Shopping
Google Shopping feed: seven mistakes that cost you clicks every day
The feed decides which searches your products show up for at all. Yet in most stores it is an export nobody has touched since the setup.
Published on · 7 min read
- 1Google Shopping has no keywords. The product title is your keyword. What is not in the title does not get found.
- 2Most feed problems do not start in Merchant Center but in the shop: titles, images and GTINs come from there.
- 3Custom labels are the lever for steering budget by margin, stock and return rate. Without them Google treats every product the same.
- 4A feed is not an export. It is a product that gets maintained like a category page.
With search ads you decide which queries you appear for. With Shopping, Google decides, and the basis for that decision is your feed. Every missing attribute, every title copied from the shop backend, every wrong price takes auctions away from you that you could have won. The insidious part: it does not hurt. There is no error message. There are only impressions you never get.
Here are the seven mistakes we see most often, sorted by the damage they do. The first three cost reach, the next two cost click-through rate, the last two cost control.
The seven mistakes
- 1
Titles copied from the shop
The shop title is written for people already on your site. The feed title has to work for people typing into Google right now. Brand, product type, decisive attributes like material, colour, size, quantity, in the order people search. The first 70 characters count double because everything after is cut off.
- 2
Missing or wrong GTINs
Without a GTIN Google cannot match your product against its catalogue and ranks it lower. With a wrong GTIN, say the one of the case instead of the product, you end up in the wrong auction. Own brands without GTINs need the explicit flag that none exists, otherwise the field counts as missing.
- 3
Price and availability differ from the page
Google regularly checks whether the price in the feed matches the landing page. Mismatches lead to disapprovals, repeated mismatches to account suspension. Typical causes: promotions that only run in the shop, tiered pricing, currency rounding, a feed that updates once a day.
- 4
Images with text, watermarks or lifestyle scenes
The main image sits in a tile next to eight competitors. Cut-outs on white win there almost every time against lifestyle photos. Text in the image, logos and discount stickers violate the policies and depress click-through rate. Additional images are the place to show the product in use.
- 5
Product type and Google category missing or generic
The Google product category helps with matching, the product type is your own taxonomy and may be as deep as you like. Together they help decide which auctions you enter. A product type like Apparel is worthless. Apparel, Women, Tops, Blouses, Linen is one.
- 6
No custom labels
Without custom labels Google does not know which products carry 60 percent margin and which carry 8. It treats them the same and sends budget to wherever the conversion is easiest. With five labels you can steer margin tier, stock coverage, return rate, season and novelty. That is the difference between Shopping as a channel and Shopping as a control instrument.
- 7
Hotfixes in Merchant Center instead of at the source
Feed rules and supplemental feeds are handy for quick repairs. After two years, twenty rules sit on top of each other, nobody knows which one does what, and a new feed breaks everything. The source belongs in the shop or in a feed tool, Merchant Center is the output.
What a title has to do
The title is where things move fastest, so it deserves a closer look. A good feed title answers the question someone asked Google before they even clicked the ad.
Titles from the shop
- Air Zoom Pegasus 41
- Blouse Emma
- Whey Protein Vanilla
- Bundle Sale 3+1
Titles for search
- Nike Air Zoom Pegasus 41 Men's Running Shoe Black Size 9
- Women's Linen Blouse Long Sleeve White Emma Size 10
- Whey Protein Powder Vanilla 1 kg 30 Servings
- Organic Medjool Dates 4 x 500 g Bulk Pack
Mind the order. Google weights the start of the title more than the end, and on mobile users see only the first 35 to 40 characters. Brand first works when the brand is searched for. For own brands without recognition, the product type moves to the front and the brand to the end.
Custom labels that steer something
Five custom labels are available to you. Most stores use none, many use one for the season. Yet they are the only way to bring economic information into the feed that Google otherwise does not have. This is an assignment that lets you steer budget:
| Label | Content | What it steers |
|---|---|---|
| custom_label_0 | Contribution margin tier A to E | Own campaign and own target per tier |
| custom_label_1 | Stock coverage in weeks | Push clearance, throttle near-sold-out items before suspension |
| custom_label_2 | Return rate in three bands | Harder target for return-heavy products |
| custom_label_3 | Price position versus market | Bid aggressively where you are cheaper |
| custom_label_4 | New or bestseller | Launch budget for new products, cap for bestsellers |
Values come from the ERP and update daily. A margin maintained once a year steers nothing.
Ten-minute test
Open the diagnostics in Merchant Center and count the warnings for titles, images and GTINs. Then search Google for your best-selling product the way a customer would type it, without your brand name. Do you appear in the Shopping tiles? If not, the title is the first mistake you fix.
A feed is not an export. It is the only place where you can tell Google what your products are worth.
None of this is complicated. It is work nobody sees, in columns nobody reads. That is exactly why it has been left undone in most accounts, and exactly why it moves more than any new campaign.