Custom Labels
Feed fields you define to group products by margin, season, lifecycle, or any custom attribute.
Custom labels are the single most under-used feed feature on both Google Merchant Center and Meta. They let you carve a 5,000-SKU catalog into product sets that match how the business actually thinks — high-margin, best-sellers, clearance, seasonal.
Definition
Custom labels are advertiser-defined columns in a product feed (custom_label_0..4). You use them to build product sets for bidding, exclusion, or reporting.
Why it matters
Custom labels are how you inject business logic — margin buckets, hero SKUs, seasonal ranges — into ad platform decisioning. Without them, every SKU is treated equally.
| Custom label | Use | Example values | |
|---|---|---|---|
| custom_label_0 | Margin tier | high, medium, low | |
| custom_label_1 | Lifecycle | new, core, clearance | |
| custom_label_2 | Season | spring24, holiday24 | |
| custom_label_3 | Price tier | under50, 50-100, over100 | |
| custom_label_4 | Content tag | video-ready, ugc, hero |
Custom Labels in practice
Custom labels are advertiser-defined columns in a product feed (custom_label_0..4). You use them to build product sets for bidding, exclusion, or reporting. Production concepts decide whether creative can be made at catalog scale or only for hero moments. Anything that requires a person to open a canvas per SKU stops working around the fortieth product. The brands that ship the most variants treat production as a system of templates, rules and specs rather than a series of one-off files. Read it next to Product Feed, Product Set, Catalog Feed.
How to get it right
Define it once, then apply it everywhere. Lock type ramp, palette, logo placement, offer treatment and legal lines in a shared brand system, and build templates that accept the product feed as input. Every export should already respect the placement's safe zones so nothing needs a manual crop after the fact.
What to measure and watch
Quality control is checkable, not subjective: does the asset meet the platform's ratio and file requirements, does key content sit inside the safe area, is text legible at thumbnail size, and does the product read in the first frame? Run that checklist before spend, because rejections and silent crops cost more than the render did. Why this matters commercially: Custom labels are how you inject business logic — margin buckets, hero SKUs, seasonal ranges — into ad platform decisioning. Without them, every SKU is treated equally.
Where Custom Labels sits in an agentic creative workflow
In Xeli this is a rule an agent enforces, not a note in a brief. Templates read the catalog, respect the brand system, and output every required ratio for every SKU at ad-ready resolution — so a 400-product drop becomes a queue to approve rather than a month of files. In the context of creative & production, that means the concept stops being something a person re-applies by hand every campaign and becomes a rule the system enforces on every asset it produces.