By polishing what Google shows before the click: the title, image, price, availability and shipping.
All of it comes from your product feed, and much of the feed is written in your back office, the day someone creates the product page. The landing page must then confirm exactly what the ad showed.
The benchmark
Two Merchant Center reports are enough to get started. The product issues list shows which items are disapproved or limited, with the reason.
The Products report, under Analytics, gives impressions and click-through rate item by item.
When a product gets many impressions but few clicks, the title, image or price is almost always the cause. A disapproved product stops showing altogether, and you often notice only after its sales have already dropped.
Also compare your best sellers on the site with the products your campaigns promote.
While reviewing the numbers of a fashion brand the authors work with, we found a model that alone accounted for nearly a quarter of online revenue and appeared in none of the ads we could find.
We hadn't spotted it either before cross-checking the two lists.
The rule
The feed title uses the words people type. Google asks you to put the key information first, because shoppers often read only the first 70 characters, and it allows up to 150 characters in total.
When few people search for your name yet, we start with the product type and its attributes (material, color, cut, gender), then add the brand or model name.
A name that people already type into Google as is can come first. The click then leads to the variant shown in the ad, already selected on the page, as Merchant Center rules require.
The steps
- Feed titles, rewritten in this order: product type, attributes, brand. Google accepts neither prices nor promotional wording in them.
- A sharp main image showing the product alone, with no text or watermark, and at least 500 × 500 pixels.
- Product identifiers (GTIN, or brand and manufacturer part number), shipping and returns, filled in in Merchant Center.
- Price and stock syncing, several times a day during promotions, with Merchant Center automations turned on to fix occasional mismatches.
- The URL of each variant, opened in a private browsing window, to check that it shows the right color and size.
A one-hour exercise to get started: take your twenty most-viewed products, copy their feed titles into a spreadsheet and write next to each what a customer would type to find it. The gaps show up right away. A line for leadership, to put in your own words:
“Our Shopping titles describe our products in our customers' words, and every week we know how many products Google rejects, and why.”
The trap
The most common trap is carrying the site's poetic product names over into the feed. “Le Marcel” speaks to your loyal customers, much less to the person typing “men's white cotton tank top.”
Yet feed apps generally pull the product title exactly as entered in the store. So the Shopping title is written months before the first campaign, by the team that creates the product pages.
In the same store, three naming conventions coexisted (uppercase, lowercase, or with the size stuck to the name), so one model existed under several identities, and a typo in a title went straight to Google as is.
The fix then happens in the catalog: a written naming convention applied to every new product, or feed-specific titles when the tool allows it.
The other trap comes back with every promotion. The price changes on the site, the feed keeps the old one until its next sync, and Google may disapprove the product for a price mismatch.
It reapproves the product after its crawler visits again, which takes a few hours to a few days, sometimes the whole length of the promotion, and repeated mismatches can lead to account suspension.
So declare the sale price in the feed with its start and end dates, and check the time zone.
