Most PPC managers spend a lot of time in their Google Ads account optimizing account settings and bids but their Shopping feed gets ignored.

Today we will discuss why you shouldn’t ignore your Shopping feed and how to perform a feed audit.

Why do you need to audit your feed?

When you create a Google Ads search campaign, you can choose the keywords you want to bid on and the text ad you want to show to the user who will search for your targeted keywords. However, Shopping campaigns do not give you this level of control.

On Google Shopping, your shopping ad is only as good as your feed and the data in it. Ensuring that the data in your shopping feed is correct helps you improve your ad quality, target the right searches, and improve your conversion rate.

  1. Improve your ad quality
    When your shopping feed contains detailed data, your ad will display correctly. An optimized title, description, and images can attract the attention of a casual searcher and lead them to your website.  
  1. Target relevant search queries
    Unlike a search campaign, a Shopping or Performance Max campaign does not allow you to target specific keywords. Then how do you ensure that your ads show on the relevant search queries? By working on your shopping feed.
  1. Improve your conversion rate
    When your ads show on the right search queries, the chances that a user converts after clicking on your ad will be higher. Improving your shopping feed can improve the conversion rate of your campaigns.

How to audit your Shopping feed?

Auditing your product feed involves two steps:

  • Take a look at your current data and all the attributes that you are using. Ensure that the information in them is added according to Google’s best practices
  • Look at Google’s product attributes support page and see if there are any attributes you haven’t added to the feed.

We will discuss a few attributes in this blog post and suggest best practices for those attributes.

Product Titles and Descriptions

Your product titles and descriptions are important to optimize not only because Google uses them to figure out where to place your ads, but also because these attributes are viewed by the customer and can help them learn if your product is a good fit for their needs.

When you audit your titles, you need to look at whether you have mentioned the Brand name, product name, size/weight, color, gender, age, and material.

Mention the most important details first because Google only shows the first 70 or so characters – the rest can only be viewed after clicking on the ad.

Avoid excessive capitalization and follow Google’s editorial guidelines. You can read more about how to craft the perfect title here.   

Similarly, your description needs to go into detail about your product and tell the customer exactly what purpose the product serves. You can add the uses of the product, go into detail about what the product does, what it looks like, etc. When you write your descriptions, try to add relevant keywords so that your ads can show on those keywords.

Product Images

Look at your images to make sure that they are high quality and clearly show the product, have a white background, do not contain text/promotional text or any watermark, and follow Google’s size guidelines.

A lesser-known attribute is additional_image_link. This is a highly useful attribute as you can use this to submit up to 10 images related to your product. You can show the product in-use, show multiple angles and display a multipack.

You can read our blog post on product images to learn more about what type of images to use in your feed.

Google Product Category

Since Google assigns the Google Product Category attribute if you haven’t specified it yourself, the data in this attribute needs to be audited thoroughly. Google can sometimes assign the wrong product categories.

You can go through the list of Google taxonomy and determine if your products have the correct GPC values assigned. You can read more about this attribute here and learn how and when to assign a GPC. 

GTIN

This is an important attribute as Google uses this information to categorize products. If your products have a GTIN, reach out to the manufacturer and get those values so you can add them to your feed. People often do not fill out GTINs because finding them takes work. Yes, it does take work but it adds additional details to your feed and helps Google understand where to show your ads.

Here is our blog post on GTINs which gives more information about this attribute.

Size/Color/Material

Many apparel brands forget to add the attributes of size, color, and material to their feed. These attributes are used by customers to filter their desired products on the Google Shopping page. Adding them to the feed enhances the data quality you provide to your customers as well as Google.

Custom Labels

Use custom labels in your feed as it can help you analyze the data in your shopping campaigns. You can use custom labels to mark the products that are on sale, or you can add details like size/color/gender to the custom label because this way, you can set up separate campaigns based on these attributes.

If you are not using custom labels, it’s a missed opportunity to improve your campaign quality. Read about other ways of utilizing custom labels here.

Once you are done taking a deeper look at your existing data, don’t forget to look at other possible attributes that could be useful to add. For example, adding product_detail and product_highlight attributes can further enhance your data feed.

Final Thoughts

A good product feed can make your shopping ad campaigns perform much better. We took over a client’s Google Ads advertising in April 2022. In the first month, we performed a feed audit then made changes to the feed based on our findings. We didn’t make any significant changes to the existing campaigns in the account. Just by working on the feed, we were able to generate 300% higher sales compared to the previous month at the same cost.

If you want to reach out to us for a feed or account audit, message us and we will get in touch!