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How to Map Google Product Categories and Other Attributes in Google for WooCommerce

23 threads Sep 21, 2025 Plugin → Google for woocommerce

Content

Many WooCommerce store owners using the 'Google for WooCommerce' plugin encounter a common challenge: the inability to properly map critical product attributes like google_product_category, custom labels, or apparel-specific details (size, color, gender, age group) for their entire store or in bulk. This often leads to warnings, errors, or disapprovals in Google Merchant Center.

This guide explains why this happens and outlines the most common solutions based on community discussions.

Why This Problem Occurs

The 'Google for WooCommerce' plugin automatically syncs your product data to Google. However, its core design has some limitations that users frequently run into:

  • No Global Category Mapping: The plugin lacks a built-in interface to map your WooCommerce product categories to official Google product taxonomy categories on a global scale.
  • Missing Bulk Editing: Attributes like google_product_category, age_group, gender, and custom labels must often be set on individual products or variations, which is impractical for stores with thousands of items.
  • Attribute Mapping Gaps: Key attributes like google_product_category or Google Ads custom labels (0-4) have historically been absent from the plugin's 'Attribute Mapping' tool dropdown, making it impossible to set a global default.

Common Solutions and Workarounds

Based on community feedback and official responses, here are the most common approaches to solving these attribute mapping issues.

1. For Google Product Category (google_product_category)

  • Individual Product Editing: You can manually set the Google product category on a per-product basis. Edit a product, navigate to the Google Listings & Ads tab, and find the Google product category field. Enter the full category path (e.g., Apparel & Accessories > Clothing > Shirts & Tops) or its corresponding numerical ID.
  • Check for Global Mapping: Occasionally, the google_product_category field may be missing from the global Attribute Mapping tool. This is a known issue that the 'Google for WooCommerce' team has been made aware of. Check your Marketing > Google Listings & Ads > Attributes screen to see if it is available in the Target attribute dropdown. If it's missing, you may need to wait for a plugin update or use another method.
  • Feature Request: The official team has acknowledged that the ability to set and map the google_product_category attribute is a highly requested feature. Users are encouraged to vote for it on the official ideas board to increase its priority for future development.

2. For Apparel Attributes (Size, Color, Gender, Age Group)

  • Bulk Editing Challenge: The plugin requires these attributes to be set on each product variation. Manually doing this for thousands of variations is not feasible.
  • Programmatic Bulk Update: The most common solution is to use custom code to bulk update the post meta values for these attributes in your database. This requires development knowledge. The meta keys for these attributes are typically:
    • google_product_category
    • age_group
    • color
    • gender
    • size
    • size_system
    • size_type
  • Leverage Existing Attributes: If you already have this data stored in WooCommerce attributes (e.g., a 'pa_color' attribute), you can use the Attribute Mapping tool to map your local 'color' attribute to the Google 'color' attribute. This can apply the value to all relevant products at once.

3. For Custom Labels and Other Missing Attributes

  • Not Natively Supported: Attributes like Google Ads custom labels (0-4) are not currently available for mapping within the plugin's interface.
  • Custom Hooks (Filters): For developers, the plugin provides filters to modify the product data sent to Google. You can use hooks like woocommerce_gla_product_attribute_value_{ATTRIBUTE} to programmatically set values for attributes that aren't supported in the UI. For example, you could create a filter to populate a custom label based on a product's shipping class or tags.

Conclusion

While the 'Google for WooCommerce' plugin simplifies product syncing, managing attributes in bulk remains a significant challenge for large stores. The current solutions involve a combination of manual data entry, leveraging the Attribute Mapping tool for supported fields, and writing custom code for bulk operations and unsupported attributes.

The development team is actively aware of these limitations, and user feedback on their official ideas board is a critical driver for prioritizing new features like global category mapping and bulk editing tools.

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