How do I add custom labels to my Facebook catalog?

Adding custom labels to your Facebook catalog can help organize your products and make them easier to manage. Here’s a step-by-step guide to adding custom labels in your Facebook Shop.

Why Use Custom Labels?

Custom labels allow you to categorize products in your catalog however you want. For example, you can create labels like “New Arrivals,” “Sale Items,” or “Clearance” to highlight certain products. Some key benefits of using custom labels include:

• Group similar products together – Easily find and manage products by creating labels for your product type, brand, collection, etc.
• Create categories and menus – Use labels to categorize products in different sections that customers can browse.
• Run targeted ads – Custom labels let you target marketing campaigns or Facebook Dynamic Ads to specific product groups.
• Organize inventory – Use labels to track which products are low in stock, need to be reordered, etc.
• Promote products – Draw attention to new releases, sales and other specials by putting them in unique label categories.

Overall, custom labels add flexibility to organize your catalog in a way that benefits your business.

How to Add a Custom Label in Facebook

Adding new custom labels is easy and can be done right in your Facebook Commerce Manager. Here are the steps:

1. Go to the Commerce Manager section in your Facebook Business page settings.
2. Click on the “Catalog” tab at the top.
3. Select “Browse Catalog” on the left side to view your current product catalog.
4. Click the “+” icon to add a new label.
5. Enter the desired name for your new label.
6. Click “Create Label” to finish. The new tag will now show under the Labels section.

Once you’ve added new labels to your catalog, you can start organizing and tagging products with them.

How to Tag Products with Custom Labels

Here are the steps to add custom labels to your individual products:

1. Open your product catalog in Commerce Manager.
2. Find the product you want to label.
3. Expand the product details by clicking on it.
4. Scroll down and click “+ Add” under the Product Labels section.
5. Type in the label(s) you want to add from the ones you’ve created.
6. Click “Save” to apply the labels.

Repeat this process to tag all the relevant products with your custom labels. The labels will now appear on each product for easier organization and identification.

Using Custom Labels for Ads

One of the key benefits of creating custom labels is the ability to target ads and campaigns to specific product groups. For example, you can promote a sale by targeting ads to just your “Sale Items” label.

Here is how to use custom labels for Facebook Dynamic Ads:

1. Go to the Ads Manager dashboard and click “+ Create” to make a new ad.
2. Select your campaign objective. For this example, choose “Traffic”.
3. Under “Detailed Targeting” select “Catalog Sales” as the product set.
4. Under product selection, check the labels you want to target.
5. Continue making your ad as normal. Enable Facebook Dynamic Ads.
6. Save and launch your ad. It will now only promote products with the selected labels.

This lets you hone in your ads to very specific products. You can target any combination of your custom labels this way for greater efficiency.

Using Labels for Organization in Commerce Manager

In addition to ads, custom labels can be used to organize and manage your catalog right in Commerce Manager. The labels allow you to filter and search for products in different ways.

Some examples include:

• Filtering your catalog view – Open your product catalog and click the “filter” dropdown to view just one label at a time.
• Searching products – Use labels in the search bar to find all products with a certain tag.
• Sorting – In the catalog, click the “Sort” dropdown and select a label to sort products by that tag alphabetically.
• Tag organization – Drag and drop tags in the Labels section to display them in a specific order.

Using the labels to filter and search makes managing large catalogs with hundreds or thousands of products much easier. You can instantly pull up certain products for inventory management, editing, marketing and more.

Best Practices for Using Custom Labels

Here are some top tips for maximizing the value of custom labels for your Facebook commerce:

• Use clear, descriptive names like “New Arrivals” instead of vague tags like “Product1”.
• Keep label names consistent in spelling and format.
• Limit overlap between labels to keep things organized.
• Tag all relevant products with each label.
• Re-use labels for similar product groups over time.
• Delete unused labels to avoid clutter.
• Use labels to group best-selling items, seasonal products, sale items and more.
• Target complementary labels together in ads, like “Summer Sale”.

Keeping your labels clean, focused and consistently applied will get the most out of this feature.

Other Facebook Catalog Features

Along with custom labels, Facebook’s product catalog has a few other useful management features including:

• Collections – Curate groups of products that shoppers can browse.
• Video demos – Upload instructional videos for products.
• Availability – Indicate if a product is in-stock or sold-out.
• Advanced matching – Match your products to their identical listings on Amazon for better ads.

Experiment with these to make your catalog as useful as possible. The more information you add, the better.

Should You Use Custom Labels for Google Shopping Ads?

While custom labels are great for Facebook commerce, most other paid platforms don’t recognize these tags. For example, Google Shopping ads uses their own set of product types that you assign to each product.

So if you also run Google Shopping campaigns, you would need to assign the standard product type attribute to categorize products for those ads separately. The Facebook custom labels would only apply on Facebook in this case.

However, for some businesses a simple catalog workflow is preferable. If you only want to manage one set of tags/labels for your products across channels, Google Shopping does allow custom grouping/labels as well.

You can apply similar techniques as on Facebook to organize your Google product data into custom groupings. These can be used for organization, filtering, etc in the Google Merchant Center. The key difference is that custom labels on Google won’t directly target ads…you need to use standardized product types for that.

So in summary:

• Facebook Custom Labels – Can be used to target Dynamic Ads and organize your catalog. But are specific to Facebook only.
• Google Shopping Custom Labels – Help organize your products in the Google Merchant Center but don’t directly target ads.
• Google Shopping Product Types – Needed to actually target and segment products in Google Shopping campaigns.

Choose the right approach based on where you are advertising and how you want to structure your product data.

Conclusion

Adding custom labels provides a flexible and intuitive way to structure your Facebook product catalog. Labels allow you to categorize products in granular groups for organization, searching, filtering and targeted advertising. Use descriptive but consistent naming conventions and tag all relevant products to get the most value. Along with other product catalog tools like collections and matching, custom labels help streamline your Facebook commerce operations.