Channable Labelizer: Product segmentation for Google Ads

Google's automated bidding doesn't distribute visibility evenly across every product in your catalogue. Products with stronger performance often receive more traffic and spend, while many others get limited opportunities to generate meaningful performance data.

As a result, advertisers often struggle to understand which products are driving results, which are consuming budget inefficiently, and which have barely had the opportunity to perform. Channable Labelizer helps solve this by automatically segmenting products based on their Google Ads performance, making it easier to apply the right strategy to each product group.

In this article, we explain what Channable Labelizer is, how it works, and how to use performance-based product segmentation to structure your Performance Max campaigns and Shopping campaigns on Google more effectively.

Key takeaways

• Channable Labelizer is a performance-based product segmentation tool for Google Shopping and Performance Max campaigns. It uses Google Ads performance data to group products by performance. Originally developed by Producthero, the Labelizer is now part of Channable following the acquisition of Producthero.
• Channable Labelizer automatically groups products into Heroes, Sidekicks, Villains, and Zombies based on clicks and ROAS. You can also enable the optional 0 Zombies label to separate products with no performance history at all.
• The labels show where your ad spend is generating results and where it may be used inefficiently so that you can make better budget decisions.
• The right campaign structure depends on the amount of performance data you have, so lower-volume accounts should start simple and add more segmentation gradually.
• Using the same Google Ads Target ROAS across Labelizer campaigns keeps the bidding objective consistent, while different budgets give you more control over how much each product group can spend.
• Within CSS Pro, the Google Ads Labelizer can be combined with Products AI, Price Benchmark, and Manual Product Tagging to add feed optimization, market context, and strategic flexibility to your Google Shopping strategy. For more advanced multi-channel segmentation, advanced feed management, automation, and custom business metrics, Channable Core takes these Google-focused capabilities even further.

What is the Channable Labelizer?

When you advertise hundreds or thousands of products on Google, it can be difficult to see which products are driving sales and which ones are using up your budget without driving revenue. The Channable Labelizer automatically sorts products into groups based on their Google Ads performance.

It looks at two simple factors:

• Click volume
• ROAS: how much revenue a product generates compared with the amount spent advertising it

Each product is then given one of the Labelizer labels (We will explain each of these in detail later):

• Heroes are products with high click volume and a ROAS above your Labelizer Target ROAS.
• Sidekicks have a decent amount of clicks and generate a good return, but they could perform better, so they may have more potential.
• Villains receive plenty of clicks but do not generate enough revenue; these products are "stealing" your ad budget.
• Zombies receive very little traffic. They are barely shown, so they have not had much opportunity to prove their potential.

You can also enable the optional 0 Zombies label to separate products with no impressions, clicks, or performance history at all from regular Zombies that have at least some performance data.

These labels give advertisers a clearer picture of how different product groups contribute to performance. You can use them to decide where to protect or increase investment, where to limit inefficient spend, and which low-traffic products deserve additional testing. Labelizer analyzes performance daily, so products can automatically move between labels as their performance changes.

Labelizer was created by Producthero, a Google Comparison Shopping Service Premium Partner. Channable acquired Producthero and is bringing its CSS services and optimization tools into the Channable platform.

As part of this integration, Labelizer is now available in the CSS Pro module within Channable, while keeping Producthero's familiar Heroes, Sidekicks, Villains, and Zombies segmentation model.

💡 Channable CSS provides the CSS 20% margin advantage in eligible Google Shopping markets, while Labelizer adds performance-based product segmentation to help advertisers decide how different product groups should be managed in Google Ads.

Where your ad spend actually goes

A Shopping or Performance Max campaign may look profitable overall, while some individual products are still wasting ad spend. Google doesn't divide the budget evenly across your catalogue. Some products attract a large share of the clicks and spend, while many others receive too little exposure to generate meaningful results.

This creates three common blind spots:

• Products can continue consuming budget even when they fall below your ROAS target
• Profitable products may receive too little traffic to reach their full potential
• Large parts of the catalogue may barely appear in ads at all

Based on Producthero's analysis of thousands of advertisers, only 10% of your product catalogue is responsible for 80% of your revenue (Heroes), while more than 50% of Shopping advertising costs go to underperforming products (Villains). On top of this, over 60% of your products are not being displayed (Zombies).

Labelizer helps address this by analysing each product's clicks and return on ad spend (ROAS) every day. It then pushes those performance labels to Google Ads, allowing advertisers to automatically separate products into more focused campaigns and control how much budget each group receives.

