Product images for Google shopping is an undervalued ranking factoring. The ability to add up to 10 additional images for each SKU can help your brand rank across different Google shopping placements.

We have talked about product titles and product descriptions helping you rank in Google shopping. A lot of marketers focus on these two areas in their shopping feed and beyond your product’s price, are the two biggest areas that can help your shopping ads get impressions.

We’ve written a LOT about Google Shopping at this point. I am going to link some of other means of optimizing attributes for SKU’s below. Maybe you come across something you’ve not considered and wish to try out.

Custom Labels
Bundles

You can also look at using a Supplemental Feed to help optimize your shopping feed, if you are not using a shopping feed management platform.

Now back to the topic at hand: product images!

It is a thing that is less talked about and can have a huge impact on shopping. Over the last few years, we have seen Google focus their tech on being better at reading and understanding images. We know that Google scans images to make sure it covers all the ways your product could rank. If your product title does not have the colour black but you sell black jeans. You will get ranked for people searching for black jeans, based on image alone. 

Additional Product Images

Any brand running shopping ads will use the standard image_link attribute. Submitting URLs to high-resolution product images helps improve your chances of capturing your customers attention. We recommend removing any UTM sizing parameters and submitting images that are at least 650 × 850 pixels. This is pretty standard and where basic shopping feeds end.

What most brands don’t know is you can use the additional_image_link attribute in your shopping feed. This will provide your brand with the opportunity to add up to 10 additional images per product/SKU to help shoppers see different views/angles of your product.

What sets the additional image link attribute apart from the image link attribute is that you can use images that are not allowed in the latter. Here are some examples to use those 10 additional images:

  • Show the product with product staging elements
  • Display the entire multipack. When you submit a custom multipack of products, use the multipack attribute.
  • Show the product in use, which could include a person in the image
  • Show the product from different angles
  • Highlight parts of the product without showing the entire product
  • Show parts of a bundle instead of showing all products in the bundle. When you submit a custom bundle of products, use the is_bundle attribute.

A lot of these additional image rules let you show the product from different angles or the product being used. For example, if the main image shows product packaging, including images of the box contents in the additional images can help users better understand what they are buying.

Plus, with all these additional images for your SKUs, it can help you rank and allow Google to better understand what you are selling with your shopping ads. 

Best Practices

These best practices can help you go beyond the basic requirements to optimize your product data for performance.

  • Follow the best practices for the image_link attribute.
    For example, do not submit:
    • Brand-only or logo images
    • Blurry or misshapen images
    • Images with a watermark, or text not relevant to the image such as trademark or store info
  • Submit images that meet the size requirements. If you include images that are under the minimum size requirements (explained in image_link), your product won’t be disapproved, but your images won’t be shown. 

Uploading Additional Images

You don’t need to have these images on your website. You could have the images stored on a server and have your shopping feed fetch them to include them in your shopping campaigns. This is important if you don’t want your competitors to know what you are up to.

If you want to start to optimize your shopping feed and understand how to go beyond the basics. Don’t undervalue your product images. That is it for this week. See you next time.