Your shopping feed might not be as good as you think it is, follow our quick and simple guide to ensure your feed is fully optimised and operating at its best!
An optimised feed makes all the difference in ensuring your Shopping Ads are showing where and when they are supposed to. Thus don’t overlook and go in with no plan. We suggest taking the 80:20 rule when it comes to feed optimisation prioritisation.
- Pull a product-level report from GA for the last 30 days or the period you wish to look at, factors to consider in this stage include seasonalities and external factors that may cause changes in product performance. If you have a very seasonal product catalog then you may want to look at a whole year.
- Examine your report and deduce which products generate 80% of your revenue.
- Focus on these and optimise them manually. This method is more time-consuming and consists of manually inputting as many available fields as you can and writing tailored product titles by hand as opposed to relying on rules to get the very best results.
The other 80% of products are only going to account for a small percentage of your sales, usually 20% or less. For these products you should focus on rule-based optimisation: using a set of rules to apply throughout allowing for mass changes.
Examples of these rules would be appending the Brand name to the title if it is not currently included for example. Or fill in the colour attribute as blue if the product title contains that colour.
How To Prioritise Your Feed Optimisation Efforts
We suggest prioritising the following areas…
1) The product title is the most important area to optimise, start here
The product title acts similarly to keywords in search ads. The title based on the order dictates what the ad is most likely to show for when searched. Thus ensuring that your relevant keywords are within the title is crucial.
Google also looks at the placement of the words in your title, the closer to the front of the title they are the more weight they will carry. So place your most important terms at the front of the product title.
You should also consider your wider marketing strategy when placing these terms. Are you trying to highlight and maintain brand awareness? Are you trying to capture Generic searches?
Depending on what you decide you must adjust your product titles accordingly.
Optimising your titles for brand protection
If you want to use shopping ads to protect your brand terms and don’t want to appear for generic terms then you would place your brand name at the front of the title and remove generic terms from your product title. This is how we would do it for a cosmetics brand.
Product title optimised for brand protection:
“MZ Skin Tint and Protect 50ml“
Example: Optimising your title for generic coverage
To optimise for generic coverage you should put generic keywords you want to rank for towards the front of the product title, such as “moisturising balm” and “Vitamin C”. You should move the brand to the back of the title so Google takes it less into consideration.
Product title optimised for generic coverage:
“Tint and Protect Moisturising Balm with Vitamin C 50ml by MZ Skin“
2) After the product title GTINs and MPNs are the most important area to work on
Ensuring that your products have GTINs and MPNs allows Google to identify your products and group them with the same products listed by other merchants.
This allows you to also measure price competitiveness. This is important as if your products are price competitive they will perform better and be favoured by Google. Additionally, customers are more likely to convert when they reach your site.
3) Google Product Categories (GPC) should be next on your optimization list.
The aim here is to make it as granular as possible. This is one of the key reasons that advertisers Google Shopping ads appear in irrelevant searchers is because they either don’t have GPCs filled out or they are not using the most granular one available.
4) Include business data to segment your campaigns by business goal
Segmenting your products allow you to group products in Performance Max so you can set different bids or use different strategies based on your business needs.
By using custom labels you are able to segment by various categories such as by margins, stock levels, and more.
5) A few bonus feed optimisation suggestions
Maintaining a healthy feed also requires frequent updates and testing. Don’t neglect your feed! We recommend doing A/B tests or pre-post tests and monitoring changes.
Areas to test include:
- Changing headline titles to include attributes (colour, size, etc) or use synonyms; you can also rearrange the order of your headlines
- Changing images: trial different angles, shots and sizing of the product
- Testing a new landing page layout or checkout page
- Changing product descriptions to include sales and promotions
The task of optimising may be daunting and long-winded but a crucial part of running good shopping ads. At DemandMore we offer a one-time free audit to help make this task simpler.
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