For any e-com account, the product feed is where the biggest impact can be made. However, the bare minimum is often done during setup, just to meet the requirements.
At Rise we take feed optimization seriously. With a few tweaks on your product’s attributes, you can increase your return from Google Shopping & PMax campaigns. Your product feed links search queries with the products you want to showcase. With a comprehensive and detail-rich feed, you can guarantee relevant matches for every search and maximize the effectiveness of your campaigns.
You can start with the basics, and once they are in place, move on to deeper optimization points.
#1 Product Title
We usually encounter product titles that have been pulled from Shopify, Woocommerce, or whatever platform the client is using, with no further thought. Additionally, many businesses rely on guesswork when creating their item titles, which leads to missed opportunities.
Here’s how to write effective titles that grab attention and boost your performance:
- Ditch the Hyphens & Embrace Keywords: Limited space in catalogs shouldn’t limit your reach. Analyze search term reports from Google Shopping or Search Console to identify relevant keywords shoppers use.
- Data-Driven Decisions: Don’t guess! Use search data to understand what terms customers are searching for. Base your titles around these keywords while maintaining clarity.
Bonus Tip: Focus on Clarity & Avoid Clutter
- Ditch Subjective Terms: Avoid words like “amazing” or “fantastic.” Let the features speak for themselves.
- No Sales Talk: Focus on product information, not promotions. Time-sensitive offers can be displayed elsewhere.
- Keep it Clean: Avoid excessive punctuation, ALL CAPS, or unnecessary symbols.
By following these steps, you can create clear, keyword-rich titles that get your products noticed and improve your ranking in Google Shopping.
#2 Image
Great product images do more than just display your offerings, they’re the first impression that grabs potential customers’ attention and entices them to click. Google sets some basic image requirements (size, format, etc.), but that’s just the starting point.
Google’s Image Guidelines:
- Minimum size: 100×100 pixels (ideally 250×250 or larger)
- Accepted formats: GIF (non-animated), JPEG, PNG, BMP, TIFF
- Keep it clean: No overlays, promotional text, watermarks, or CTAs.
- Focus on the product: Eliminate unnecessary props or service information.
Now, what is it with the white background?
While Google suggests plain white backgrounds to emphasize the product, there’s room for exploration. Consider experimenting with lifestyle images to showcase your product in real-world settings. If you have lifestyle images, we recommend adding the lifestyle_image_link attribute so that google can start showing them to potential customers.
Design unique visuals to test against your standard images, and then analyze results: which product image got higher CTR and CVR? Experimenting is the only way to boost performance!
#3 Google Category & Product Type
These attributes serve as foundational elements that significantly impact product visibility and relevance. But as Google can categorize your listings for you, most advertisers just trust the machine for the task.
Well, let me tell you, Google is not always accurate and you may end up showing your product on irrelevant search queries – aka wasting your money.
Precise categorization helps Google understand the nature of your products better. Take the time to go over google product taxonomy and select the category that best describes your listing.
In some cases, google categories may not represent your products. That’s why you have the product_type attribute. This allows you to create your own categorization.
#4 Product Description
This attribute is often overlooked but that can also help you land relevant impressions and conversions. Google also crawls your descriptions to determine if your listing is relevant for a search query, so the keywords you use play a role in determining the relevance of your product.
Our best practices:
- Put the most important information first, as Google only shows the first 145-180 characters of your product description.
- Add accurate and descriptive keywords to your product_description attribute. But note that the structure of your description needs to make sense and provide value. It’s not just about stuffing in as many keywords as possible.
- Highlight product features.
- Do not include promotional text.
#5 Age Group & Gender
These attributes are basic signals that help Google understand your product and target audience. It’s not the same to promote a hat for a kid versus a hat for an adult or jeans for women versus jeans for men. Don’t waste your money and make sure your age_group and gender attributes are correctly set up.
#6 Item Group id
Should you include all your product variations in your feed or only the main product, the “parent product”?
There are pros and cons for both. On one hand, adding only the main product saves on costs and maintenance, but can lead to irrelevant clicks and issues with searches focusing on specific features (like size or color).
On the other hand, adding all variations ensures accurate matches and avoids irrelevant clicks, but requires more data management and can increase advertising costs.
From our experience, we recommend including all variations ensuring each variation has a unique title that reflects its specific features (size, color, etc.) to improve search relevance.
#7 Product Highlights
With product_highlights you can add bullet points with important product information. It’s an easy way to show the potential new customer unique features before they click through to your site.
Product highlights should be easy, quick-to-scan fragments that answer the most common questions.
#8 Google Search index link
Optimizing your feed not only helps you improve ads performance but also boost your organic conversions.
What product should Google show when you have a lot of variants on your free listing catalog, and someone uses a generic search query? You’d probably want to show your best selling variant. With the canonical_link attribute, you get to decide what listing to show, instead of Google needing to crawl your site and set whichever URL it considers to be the most representative as the canonical link.
The above mentioned are only a few of all the product attributes you should be working on. We took the time to point out the aforementioned attributes, because we find that these have the greatest impact and some are usually overseen.
If you need any help with your product feed, don’t hesitate to ask!
