Feeds & Shopping
Supplemental Feed
A supplemental feed is a secondary data source in Merchant Center that adds or overrides attributes on products already in your primary feed, matched by product id.
In practice
You often cannot edit the primary feed directly; it is generated by the platform and overwritten on every sync. A supplemental feed solves that. It is a Google Sheet or file containing product ids plus the attributes you want to change, and Merchant Center merges it on top of the primary feed.
Typical uses: custom labels for campaign segmentation (top sellers, clearance, high margin, seasonal), rewritten titles for products the platform names badly, sale price and sale price effective dates for promotions, and corrected product categories. Because it is a spreadsheet, non-developers can maintain it and changes appear on the next fetch.
Supplemental feeds cannot add products that are not in the primary feed, and they cannot remove them; for exclusions use the excluded destination attribute or campaign-level listing group filters instead.
Why it matters
It lets you optimize the feed without fighting the platform that generates it.
RELATED TERMS
Product Feed
A product feed is the structured file or API connection that sends your catalog attributes (id, title, description, price, availability, image, GTIN, category) to Merchant Center.
Google Merchant Center
Google Merchant Center is the platform where retailers upload and manage product data that powers Shopping ads, Performance Max retail campaigns, and free product listings across Google.
Shopping Campaign (Standard Shopping)
A standard Shopping campaign serves product ads built from your Merchant Center feed on Google Search and the Shopping tab, with bidding and targeting controlled at the product group level rather than by keywords.
Written by Ilya Bulychev, Founder, Live PPC Ads. Part of the PPC Glossary.
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