google Ads API.

For Merchant center

• As of September 14th, 2022 we‘ve started the gradual rollout of feed labels in the Merchant Center UI. When this feature is enabled in the UI, merchants will be able to create a new feed with feed label set to any valid string. 

In the Content API:

• Products that have only feedLabel, and not targetCountry, if they were added in the Merchant Center UI.
• Products with feed labels that aren’t two-letter country codes.

API behavior summary. Additionally, the following is a clarification from Google about the current API behavior for feedLabel:

• Insertion: You can only call Products.insert on products with a matching feedLabel and targetCountry. Currently, Products.insert might return an error if you don’t provide a matching targetCountry. This behavior hasn’t changed if you continue to use only targetCountry.
• Targeting: If you set feedLabel to a valid 2-letter CLDR territory code, you must still set the shipping attribute of the products resource to the same country in order to target that country. For example, if you set a new feedLabel to “US”, you must also set the country field in the shipping attribute to “US”. If you don’t set both fields, the product might not be eligible to serve in that country. You can configure targeting for an entire feed in the Merchant Center UI.
• Get/List: When you use Products.list or Products.get, you might see products that only have feedLabel (and not targetCountry) set if they were added in the Merchant Center UI.
• Product IDs: Once a feedLabel is set for a product it becomes part of the product Id. This means you can’t modify the feedLabel for that product (this is similar to how language works). If you wish to change the feedLabel you will need to create a new product with a different product Id.

Coming next. Google says that once the rollout of feed labels is complete, they will accept Products.insert calls with feedLabel set to any string. targetCountry will be optional.

For datafeeds, the datafeeds resource will be updated to include feedLabel in the Content API for Shopping.

Dig deeper. You can read the full announcement from Google here.

Why we care. If you’re a developer and you’re using APIs for content or shopping campaigns, you’ll no longer have to set a target country, but instead use the feedLabel in its place. You can opt-in or out of these features,