Google product categories

This screen maps your categories onto Google’s own product taxonomy. The admin states the purpose directly: “Map your catalog categories to Google’s taxonomy so Shopping and Facebook feeds are approved.”

Why this exists at all

Your category tree is built for your shoppers. Google’s taxonomy is built for Google. They are both correct and they do not match.

Google will not accept a product feed that does not place its items somewhere in its tree. So there has to be a translation, and the choice is either to do it once, deliberately, on a screen made for it — or to have every feed guess, differently, forever.

Do it once, benefit everywhere

The mapping is stored against your categories, not against a particular feed. Map a category today and every feed you generate afterwards — Google, Facebook, any future channel using the same taxonomy — inherits it.

That is why a rejected feed is often a category problem rather than a feed problem: nothing is wrong with the export, the products simply have nowhere to go in Google’s tree.

Where new categories come in

A category you add after mapping starts life unmapped. Nothing breaks and nothing warns you at the time — the products in it simply drop out of your next feed, or the feed is disapproved.

The habit worth building: adding a category is also a mapping task, in the same way that adding a product is also a photography task.

What this page does not say

• It does not give click-paths. This screen has no verified screenshot in this help centre.
• It does not reproduce Google’s taxonomy. It is long, it is theirs, and it changes; the screen shows the current one.
• It does not say whether unmapped categories are flagged anywhere, or whether mappings can be suggested automatically. Neither has been checked against the current screen.