9 Things to Remember When Optimising Your Google Shopping Feed 

1. Product Titles

The titles are one of the most important factors in optimising your Google Shopping feed. Unlike Search, you don’t have the ability to bid on keywords and be prescriptive with the searches you want to show for through match types. This makes your titles and descriptions extremely important.

The information that you provide Google through your feed is what used to match with keywords that users are searching. It’s therefore incredibly important that the keywords used in your titles are terms that people are searching for in significant volumes, and also that they are converting well. Check out my other article on how to see your search terms by id in Google Shopping

With no clear “quality score” that you can see for Google Shopping unlike Search, ensuring your titles are specific, relevant and well written will help to drive a higher click-through-rate compared with your competitors, and likely a higher quality score (though you can’t see this score for Google Shopping). 

Shopping titles are also the only text that appears in the paid ad listing, so getting them right will ensure that people are only clicking when they feel the product is relevant to them. This is why it’s important to include other attributes from your feed such as gender and size, and test the impact that this has on your performance.

Consider the devices your searchers are on too. With many sites driving a high proportion of traffic (sometimes even the majority) from mobile, title length is important. Google recommends a title length of less than 70 characters (and no more than 150 characters), but it's best to keep to 70 characters or less to optimise for mobile.  

2. Product Descriptions

Arguably the second most important thing to optimise in your Google Shopping feed is the product descriptions. Unlike product titles, you can’t see these within the paid listings, so they don’t influence click-through-rate. 

However you can see the product descriptions on the free listings, so they represent an opportunity to drive high click-through-rates with relevant, engaging and useful copy covering your products specifications as well as reasons to buy. They can take a larger space on the free listings, so don’t be afraid to include as much relevant detail. Descriptions have a very long maximum length (up to 5000), and can take a large space on the free listings, so don’t be afraid to include as much relevant detail as you feel is necessary. 

Product descriptions are also likely used by Google to influence which search terms you appear for, so represent another opportunity to include relevant search terms that you want to appear for. 

3. ROAS Targets

There are many important questions to ask yourself when setting your CPA or ROAS targets

Have you considered how much you can afford to spend on selling a particular product? 

What is your gross margin % for each product you sell? 

Do your customers typically purchase the item that they land on or not? Do customers typically add other items to their basket?

Do you know how much a customer is worth to you?

These are all questions you should be asking yourself when setting your ROAS or CPA targets. Failure to consider these questions properly and you’ll struggle to make a profit from Google Shopping irrespective of how optimised your campaigns are.

4. Custom Labels

Custom labels are another feature that every advertiser should be taking advantage of.

The most powerful thing about custom labels is that they are time stamped for the day in which you set them. Simply put, this means if you change a custom label for a product id, then Google will retain data for the previous custom label for all of the days it was previously running.

This is incredibly useful for a few reasons:

• Custom segmentation

You can use custom labels in Product Groups, to segment your ad groups by whichever labels you choose 

• Data analysis

Because custom labels are time stamped for each day, they are highly useful for undertaking data analysis and helping answer questions you may have about your Google Shopping ad performance.

Do you want to understand the impact that free shipping has on your ROAS and/or conversion rates? Then you could add the shipping price as a custom label.

Do you want to understand the impact that stock availability of your products by type of size/model/colour has on your ROAS and/or conversion rates? Then you could also add the stock availability of each product id as a custom label. 

Do some of your products have high return rates? Then this could be added as a custom label and those products excluded from bidding. 

As long as you don’t go over the 1000 character limit, then you can combine multiple custom labels into one, amplifying their usefulness even more! You can use feed rules either directly in the Merchant Center, in your feed management platform, or in other supplementary feeds (through Google Sheets) to apply these labels when certain conditions are meant.

5. Supplementary Feeds

Supplementary feeds are another powerful feature within the Merchant Center (or a feed management platform) that you can use to augment your primary data feed with additional information that may not be present within your primary feed. 

These could either be implemented via a feed management platform first, or directly in the Merchant Center. The benefit of implementing them via the Merchant Center is that you can guarantee it is the feed value that will be registered and that nothing else is going to overwrite it.

Adding additional information that’s not present in your primary feed can improve performance for example by providing missing information like GTINs, colour, gender or sizing. This will ensure that you’re maximising the amount of information you’re giving Google to be able to display your products. 

6. Product Categorisation

Providing accurate product categorisation helps Google to understand your products and ensure they’re in the most appropriate category, which will ensure they appear in the correct auction alongside other relevant products, and that you pay less for your product ads and beat your competitors! 

This is because higher relevance = higher click-through-rates = cheaper CPCs.

If you don’t assign a product category for each product, then Google will assign one for you using other data you give to it such as titles, descriptions, GTINs. If these attributes are correct then the risk of Google choosing an incorrect category is lower, but it’s still worth checking.

It’s definitely worth auditing your Merchant Center to ensure the one Google has picked is accurate. 

7. Feed Management Platform

Are you using a feed management platform to manage your Google Shopping feed? E.g Datafeedwatch or Shoptimised. Depending on the size of your store, this may not be necessary, but is absolutely essential for larger sites. 

The functionality that a feed management platform gives you is huge. From being able to create feeds for multiple channels (not just Google Shopping), to being able to easily set and combine custom columns, set custom attributes and use custom rules and functions to manipulate your feed data. A proper feed management platform gives you so much more customisability, especially at the enterprise level where you may have thousands of skus. 

8. Search Terms

Are you using search term data to optimise your product titles and descriptions? Depending on how many products you have and your campaign structure is set up, you may need to make some changes in your utm tracking. See here how to see your search terms at the product id level in google shopping

8. Product Types

Providing accurate product types and hierarchy is essential if you’re using product types for your campaign structure (or through inventory management in Search Ads 360). 

The other way product types are useful is for reporting and understanding changes in performance over time. If your product types are accurate then you can use your feed to track performance of your product categories at their different levels over time.

That’s it - 9 ways to optimise your Google Shopping feed and set yourself up for success!