Those of us that have dabbled in managing Shopping campaigns know that one of the most frustrating things is having disapproved products due to feed issues. And sometimes, you don’t have disapprovals but you have un-optimized feeds that you don’t have access to it. But every now and then we get feed management access. Now what? What should you look for? How should you optimize the feed to improve account performance?
Descriptive Titles & Descriptions
Put yourself in a searcher’s shoes. What would you want to see when shopping for a product? Most searchers include things like brand name, color and size in their search queries. These are key features that you should include in your title, in order of most important to least ie. brand –> model –> color –> size –> gender. These descriptors are also important to include in your descriptions. Unlike ad descriptions, which limit you to 80 characters, you have up to 10,000 for product descriptions in feeds! That being said, you don’t have to utilize every character but ideally, you’ll aim for at least 500.
Image is Everything
You know the saying “A picture is worth 1000 words”? Well, it definitely applies to shopping campaigns. Not only is it important to select the right image but you want one that is of high quality so searchers can see the features of your product. For the main image, try to select an image of the product with a white background so it stands out and so it’s clear to the searcher what the product is. Provide multiple angles of the product on the landing page so your user isn’t left wondering what the back of a shirt looks like or how high a 4″ heel really is.
Leverage Custom Labels
Custom labels in shopping can be applied to every product in your feed. While it’s an optional feature, more advertisers are adopting them today to make segmenting data and reporting more efficient. Custom labels are also great if you’re using a 3rd party feed management platform or bidding platform because you can use these labels to help you segment products into product groups and optimize your campaign setup.
Get Granular with Categories
Utilizing Google Product Categories is a no-brainer but selecting the right category can be time consuming. Trust me, it’s worth it! Remember to get granular by selecting specific “product types” to help Google better understand what you’re selling. The more granular you get, the easier it is for Google Shopping to connect searchers with your products which can only positively affect your ROAS.
Remember to Refresh/Update the Feed!
Performance will always suffer when you don’t have the most up-to-date information in your feeds. The easiest way to do this is by setting up your feed on an FTP and allowing Google or Bing to directly pull from that. One of our clients didn’t update their feed for over a month and when their clearance product feed was updated to reflect actual in and out of stock numbers, their ROAS for that campaign went from 36% to 150% week over week.
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