A required feed field is one an ad network won't accept a product without — no ID, no price, and the product is rejected before it can run. A recommended field isn't mandatory, but supplying it improves how far and how well your product reaches shoppers. Renable checks seven required fields for every product.
What "required" means#
A required field is data an ad network treats as mandatory. If a product's feed entry is missing it, the network won't approve that product — it's rejected or disapproved and never delivers, no matter how good your campaign is. Required fields are the floor: they're what makes a product usable at all, not what makes it perform.
The catch is that "required" isn't a single fixed list. There's a small core that every network needs, and then each network adds more depending on the product's category and where it's selling. A plain product might clear the bar with a handful of fields; an apparel product usually needs several more.
What "recommended" means#
A recommended field is one that isn't mandatory — the product is accepted without it — but supplying it helps the network match, rank, and show your product to the right shoppers. Recommended fields are how you go from eligible to competitive.
Common recommended fields include product identifiers like GTIN (barcode), brand, and MPN; extra images; a product category or type; and custom labels. GTIN in particular is strongly recommended — and required for products that carry a manufacturer-assigned barcode (see below). Leaving them out won't get a product rejected, but it usually costs you reach — for example, products without a valid GTIN or brand can be matched and ranked more weakly [VERIFY: exact impact of missing identifiers/brand on each network's matching and ranking]. Adding identifiers is a common, high-value improvement — see Add missing GTINs, brands, and identifiers.
The seven fields Renable checks for you#
Renable flags seven fields as required for every product, because a product missing any of them can't be advertised on any network. These are the fields marked with an asterisk on the catalog's Mapping tab:
- ID — a unique identifier for the product
- Title — the product name shoppers see
- Description — the product copy
- URL — the link to the product's page
- Main image — the primary product image
- Price — the current price
- Availability — whether the product is in stock
If any of these has no source, the Mapping tab counts it toward its "{N} required missing" warning; if it's mapped but comes back empty for some products, the row shows a warning tone and an "N empty" note. Renable flags these before an ad network gets the chance to reject the product. For how to fill or map them, see Mapping your feed to catalog fields.
Why networks require more than seven#
Renable's seven are the universal minimum — the fields no network will run a product without. Individual networks require additional fields on top of that, and the exact list depends on the product's category and market:
- Product identifiers. Many networks require a valid GTIN (or a brand-plus-MPN combination) for products that have a manufacturer-assigned barcode, and reject or limit those that don't. [VERIFY: exact GTIN/identifier requirement rules per network, e.g. Google's "products with a GTIN assigned by the manufacturer must include it"]
- Category-specific attributes. Apparel and accessories typically require extra fields such as color, size, age group, and gender, while other categories don't. [VERIFY: exact category-specific required attribute lists per network — Google Shopping, Meta, TikTok]
- Network-specific fields. Each network has its own required-attribute list and its own field names. [VERIFY: full required-field list per network — Google Merchant Center, Meta Commerce Manager, TikTok catalog]
Because these vary by network and category, the safe rule is: fill Renable's seven first, then add the identifiers and category attributes your products need. A field that's merely recommended on one network may be required on another, so treating recommended fields as worth filling keeps you eligible everywhere.
When the required list is shorter than you expect#
It runs the other way too, and Prisjakt is the clearest example in the product of how short a required list can be — and how little that tells you about what's worth filling.
Prisjakt requires exactly six fields: product ID, title, link, price, availability, and condition. An offer missing one of them is dropped whole. Everything else it documents as optional — including three that most people assume are mandatory: brand, description, and the product image. Renable marks those as recommended rather than required on a Prisjakt channel for exactly that reason: calling them required would raise warnings on a feed Prisjakt accepts happily, and a warning you learn to ignore is worse than no warning.
But the field that actually decides your results there isn't in the required six at all. Prisjakt matches your offer onto the product page other shops are already listed on, and the barcode (gtin) is its documented accelerator, with mpn as the second signal. So the fill rate on the gtin row tells you more about how many of your products will show up than the whole required list does. That's the general lesson at its sharpest: required fields decide whether a product is accepted; recommended fields decide how well it does.