Advertisers using the Channable CSS margin advantage can gain more bidding power in Shopping auctions. Labelizer then helps them have a more efficient bidding strategy by identifying which products are generating strong returns and where advertising budgets may be allocated more efficiently.

Heroes, Sidekicks, Villains, and Zombies: What each label means

First, let's understand how products are distributed among the labels. The Labelizer analyses each product using two thresholds that you adjust within the CSS Pro module:

• Click volume shows whether a product is receiving enough traffic
• Labelizer target ROAS shows whether the product is generating an acceptable return on ad spend

The combination of these two factors and the thresholds you chose in your Labelizer strategy determines the label assignment. As you can see in the matrix below, products with higher click volume become Heroes or Villains, depending on their ROAS. Products with lower click volume become Sidekicks or Zombies.

Label	What it means	Typical product profile	Why it matters
Heroes	Top-performing products	High click volume and ROAS above the Labelizer Target ROAS	These are the products you usually want to protect, prioritize, and scale. They are responsible for a great part of your revenue.
Sidekicks	Good performers, but with low volume	Lower click volume and ROAS above the Labelizer Target ROAS	These products have a lot of potential. They can grow with more visibility, testing, or budget support
Villains	Weak performers	High click volume and ROAS below the Labelizer Target ROAS	These items often need more control, better feed quality, or lower budget
Zombies	Products with little or no visibility	Low click volume and ROAS below the Labelizer Target ROAS. These products have limited performance data and may need additional visibility or optimization before their potential can be properly assessed.	These products may still have potential, but they need more exposure or a different campaign strategy before we can judge their performance fairly
0 Zombies	Products with no performance history	Products with no impressions, clicks, or performance history at all. (usually newly added products)	Separating them can prevent brand-new products from being treated like existing products with weak performance and helps advertisers prioritize initial testing.

💡The Labelizer target ROAS is only used to classify products. It is a Labelizer threshold and is separate from the target ROAS in Google Ads and doesn't control bidding.

These labels are not static. As the performance of a product changes, the Labelizer can automatically move it into a different group. A Villain that generates a higher return, for example, could later become a Hero. With Labelizer, you can also check the label history.

How to set up the Labelizer for Performance Max campaigns in 4 steps

Now that you know what each label means, the next step is to put them to work in your Performance Max structure.

Before you can use Labelizer labels in Performance Max campaigns, make sure:

• Your account is connected to Google Merchant Center
• Your product feed is active
• At least one product is approved
• A supplemental source is set up in your Merchant Center account

You must know which custom label field holds the Labelizer Labels (for example, Custom label 0). In the following steps, we show you how to configure your Labelizer strategy, send the labels to Google Ads, and use them in your Performance Max campaigns.

1. Adjust your Labelizer strategy in Channable

First, you need to decide what Channable Labelizer should consider as enough traffic and an acceptable return. As we've discussed above, the click threshold defines how much volume is enough to assess a product, while the Labelizer target ROAS separates products meeting your profitability goal from those falling below it.

In Channable, go to CSS Merchants, select the relevant merchant, and open the Labelizer tab. Click Adjust Labelizer, then select Edit to configure the following settings:

• Target ROAS sets the minimum return a product must achieve to be considered profitable. It's a best practice to set your Labelizer target ROAS 25% lower than your actual ROAS. By doing this, you ensure that the system keeps labelling and promoting products with long-term potential.

• Number of clicks determines when a product has received enough traffic to be treated as a high-volume product. Tip: Set this threshold slightly lower than your average number of clicks needed to get a conversion

• Date range controls how much recent performance data the Labelizer analyses. You can choose between 7, 14, 30, or 60 days. While 7 and 14 days are an exception, 60 days range is better for long conversion paths. The general recommendation is to go for 30 days.

• 0 Zombies separates products with no activity at all from products that have some performance data

As you change these settings, Channable updates the preview to show how your products would be divided between the labels. Review the results before saving. Once the strategy is saved, Channable Labelizer can begin assigning and updating labels based on your Google Ads performance data. The next step is to send those labels to Google Merchant Center so they can be used in your Performance Max campaigns in Google Ads.

2. Send Labelizer labels to Google Merchant Center

Once Channable has assigned a label to each product, you need to send those labels to Google Merchant Center before you can use them in Performance Max campaigns in Google Ads.

Channable sends the Labelizer labels through a supplemental source. Think of this as a small add-on to your existing product feed:

• Your primary source or primary feed provides the complete product data, including titles, prices, images, availability, and more.
• The supplemental source adds extra information to products already in that primary source.
• In this case, the extra information is the Labelizer label assigned to each product.

