Shopping feed optimisation: 6 quick tips

Jason

Jason

Agency partner — Can be found writing about Google Shopping and playing piano like Les Dawson.

So we’ve transitioned to online shopping. You can read many different versions of how we have moved forward ‘x’ amount of years in ‘x’ amount of months. I think the upshot is… everyone and their granny is now buying online and it shows no sign of slowing down. So if you’re a retailer you need to get your products in the Google Shopping results.

This is, without doubt, the most effective way to get your product with a picture and price in front of someone who is actively searching for that product or one similar. Now, Google is getting smarter and we are seeing Smart (machine learning) Shopping campaigns outperform their manual counterparts on a very regular basis. Smart has been the Google-recommended campaign type for ages now. But what does it actually mean? Here’s the official words from the people who own the internet –

With Smart Shopping campaigns, Google’s machine learning uses your product feed to create and show a variety of ads across different networks, including the Google Search Network, Google Display Network, YouTube and Gmail. Our systems test different combinations of the image and text assets that you provide, then select and show the most relevant ads, automatically.

— Google

Automatically! So as we drift more and more into Google’s Machine Learning World, how do you stand out from your competition in the Google Shopping Results? Well, my friends the main answer is… your product feed. The gateway to the checkout cart. Here’s 6 simple things you can do to improve your shopping feed with very little effort.

1. Optimise your product titles for your users

Make sure your product title is highly relevant and contains the key information about your product. People who know what they want (high intent) will do a longer tail search and you need to make sure you’re telling them what they want to hear.

Take a look at these two titles for similar watches:

Is someone who knows exactly what they want more likely to search like this;

Or like this, stating every little detail about the watch they’ve set their heart on?

2. Back up your titles with great descriptions

The greek philosopher, Aristotle, told us all how to present an idea 2000 years ago – “Tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them.” 

After your product’s title, its description is the next most influential factor in deciding which queries Google shows your ads on. So if your title is optimised to nail your target query, double right down: get that product title and prepend your description with it. If you want an even stronger presence, you can even triple down and add it to the end of the description.

3. Don’t forget barcodes / GTINS 

GTINs are unique to a product, and every product has the same one across every store; this is how Google can tell when you’re selling the same items as another retailer, like in the price competitiveness report. By the same logic, you can get some help from your rival’s feed optimisation when your GTINs match and Google knows it should be serving your products on the same sorts of queries.

Obviously this product-matching goes both ways, but it ends up being a win-win; you all serve on more products so as long as your listing is the best one you’ll get the most clicks. And your listings are the best, right? Follow the steps here and you’ll be in with a good shout. Or we could just do it for you.

The same thing goes for other unique identifiers like MPNs; you can run ads without them, but you’ll get more traffic (and it’ll be better quality) if your feed has as many as possible.

4. If something’s colourful, state its colour..?

This seems obvious, but it’s amazing how many feeds we see for highly visual products that have no colour attribute. People search by colour, and they filter results that way too; if someone starts filtering on the Shopping page results and picks a colour, having none stated means you’ll be filtered out and the high-intent customers will never even know you were there.

5. Don’t forget gender either

Just like with colour, people filter things like clothing and sports equipment by gender and if your feed is missing the details you’ll drop right out of filtered results.

6. Nail your Google Product Categories

When it comes to top-of-funnel searches at the start of the conversion journey, often the GPC has huge influence on where your products serve. So if they’re wrong, you won’t get your products in front of customers early in the conversion journey.

To start with, make sure you’re using GPCs for your country- the UK list for example differs from the US list on simple things like spellings (jewellery vs jewelery) but also whole word choices; in the US, clothing is apparel. If you use the wrong one your products’ performance will be penalised.

Once you’re in the right territory, don’t be lazy with the category. Health and Beauty is a great example of where you get more out if you put more in. If you sell makeup you can just set the same GPC for your whole product set – 

477 – Health & Beauty > Personal Care > Cosmetics > Makeup

-that’s not incorrect, but it’s not good either. Decide what the actual product is and categorise it so. A Mascara is not an Eye Shadow. Even I know that and I’m a bloke from Newcastle. Why Aye! Look how many subset of eye makeup there are- make sure you’re being accurate!

There it is — 6 of the best tips. There’s loads more you can do but this should get you started. If you need a hand give us a call. We love this stuff and we don’t get out of the house much these days.

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