Ensuring you keep your feed well optimised is one of the most important areas of your Shopping Campaigns. In fact, it’s key to their success. Making sure all the parts come together harmoniously to entice shoppers to click on your product will result in more revenue and engagement.

There are, however, there are numerous opportunities that agencies and brands miss when it comes to product feeds. In this article, we share our thoughts on what some of those opportunities are and how to make the most of them.

Poorly Structured Titles

Google has been kind enough to give a decent character count for your titles, so utilise it. It’s important to list any relevant product details as well as the brand, if the item is a branded product of course. The first 45 characters should include the most important attributes with the last 25 including other relevant information like product colour and size.

Titles should always be unique to the product you are marketing. If it’s a product variant, make sure you add something unique into the title to differentiate them from one another. Avoid keyword stuffing however and leave out block capital letters. Promotional text that discusses price and sale dates should be left out of your titles and added to the product descriptions.

In a nutshell, view your ads from the consumer’s perspective. If something isn’t obvious from the product image, then try to put this information at the beginning of your title so that it becomes obvious to your customers.

Tommy Hilfiger Poor Title Structure Ad

Short & Dull Product Descriptions

If you are selling a couch, should you call it a couch, a sofa or a settee? The right keywords are paramount in both your title and description. In this instance, sofa has a higher search volume than the other two, but that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t use those words elsewhere. Add sofa to the title and expand your reach by including settee and couch in the description.

On the subject of keywords, it’s important not to overwhelm your description by stuffing search terms in there. Try to make it sound as natural as possible while providing all the relevant information in engaging and attractive copy. You have up to 5,000 characters to play with, but users will need to click to expand a longer description, so it’s worth bearing that in mind.

Stock Availability Discrepancies

It is important to keep your availability information up to date. Imagine it from a consumer perspective: you see a stylish table lamp for sale at a great price and even better, it’s in stock.

Naturally, you click through to buy the product only to be told it’s out of stock. Not only is this frustrating but it reduces the chance of you buying from that brand again, and brand loyalty is especially important in the current retail climate.

Ensuring that the availability attribute in your product data matches that of your landing page will mean users shouldn’t try to buy a product that you don’t have in stock.

Pricing Issues

A common oversight brands and agencies often make is relying on a site scrape alone to update their pricing. Although not an issue if the site is relevant and up to date, challenges may arise if the site does not align with promotions and frequent pricing changes.

A more reliable process would include a feed management solution which accounts for numerous price changes per day. This is particularly important for retailers who change promotions or are in sales.

Missing/Incorrect Unique Product Identifiers

Unique product identifiers do pretty much what they say on the tin. They define the product that you are selling within the global marketplace. Common examples of UPIs include Global Trade Item Numbers (GTINs), Manufacturer Part Numbers (MPNs) and brand names.

Unique Product Identifiers

The purpose of including UPIs is to simply make your ads richer and easier for users to find. When it comes to GTINs however, not all products have one assigned, meaning there is no need to submit one. It’s important though that if an item does have a GTIN, it is submitted as the product could be disapproved if you don’t. Some examples of products that may not have an assigned GTIN include:

  • Store-brand products
  • Replacement parts
  • Vintage or antique products

It’s important to note that the GTIN/EAN number must be valid and match what is in Google’s own database. If the number isn’t valid, it will be flagged by Google in the Merchant Centre.

Those are just a few of the opportunities that agencies and brands can miss in their product feeds. If you’d like to find out more about how Productcaster can help you unlock the hidden value in your feed and beyond, get in touch with the team today by calling +44 (0)203 910 7026 or email cssteam@productcaster.com