Channable uses this connection to sync its CSS optimizations, including the Hero, Sidekick, Villain, and Zombie labels, with the corresponding products in Merchant Center, or, for example, the optimizations done with Products AI or Title Optimizer.

Once Merchant Center processes the source, you can use those labels in Google Ads to group products within your Performance Max campaigns.

3. Choose the right Performance Max campaign approach

The best Performance Max setup depends on your business goal, on how much conversion data you have, and on how much segmentation your account can support. At Channable, we recommend that you choose an approach that matches your current volume and then change to a more advanced structure only when each label group has enough data to perform well.

We recommend different campaign structures, ranging from a simple setup for lower-volume accounts to a more segmented approach for accounts with sufficient conversion data.

1. Basic approach: Separate one product group

Recommended starting point: 30+ conversions in the last 30 days and 50+ products.

Start with two campaigns and choose which product group to separate based on your primary goal:

• Focus on profitability → Separate Villains. Keep Villains in a dedicated campaign with a lower budget to limit inefficient spend, while giving the rest of your products more room to perform.
• Focus on revenue → Separate Zombies. Create a dedicated Zombie campaign to give low-traffic products more opportunity to gain visibility and collect enough performance data to prove their potential.

This is a good starting point when your account doesn't yet have enough data to support more granular segmentation.

2. Intermediate approach: Separate Villains and Zombies.

Recommended starting point: 70+ conversions in the last 30 days. Once you have more performance data, you can combine both basic approaches by separating Villains and Zombies into their own campaigns. This allows you to work towards both goals at the same time: limit inefficient spend on underperforming products while giving low-traffic products more opportunity to collect data and grow.

3. Advanced approach: Create a campaign for each label

Recommended starting point: 100+ conversions in the last 30 days, with enough volume within the individual label groups to support separate campaigns.

At this stage, you can create dedicated campaigns for Heroes, Sidekicks, Villains, and Zombies, giving each performance group its own budget and strategy.

Before moving to this setup, make sure Heroes and Sidekicks have enough conversion volume and that the Villain group is large enough to sustain its own campaign. More segmentation only adds value when each campaign has enough data to optimize effectively.

4. Boost selected products when business priorities require it.

Sometimes performance labels don't capture everything you need to prioritize. Seasonal products, promotions, new collections, or other temporary business priorities may require a different treatment.

The original Labelizer Strategy handled this through a separate Boost campaign, temporarily excluding selected products from the automatic Labelizer structure. With Manual Product Tagging in CSS Pro, you now have additional flexibility to complement or override automatic performance labels with static tags for these strategic use cases.

If you don't have enough historical Shopping Ads data yet, we recommend starting with a single campaign containing all your products. Let it run until you have collected enough conversion and performance data for Labelizer to evaluate your products effectively. Once sufficient data is available, Labelizer can assign performance labels, and you can start building a more segmented campaign structure.

These figures are recommended starting points rather than technical minimum requirements.

💡 General rule: More data gives you more flexibility, while less data usually calls for a simple campaign structure. If you split too early, you may not give each campaign enough volume to learn properly.

💡 Tip: If you don’t want to create a campaign from scratch, you can also turn your existing campaigns into a Labelizer campaign. This keeps your performance data intact and avoids restarting the learning phase in Google Ads.

4. Set the same target ROAS in Google Ads and different budgets across Google Shopping campaigns

Once you split your products into label-based campaigns, keep the same target ROAS in Google Ads across all of them. Labelizer can move a product from one campaign to another as its performance changes. Using the same target ROAS means Google's algorithm treats all products equally when trying to achieve your Target ROAS

Use different campaign budgets to control how much each product group can spend:

• Same target ROAS: Keeps Google's bidding goal consistent across campaigns
• Different budgets: Gives you control over how much spend each campaign can access
• Heroes and Sidekicks: Can receive more room to spend when you want to protect strong performance or support further growth
• Villains: Should generally receive the smallest budget to limit inefficient spend while still allowing them to improve.
• Zombies: Can receive a controlled test budget to collect enough performance data and determine whether they have potential to turn into a Hero or if they will become a Villain.

This setup lets products move between labels without also moving between different efficiency goals. You can then adjust budgets based on performance and business priorities rather than manually changing the bidding target for each product group.

How to optimize your Google Shopping feed while leveraging Labelizer labels

Once your labels are live, Labelizer gives you a clear view of which products are performing well, which ones need more support, and which ones are getting little or no visibility in Google Shopping or Performance Max.

Here's how you can use that information to improve titles and other relevant attributes and review pricing to increase the potential of turning inactive products into revenue earners.

