Why your “Match Rate” might be Low or 0 in Shoptimizer when creating custom labels

The "Product Match Rate" is the percentage of products in your store that successfully match with product items in your Google Shopping ads. A higher match rate means more product items can receive custom labels and be included in your supplemental feed. If products aren’t matched in Merchant Center, labels cannot be applied to them.

The example below, shows ex. 0 items with more than 35 clicks on Google Shopping. In reality, many product items might match this criteria. As such, this suggests an issue in the product item matching logic between the ecommerce store and the Google Shopping product item ads. 

Some of the reasons why the match rate may be low:

Advertising only a subset of products:

• If you only run ads for a small portion of your product catalog on Google Shopping, your overall match rate will be low compared to all active products in your e-commerce store.

Matching method -Barcode ID vs. SKU: 

• By default, we match products based on Barcode ID. If your unique product identifiers are set up as SKUs instead of Barcodes, you may see a lower match rate. To resolve this, you can switch to SKU matching as per this guide. 

Large product coverage but low match rate

• If you advertise most of your products on Google Shopping (and they have received clicks before) but still see a low match rate, it is a strong signal that switching to SKU matching may solve the issue.