What are Webgains Product Feed specifications?
Format & Fields
The Webgains Product Feed platform adopts the Google Shopping format, which is common throughout the industry, and one already used and supported by many of our advertisers and publishers.
As per the Google Shopping format specifications, there are several mandatory fields for the product feeds that advertisers will need to include, as well as some additional optional fields. For the UK, these mandatory fields are: id, title, description, link, image_link, availability, price, google_product_category, and shipping. For Germany & France, also mandatory are: sale_price, unit_pricing_base_measure, and unit_pricing_measure.
Advertisers can then provide optional (but recommended) additional fields in their feed, including brand, mpn, gtin and size. Advertisers can also provide up to 10 additional custom fields, if required.
If a specific custom field is required in order to facilitate a campaign partnership, please reach out to the program’s account manager to discuss including this in the feed.
Fetching Frequency
Advertisers have freedom to select when their feed is updated, up to Daily, helping to ensure you are always fed the most up to date data, as well as more control in error handling so that any issues can be resolved quickly.
Sub-Attributes
Advertisers can provide sub-attributes for certain key fields like shipping. Sub-attributes allow an advertiser to provide extra detail for each product. For example, if they are defining the shipping information for a product, they may include the service (e.g. priority or standard), or the price (e.g. 5.00 USD).
A complete list of the fields that support sub-attributes, and the supported sub-attribute names, can be found in the Google Shopping specification.
These sub-attributes will also be available to you in the feeds that you download. Depending on the format you have selected for your export, the sub-attributes may be defined in one of two ways.
CSV/TSV exports
For CSV or TSV exports, the available sub-attributes will be defined in the first row of the file with the name of the field. For example, if the products in a feed contain the shipping service and price, the column name will be shipping(service:price). The values inside of the brackets are the available sub-attributes and each sub-attribute is separated by a colon.
The shipping value for the product will follow the same structure as the column name. That is, the sub-attributes will be in the same order and also separated by a colon. Using the above example of the shipping column being defined as shipping(service:price), the value for a product may be priority:5.00 USD.
It’s worth noting that advertisers can also provide multiple pieces of shipping information for a single product e.g. different prices depending on the shipping service. In this case, the different sets of shipping information will be separated by a comma e.g. priority:5.00 USD,standard:3.00 USD.
XML exports
Sub-attributes are slightly easier to parse in XML files. Following our earlier example, this is how an XML product would look if multiple pieces of shipping information had been included by the advertiser:
1<item>
2 <g:id>123</g:id>
3 ...
4 <g:shipping>
5 <g:service>priority</g:service>
6 <g:price>5.00 USD</g:price>
7 </g:shipping>
8 <g:shipping>
9 <g:service>standard</g:service>
10 <g:price>3.00 USD</g:price>
11 </g:shipping>
12 ...
13</item>