The vocabulary every e-commerce team needs to ship feeds correctly — from GTIN check digits to POAS bidding. Plain definitions, no jargon, written by people who actually run feeds in production.
How feeds are structured, validated, and transformed — 5 terms
A product feed is a structured file (XML, CSV, TSV, or JSON) that lists every product in your catalog with the fields advertising and marketplace platforms need to display them.
Feed management is the process of collecting product data from an e-commerce store, validating and enriching it against per-channel specifications, and distributing the resulting feeds to advertising channels and marketplaces so the products can be sold across them.
Google Merchant Center (GMC) is the Google platform where you upload, validate, and manage product feeds that power Google Shopping ads, free listings, Performance Max, and Demand Gen campaigns.
Feed validation is the process of checking a product feed against a channel's schema and rules — required fields, data types, value formats, and business logic — before upload, so errors are caught locally rather than after disapproval.
Feed rules are transformations applied to a product catalog before export — mapping internal field names to channel-specific schemas, filtering out ineligible products, enriching data, or applying conditional logic per channel.
Standards that uniquely identify products across channels — 2 terms
A Global Trade Item Number (GTIN) is the international barcode identifier — UPC, EAN, JAN, or ISBN — that uniquely identifies a manufactured product worldwide, issued by GS1.
An MPN (Manufacturer Part Number) is the unique code a manufacturer assigns to one of its products, used together with the brand field to identify products that do not have a GTIN.
Metrics and segments that drive profitable bidding — 3 terms
POAS (Profit On Ad Spend) measures the gross profit generated per unit of ad spend — (revenue minus cost of goods minus ad spend) divided by ad spend — instead of the gross revenue measured by ROAS.
Custom labels 0 through 4 are five free-text fields in Google Shopping feeds used to segment products for bidding — typically populated from Google Analytics 4 performance data so high-revenue products can be bid on differently from low-revenue ones.
COGS (Cost of Goods Sold) is the direct cost of producing or acquiring a unit of a product — typically the wholesale price for resellers, or raw material plus labour for manufacturers — used to calculate gross margin and profit-based bidding metrics.
Conventions for attributing traffic to its source — 1 terms
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