Google Ads

In 2020, we experienced what can only be described as a monumental shift in the shopping habits of the public.

The COVID-19 pandemic, coupled with social distancing rules, meant that traditional retail was eschewed in favour of online shopping services. As of 2022, more than 40% of all online shoppers employ search engines to help them discover and make purchases online.

Amazon stands out from the crowd in this regard – it captures roughly 40% of all online shoppers. These figures are a marvel when we think about the fact that Google has typically controlled the search engine market for years.

Don’t be fooled, however…

The power of Google Shopping.

Naturally, Google Shopping is a powerful tool that can generate a lot of sales for the user. However, the competition for sales is cutthroat and constant – with such tantalising rewards on offer, everyone who wants to make a sale is scrambling to capitalise on Google.

As an advertiser, your job is to make it as easy as possible for Google’s algorithm to match up the ads you make with the right customers. If you want to do this effectively, you’ll need to sit down and optimise your Google shopping feed, focusing on accuracy and relevancy.

If you want to do this, then you need to link your Google Ads account directly with the Google Merchant Center to run Google Shopping Campaigns.

Once you’ve linked up your Google Ads directly to the Merchant Center, then you’ll need to make sure that you optimise your Google Shopping feed so everything has been streamlined and made easier for Google itself. With that being said, it is important to acknowledge that higher-performing shopping campaigns do require you to invest in not only feed optimisation but also campaign optimisation.

When you take the time to optimise your Google shopping feed, it’ll benefit you in one of three ways:

1. Your feed will meet the platform requirements. Each media channel has a specific set of rules and regulations which need to be met to guarantee success, and to get your feed approved and run your ads, you need to meet the regulations.
2. Your feed will look really attractive in search results. You can expect more views, clicks and sales.
3. You’ll have access to trackable and accurate campaign data for maximum scalability.

You should think about your product feed like you would think about SEO. The feed needs to be both optimised and coordinated to display relevant and accurate information. If you want people to be able to find your products, then this is a must.

What’s a Product Data Feed?

The product data feed is a special file which contains all of your products and will display the attributes for each one. You can do this through things like Microsoft Excel or an app, CSV or XML file.

Within the feed, each of the products is presented within a single row format. Each individual piece of product information is put into a separate column.

Things to consider:

1. Different channels will often have different requirements for their feed formats. The retailer is the one who is responsible for catering the individual feed to the channel-specific requirements.
2. The feed needs to be refreshed on a daily basis. If products are added or removed, or you encounter pricing changes, then you definitely need pricing updates.
3. Manually updating and improving a feed can be tricky. Therefore, it is worth using a third-party software to automate the process.

Google Merchant Center product feed requirements.

When you use an app to optimise your feed, it should be able to export to XML, TXT, JSON, and CSV.

All of these feeds are compatible with the Google Merchant Center, and are plugged in via a link the server can generate.

Product Feed – Required Fields

The product information that you will need to get your feed approved is as follows:

• Product ID – this is your unique identifier.
• Product Title – this is vital for providing a proper description of your product, using proper keyword selection where necessary. It can’t contain foreign characters or be in all capital letters, nor contain text like “free shipping”.
• Product Description – this is an accurate description of your product, with the right level of detail, as an extension of the product title. You shouldn’t use any links or descriptions from other products if they’re not relevant.
• Product URL – this should include a link which directs visitors to the exact product page on the website.
• Image link – these images need to be of the product you are selling. You can use GIF, JPG, BMP or TIFF. They should be 100 x 100 pixels at minimum, and less than 16mb and without a watermark or border.

Field specifications.

Character limitations demand that some fields have a maximum character count.

With Google, you’re only allowed 150 characters in the title, but only up to 70 characters may be shown within the ad itself so Google will truncate the title.

Facebook allows you to put up 100 characters, and Bing allows you to put up 255.

There are some predefined and required fields that will remain the same regardless of what happens.

Availability will present the available to order, in stock and out of stock options. Gender will present the male, female or unisex options.

The age group will present the newborn, toddler, infant, kids and adults options.

The condition option will present the new and used and refurbished.

The numerical fields will always be the price, UPC, MPN, ISBN, Shipping Weight, and the Shipping Costs.

Product ID

A single stock keeping unit can’t be shared by two different products at once. Each shop will have their own unique SKU for the sake of identifying inventory. Make sure that the SKU is varied according to special attributes like colour and size.

GTIN

Lots of channels need the GTIN to function – this is the set of numerical values in the bar code. The GTIN is an identifier which comes from GS1, which oversees and regulates all of the commercial properties which are internationally tracked across a unique ID allowing them to meet proper standards.

Google has already managed to integrate with the GS1 database to match up the GTIN with the product you want to promote, if it’s registered.

This ID can be a big help for Google, which can now identify and match up your product a lot easier. However, it is worth noting that your product won’t be approved if the GTIN doesn’t match.

If you don’t have a GTIN, then you can sub it out for either the UPC or MPN.

There are quite a few types of GTIN which exist at the moment. These are the following:

• ISBN: International Standard Book Number
• UPC: Universal Product Code
• EAN: European Article Number
• JAN: Japanese Article Number
• MPN: a manufacturer-assigned, alphanumeric value.  We use this to identify a product from other products from a manufacturer.

There are four different types of GTIN in use:

• GTIN-8 – this is mostly for EAN-8 barcodes.
• GTIN-12 – this is mostly for UPC barcodes.
• GTIN-13 – this is mostly for ISBN, JAN, and also EAN-13 barcodes.
• GTIN-14 – this is for both wholesale and multipack products.

Product Title

Excessive and inappropriate capitalisation will not be accepted, nor will exclamation marks.