Optimize Hero products

Hero products already attract traffic and meet your return target, so you are not trying to rescue poor performers. The goal is to make proven products more relevant to more searches and help them earn more clicks from the visibility they already receive.

Start with Heroes whose titles are marked Poor or Average in the Channable CSS Products tab. The Title Optimizer grades titles by their length and highlights the products with the clearest room for improvement. You can then open an individual product to see:

• Its current title and a preview of how it may appear in Google Shopping
• AI-powered keyword suggestions based on the product description
• The remaining character count within Google's 150-character limit
• A status showing whether the title is Poor, Average, or Great

You can add suggested keywords with one click, edit the title manually, and combine details such as the brand, product type, color, size, material, model, or variant.

Keep the most useful information near the beginning, since Google may shorten longer titles depending on where the ad appears. Channable then sends the optimized title to Google Merchant Center through the supplemental source without changing the original title in your primary feed.

For advertisers using CSS Pro, Products AI takes this a step further. Instead of focusing only on individual titles, it helps optimize titles, descriptions, and other relevant Google Shopping attributes in bulk, using AI built around Google's Shopping best practices. You can optimize up to 200 products at once, customize prompts, adjust AI creativity, and review suggested changes before publishing.

This makes Labelizer especially useful for prioritization: use performance labels to identify which Heroes or Sidekicks deserve attention first, then use Title Optimizer or Products AI and filter by these labels depending on the level of optimization you need.

If you are using Channable Core, Channable Rules can support broader feed transformation and automation across larger product sets, while Channable Insights & Analytics provides deeper analysis across additional metrics and channels and allows you to segment products based on your own business metrics, such as margin.

Make data-driven decisions from price insights

A product's Labelizer label tells you how it's performing, but doesn't always explain why. One possible factor is the product's selling price compared with competing offers on Google Shopping.

Channable Price Benchmark shows how your price compares with the benchmark price for the same product across Google Shopping. It tells you whether your product is priced:

• Below the benchmark
• Around the benchmark
• Above the benchmark
• Without a benchmark because there is not enough comparison data

You can review this information alongside the Labelizer results to understand whether your selling price may be affecting clicks, conversions, or return on ad spend.

For example:

• A Villain priced above the benchmark may warrant a closer look at price competitiveness as one possible factor affecting performance.
• A Sidekick priced below the benchmark may represent an interesting opportunity for further testing or investment.
• A Hero priced above the benchmark may still perform strongly despite its higher price, suggesting that price competitiveness isn't currently limiting its performance.

Producthero users may already know this feature as Producthero Price Benchmark. Following Channable's acquisition of Producthero, the same type of Google Shopping price comparison is available through Channable CSS.

The benchmark should guide your decisions, not make them for you. You should also consider a product's profit margin, shipping costs, promotions, stock levels, and overall campaign performance.

Help Zombie products gain enough visibility to perform

Zombie products aren't necessarily poor performers. Many products receive so few clicks that they have never had a fair chance to generate sales and move to another Labelizer label. This is common in large catalogues, where Google's automated bidding tends to prioritize products with performance histories.

Before giving Zombie products more ad spend or placing them in a dedicated campaign, find out why they are receiving so little visibility.

Labelizer identifies low-traffic products, but it doesn't diagnose the reason behind their limited visibility. Some factors worth investigating include:

• Titles and descriptions that do not match relevant searches
• Missing attributes such as brand, color, size, material, or Global Trade Item Number (GTIN)
• Prices that are less competitive than similar Shopping offers
• Weak images, missing promotions, or low product ratings
• Seasonal products or variants with naturally limited demand

Use Channable Rules to improve incomplete product data across larger groups of Zombies. You can add missing attributes, standardize product types, and build clearer titles using the information already available in your feed.

For products with sales potential, create smaller test groups based on category, brand, margin, or season rather than placing every Zombie into one large campaign.

Try Channable for free

Save time and improve efficiency with Channable Labelizer

Channable Labelizer automatically segments products based on performance and turns product-level data from your Google Ads account into clear priorities. You can quickly see which products deserve more investment and which have not received enough visibility to prove their potential.

Within CSS Pro, you can combine Labelizer with Products AI to optimize relevant Google Shopping attributes, Price Benchmark to add market context, and Manual Product Tagging when you need additional strategic flexibility.

For businesses that need advanced multi-channel segmentation, custom business metrics, Rules, or broader feed automation, Channable Core extends these capabilities further and acts on those insights with Channable Insights and Analytics to investigate performance, improve product data with the Feed Management Tool, and create custom rules to apply changes in bulk.

Together, these capabilities help advertisers move from understanding product performance to making more informed Google Shopping and Performance Max optimization decisions.