PriceRunner is the same lesson from the other end, and the clearest case where "required" is Renable's judgement rather than the destination's rule. PriceRunner publishes no reject rule at all — it heads its basic field list "minimum requirements", but what it actually does when data is missing is match the offer by hand and charge extra per click for the work (£0.06 on its UK price list; Sweden and Denmark publish their own figure in local currency). So Renable marks as required only the five fields without which there is no listing to show — product ID, name, price, URL, and stock status — and everything PriceRunner prices rather than demands, the barcode included, is marked recommended. Nothing on a PriceRunner channel is ever described as rejected, because nothing is.
Criteo shows the third shape of the same problem: a rule a destination really does have, that Renable's checks cannot express. Criteo asks for a barcode or a manufacturer part number on every product — one of the two — and there is no way to mark a pair of fields as "one of these". Marking either one required would flag a catalog that is perfectly fine on the other, so both are marked recommended and the honest reading is the fill rate across the pair. item_group_id is the other one: Criteo's specification marks it required, but it only matters when your catalog has variants, so Renable marks it recommended rather than warning on every catalog of standalone products. When a marker and a destination's own documentation disagree, the marker is usually the more careful of the two.
How required vs. recommended shows up in Renable#
You don't have to memorize which fields each network wants — Renable surfaces the distinction in two places:
- The catalog Mapping tab marks the seven core required fields with an asterisk and warns when any is unmapped or empty. See Mapping your feed to catalog fields.
- A channel's Fields tab goes further once the channel knows which networks it feeds and what for (its Used for setting): required fields carry a "Required by {networks}" note, and recommended fields get a muted "rec" marker, so you can see exactly what each network expects of that feed.
- What you set the channel up for changes that list. Toggling on Extra product images (or Meta's Multi-image ads) starts asking for a second image per product; Video ads / Product video asks for a video column; AI discovery (Google only) adds the fields Google's AI shopping surfaces read. Not every add-on exists everywhere, and the same chip can mean different things: Reddit, Perplexity, and Prisjakt have no add-ons at all (Reddit's catalog has no video field and no published limit on extra images; Perplexity has no advertising, so there is no ad format to describe; Prisjakt builds a price comparison listing out of product data rather than a creative, so there is no ad format there either), Microsoft offers only Extra product images, because its feed has no video field to declare, while Google and Pinterest call their video chip Product video rather than Video ads — both document the feed attribute but neither documents an ad format that plays it. A field a network only asks for because of an add-on says so — "Recommended by Google (AI discovery)" — and, where the value has to be produced rather than mapped, the note also says where it comes from (an AI prompt, your own project content). Setting Used as to Supplementary feed narrows the list the other way: only the product ID stays required, while the other fields become optional-but-checked — any value you do send is still validated, and any add-on you toggle keeps its own requirements. See Working with channels and AI discovery on Google.
- Meta's Adaptive designs is the one add-on that asks for nothing new — and instead stops one field being asked for. It reshapes the images the feed already carries into named design groups, and Meta ignores a plain main image when a product carries image blocks. So once a channel is converted, the main-image and extra-image rows stop being flagged: they are covered by the design groups, and adding those columns back would mean shipping columns Meta discards. See Adaptive designs.
Fill or map every flagged field, then Publish — nothing reaches the ad network until you do. To confirm the feed side is clean before blaming a campaign, work through Check your ads are eligible to deliver.
Or ask Aimée#
Not sure which fields a product still needs? Ask Aimée to trace a product end to end — she can tell you which required fields are empty and where each value came from, then set up the mapping or a rule to fill them and publish once you approve.
FAQ#
Will a product still run if it's only missing recommended fields?
Yes. A product with all its required fields filled is eligible to deliver even with no recommended fields — but it usually reaches fewer shoppers than a fully-populated one. Recommended fields can improve matching and ranking [VERIFY: exact impact of recommended fields on each network's matching and ranking]; required fields decide whether the product runs at all.
Renable says all my required fields are filled, so why did the network still reject a product?
Renable checks its seven universal required fields, but a network can require more for that product's category — or disapprove it on a policy, not a missing field. See Fix products disapproved by Google and Check your ads are eligible to deliver.