Character Length

All of the important information should be put at the beginning of the title and description where possible. This will help users to identify if they want to click through in just a few words. It’s also why Google chooses to limit what product titles are displayed.

URL

As a product name can change or the information in your shop can be updated, it is possible for your product title and URL to stop matching. This is because the URL does not automatically update. You need to do this yourself when you update the products.

Your domain will need to be the claimed URL on the GMC, as well as being the same as your feed.

Variants or Parent Variant

There are some products that have different variants within your inventory. Different colours, sizes, and features are all common. Oftentimes, the variants will all be under a single URL for the product.

If these products have different prices, this may result in your product being disapproved by Google, as the site cannot differentiate between the variations on its own.

If this is the case, then you need to make sure that you export a URL for each of the product variants that you have. If you do not do this, things may not work out.

Sales Price

If you have items that are going on sale, you have to update the feed accordingly. If Google identifies a different price to what is listed in your feed, it will disapprove the product or it will not apply the “sale” label.

Shipping & Taxes

Generally speaking, it is normally up to you to put the shipping and tax program directly into your feed on the GMS. However, if you have a different set of rates in the feed, these automatically take priority over the GMC settings.

What are the characteristics of a good Google Shopping Feed?

There are many things which can influence the Google shopping feed to make it a good one.

Good product titles

The product title is the first thing that your users will see, which makes it a core part of your product. You need to make sure that you optimise the title because both your user algorithms, as well as those used by Google are both searching for keywords within these titles.

Your title should be as relevant to the listing as possible, as so to make sure that the user will click on the product listing before they work with other competitor settings.

To give an example, imagine that your product title is a model number. You need to understand that the bulk of customers have no idea what the model number is and how it is relevant. Therefore, you need to support it with the right types of descriptive keywords.

You need to make sure that you think about what the customers need to know about the product before they click on anything. You should also make sure that you think about what people are actually trying to search for when they type in Google and adjust accordingly.

The important thing to remember about Google is that it will try to show as much of the product title as it can. However, it does typically crop the title down to roughly 70 characters or less, depending on the number of competing ads which are in play.

You need to make sure that you put the most important information at the beginning of the product title. You shouldn’t be trying to put the company name at the start either. Most customers don’t care about your company so much as the item you’re selling. Most businesses simply don’t have that level of affluence.

The table below will give you an idea of the formula to work with when creating your product title:

Where can you find good keywords for product titles?

If you want to find the right keywords for your product titles, you can use Google Analytics or search via your eCommerce store. These keywords should be put into your product titles wherever possible.

Furthermore, make sure that you go ahead and do a little research on your rival products to make sure that they’re advertised in the same way.

Google Shopping Feed Optimisation – Best Practices.

1. Create good product descriptions

This part of the product is your chance to educate the customer on the product before they click and enter your website. If you do, you need to make sure that the descriptions you use are both well-written and contain all the necessary information that the user needs. The information should be relevant to the user, and you can talk about benefits like the free shipping, colour, materials and size.

2. Use images

Images are arguably one of the most important parts of a listing because they will be what capture the attention of your user first. You need to make sure that the image you use is the product, because if you mix variants up, it’ll lower the number of sales. There should be no text in the images either. Where possible, you should add multiple photos of the image to show it from all angles.

3. Set product availability

You need to make sure that product availability is automatically updated or manually updated consistently to give yourself the best results. If the product is out of stock, then you’re wasting your spend until Google recognises that there is no more stock left – not a clever strategy.

4. Pick the right categories

If you want to pick the best possible category, then what you’ll want to do is make sure that you’ve placed your ads more accurately to your search query. Ideally, you’ll want to be no more than five paths down from your parent category, because this boosts the CTR of your ads considerably, helping performance.

5. Add any missing meta fields

When it comes to your product, it is important to make sure that you fill in any of the missing meta fields. These are things like:

colour,

brand,

product type,

shipping costs,

sale prices,

optional fields,

custom fields,

additional product types, and any other additional attributes which matter.

6. Parents and variants

It’s pretty common for apparel of most kinds to have a variety of colours, sizes and variations available. If your business is one which has a lot of parent products that all have different variants, then it might be more cost-effective to extort parent products only. This is especially helpful if you don’t have the time required to manage all of your product feeds on a regular basis. If you don’t have a schedule for regular monitoring, you can wind up presenting incorrect data, which would be disastrous.

With that being said, if you can support the costs of managing all of the parents and variants, this isn’t a bad route to take. Make sure that you separate out by the different variants instead of using the parent products, and make the user have to work to find the products that they want.

7. Feed fetching settings

You should make sure that your settings are changed throughout the day because your stock level can vary. This is very important if you have either highly fluctuating product inventories or run flash sales, because you have to work to keep both Google and your prospects aware of the latest aspects of the shop.

Final thoughts.

When it comes to optimising your Google Shopping feed, there are a few things you can do:

• You should make sure, as a first, that products which are either using low margins or have higher competition are left out. You should also exclude seasonal products to get the best choices.
• Once you have uploaded your feed, you can get started with monitoring your campaign performance and constantly optimising the feed. You need to make sure that you optimise products that receive a lot of clicks. If these products have a high cost per sale, then your customers are trying to tell you something. Your product isn’t what they expected, it’s being displayed to the wrong audience, or that your competitors have better pricing, so while they click on your product, they’ll be buying from your rivals.
• If you’re working with a healthy margin and you can afford to reduce your pricing, it is worth doing so to compete with your rivals who are also listing their products.
• You can also make sure that you use your pricing strategy to your advantage by price ranking your products via an app. If there is a clear winning product in your listings, increase the provision of services for them.
• You should also make sure that you utilise the promotions and special offers to your advantage. If you’re offering free shipping, this is especially important.

Focusing on Google Shopping feed optimisation is important. It’ll make a big difference to your success.