By setting product variants in your catalog, Aiden knows more about your products and how they relate to each other. This makes it possible to show better insights for Impact analytics, for example.
And if your product feed consists of both the configurable product and simple products, you can use Group variants of products in Matching > Settings to ensure that your advice does not only consist of similar products.
You can also show the color variants of a product on the advice page. This way the user will see which colors are available for the advised product. You can activate this functionality with Show available colors on advised products in Matching > Settings.
In a Google Shopping Feed
In your Google Shopping Feed you can include the item_group_id field for each product. In this field you can then put a value with which you link groups of products. An example: you have 10x the same product in your catalog, but these vary in size and color. By giving them the same value, for example "1", in the item_group_id field, Aiden knows that these products are variants of each other.
Below is an example of how two variants of the same product look in your feed:
<item>
<title>Aiden running shoes</title>
<link>https://aiden.cx/product-1</link>
<description>Product description</description>
<g:item_group_id>1</g:item_group_id>
<g:id>1</g:id>
<size>42</size>
...
</item>
<item>
<title>Aiden running shoes</title>
<link>https://aiden.cx/product-2</link>
<description>Product description</description>
<g:item_group_id>1</g:item_group_id>
<g:id>2</g:id>
<size>44</size>
...
</item>
More information on how this field works can be found here.
In a CSV
If you work with a CSV you can add a column that must be named exactly as follows: item_group_id
Products that have the same value in this column are seen as variants of each other. An example: you have 10x the same product in your catalog but they vary from each other in size and color. By giving these the same value, say "1," they are seen as variants.