If you're looking to generate more traffic and leads through your google shopping campaigns, then you're in luck. Google Shopping data feeds can be improved with a few simple tips.
Google has given advertisers like us lots of different attributes that we can utilise to enhance our Google shopping feeds, by providing rich data to Google.
This in turn enhances the shopping experience for potential customers, resulting in more impressions, clicks, sales and a better ROI. Our average ROI for Clients is 7.8x for example, demonstrating that Google Shopping can deliver superb returns for e-commerce businesses.
Google Shopping is potentially one of the most powerful tools Google Ads has to offer, and one of its main pillars for success is your Google Shopping feed. If you have unhealthy, unmanaged, and unorganised feed it will be negatively affecting your campaign performance.
So give your data feeds a health check, and make sure they are tuned up for best performance.
Product Titles
Titles are super-important, and depending on the product you're selling they can be set up in a variety of different ways. It's important to include key product details within the product title such as brand, size, colour, material, weight, and gender.
Below are 2 examples of how to structure your product titles:
Brand & Product Type & Gender & Colour.
e.g. Nike Free Run 5.0 Men's Running Shoes Blue.
Brand & Product Type & Weight.
Cadbury Creme Egg 10 Pack 400g.
There are lots of different ways to structure product titles, but a best practice if you're selling a brand that is well known is to include the Brand at the start of the product title. Google understands words at the start of the product title are more important and have a greater effect on searches.
Top Tip: Try testing multiple different product title combinations until you find the one that works best for your products.
Product Images
Images are another key factor you need to get right. Your product images need to showcase your product within Google's image guidelines.
- Do not upload blurry/pixelated, promotional overlays or unproportionate images.
- Use only high-quality images of your product on white background taking up around 75%-90% of the image space available.
- For fashion products you can upload your products being worn by a model. (Review Google's guidelines for more details on this as there are exceptions.)
Top Tip: Upload additional images of your products by using the additional_image_link attribute in Google shopping. Also, If you have lifestyle product images you can upload lifestyle images using the lifestyle_image_product attribute.
Promotions
If you have items on sale or you're running a special promotional code, make sure you're advertising your discounts, promotional codes and incentives through Google Shopping.
Not only do these make your Ads stands out from the crowd, they can be eligible to participate in more auctions.
Google has given advertisers multiple ways to provide this sales data such as the Marketing Promotions tab within Google Merchant Centre or even by applying new attributes to your feed such as 'sale_price' and 'promotion_id'.
Top Tip: Use both 'sale_price' and promotion incentives within the merchant centre to boost your sales and clicks even further.
Product Reviews
If you have product reviews these need to be provided to Google and again will make your ads really stand out, and enhance your listings quality.
You can supply product reviews to Google in a few ways such as uploading a product review feed in your Google merchant centre account or working with a trusted third-party review aggregator such as Trustpilot or Feefoo.
Google Product Categories
This is another key signal for Google, when deciding whether to display your Google shopping ads amongst relevant searches.
Ensure your products are mapped to the appropriate Google shopping categories. This sounds obvious, but you would be surprised how many items we see that do not have an associated Google Product Category.
Side note: Googles Taxonomy is different per country so ensure the correct taxonomy for the country where the items are being sold. For example, the Google UK taxonomy.
Top Tip: Be as specific as possible when choosing your Google product categories. For example if you're in the furniture industry don't just set all your products category as 'Furniture > Chairs' or 'Furniture > Tables', instead be more specific for every product such as below. The more specific the better.
- Furniture > Tables > Bedside Tables
- Furniture > Tables > Folding Tables
- Furniture > Tables > Kitchen & Dining Room Tables
- Furniture > Chairs > Gaming Chairs
- Furniture > Chairs > Hanging Chairs
- Furniture > Chairs > Kitchen & Dining Room Chairs
If you want to find out more about optimising your Google merchant centre feed, our data-feed specialists can run through all the enhancements needed to not only increase your Sales but also your ROI, visibility metrics and conversion rates going forward with Google Shopping.
Learn more about the power of data in e-commerce in our related article that discusses how high quality product data feeds into success in Google Shopping search.
by PPC Consultant Mike Walker
Mike is a Paid Search expert with over a decade of experience in digital marketing.
Managing PPC budgets of 6-figures per month, Mike is used to structuring and managing large campaigns on a global scale.
Continually developing his knowledge, Mike is at the forefront of trends in the PPC industry.
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