3 Product Feed Attributes to Improve Google Shopping Performance

In today’s competitive digital marketing environment, a robust and well-built feed can be the key to maximizing your returns from Google and Bing Shopping ads. Search engines reward advertisers who provide potential buyers with the most important and relevant information with increased impression share and reduced CPC’s. More impressions and cheaper CPCs can help boost your conversion volume while effectively increasing your Shopping ROI. In this post, we will discuss a few simple feed items that you should include to maximize your Shopping success.

A well formatted feed can help make sure that consumers are purchasing from you, not a competitor. Image via Pixabay

The Three Must-Haves

These three items are crucial to include in your feed, as they are the most important and relevant information for ecommerce shoppers looking to make a purchase.

1. Brand: Whether you are the manufacturer or a reseller, including a brand name in every product helps increase the relevancy of the ad to a given search. Searchers that include the brand name in the search query are much more likely to click on an ad with a title that reflects that brand. And if you manufacture the product yourself, you should strive to achieve maximum impression share on branded search queries by positioning yourself to capture as many of these queries as possible.
2. Gender: Including genders in the titles of your products will help reduce wasted spend on clicks coming from the wrong audience. For example: an apparel company that only sells women’s clothing but has gender-neutral product types (like sweaters, jeans, and t-shirts) should include gender in their titles to help negate clicks from men looking for those products.
3. Product Type: Though it may seem obvious, including the item’s product type (i.e. jeans, jackets, yoga pants) in your titles increases the relevancy of the ad to a given search. Including the product type will improve your CTR and quality score, helping to drive more clicks and reduce your CPCs.

Attribute Testing

The ideal title length for any product is less than 70 characters. Having implemented the three key attributes above, you will most likely notice that you have some flexibility to increase the length of your product titles within that limit. This is often the most strategic aspect of any title optimization, as it opens the door for a plethora of testing options to better understand what information will drive the strongest performance for your products.

Some attribute testing may be crucial in helping to qualify visitors to your site. For example, if your product images can be a little ambiguous regarding the age group it is manufactured for, you should use your extra space to include information on the age group. For example, if you only manufacture children’s jeans, you should make sure to include this information in your product titles so that you don’t receive clicks from adults.

Other attributes like size, color, and material give you the power to test and find the top performing titles. Knowing your target audience and what is most important to them is key here, as it should provide the perfect starting place for deciding what to test. For example, if you are a retailer of big & tall men’s suits, including sizes in your titles will help make your ads appealing to the relevant audience. On the flip side, if you are trying to appeal to a broad audience, you can test attributes such as materials and colors to see what will drive the strongest CTR and sales performance.

Relevance is key to running successful Shopping campaigns, and the best way to maximize your relevance is to give your target audience as much information about your product as possible. Optimize and test the attributes in your Merchant Center feed to increase relevance, improve CTR, and drive more sales.