Google Shopping Feed Optimizations for 10X Growth [Free Cheat Sheet Included]

Hey, this is Austin from Grow My Ads. And in today's video, I have something very special for you guys. We're going to talk about Google Shopping Feed optimization, which melts people's minds sometimes. Sounds way too complex. I have built a complete cheat sheet on how to optimize your feed in the simplest way. That's going to move the needle for you. So I'm taking all the complexity, I'm going to break it down in this simple video and I also have a simple cheat sheet for you guys to be able to use. I'm also going to show you one optimization that I made that also 10x start impressions and clicks. So I'm going to give you a real life case study on how you potentially can have the same results in your account. Let's dive in. All right, let's start with a bit of the chaos. I'm inside of a merchant center account and this is where your shopping feed lives. I'm actually going to go. You can add products manually. Now don't suggest that. We recommend certain tools. If you have like five SKUs and availability never changes and pricing never changes, fine. You can get away with these manual feeds either through a Google sheet or, or by actually going in and manually creating them inside a merchant center. However, most e commerce businesses have lots of SKUs and it needs to be auto fetched, usually daily, in some cases even hourly if for very, very large SKU counts. But inventory is changing, prices changing, lots of different things are changing that needs to be done automatically. That should not be reliant on a human being manually changing all of that. So most of Google Shopping feeds are going to be an automatic sort of fetched process. However, I just want to show all of the attributes that are part of a feed and the easiest way to show that is actually just going in and trying to add a product inside of merchant center. So here we have country and language, destination, then all these different product identifiers. So if we go to Advanced, you know, we've got UPCs and GTIN numbers, manufacturer part numbers, etc. We have IDs or SKUs titles, brand description, landing pages, image landing pages, and then if I hit Advanced it even gets further additional image links, mobile links. You go here for price and availability. Wow, look at all that. I'm not even going to go through all of that. But price, sale price, unit price, measuring installment, etc. Detailed product descriptions. This even gets crazy. Look at all of that data that you can give it. Shipping normally is going to be set up inside of your merchant center account inside of the actual shipping and return settings. So usually this isn't something you have to to mess with, but you can put your shipping information inside the feed too. All right, why am I showing all this craziness? And then here's Google product category. Because this is what most people get. Like they see this for the first time. It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is way too much. I don't even know what I'm doing. Relax. I have a complete cheat sheet now, so I'm going to bring that up. Boom. This will be in the description for you. I've got the Google Ad support page here for you too. This is like all the product data requirements that you do need. So there are certain requirements that you have to have. So all out of all those attributes that I just showed you, you don't need all of them. And in fact, in most cases it's, you know, adding as much detail into your feed is always good. So filling out all the attributes, sometimes that's impossible to do. So you don't necessarily need to do all of that. There are required ones though. If you don't have the required attributes added to your feed, Google will just simply disapprove it. And so here I did link the support page. This gives you a complete breakdown of all required fields and then it gives you more information than what I'm giving you in my cheat sheet. In the cheat sheet though, we do have required feed attributes and then optional feed attributes. I do put a recommended sort of bold tag next to the ones that, hey, these are optional, but we absolutely recommend adding these. And I'll go in further detail below. Number one thing though, this is all that really matters. Biggest needle movers. And again, I'm gonna Show you how I 10x impressions and clicks for literally one product just by doing one of these optimizations. I'm gonna talk about. So biggest needle movers. This is based off of my experience. I made these emoji ranking systems up. Other people may rank these differently. Number one though, to me is price. I'll talk about that because I get it, you can't always control price. But that is doesn't matter how crappy your feed is. If your price is lower and Google knows it's the same product, you're. You're usually going to win. Tidal. Tidal is a massive, massive mover. We'll talk about that. The gtin number pretty big today. Not as big years ago, five years ago. Google has really been hitting hard on the adding that number into Your feed image description and then category. So these get, you know, little ones but these are important. So you know, here is six big needle movers. But you know, look at that, look at this list of the required and optional feed attributes. But these, when you're doing optimizations are what you should be focusing on. The most technically title being the biggest one that you want to focus on. Okay, so little note here. Make sure to check your merchant center account often. Review your diagnostics tab for any feed or product issues. That's number one. So when you have this feed, I'm going to hop back into a merchant center account. Okay, so I'm back inside of this merchant center account. I am in the diagnostics tab here under products. You'll see. I actually in this one have some expiring products coming up. So this needs to be. Now this is usually an auto fetched feed so I'll have to review that. But this is number one. Just checking this tab inside of your merchant center account. This should be done all the time. If you have disapproved products, it's going to show which products are disapproved. And then down here in this issue, it's going to give you the issue with those products. From there you can investigate what do I need to do? But this is one of the key things to keeping your feet healthy and optimized is literally just making sure you don't have a bunch of disapproved products. I can't tell you how many times I've done an audit. I go check their merchant center account out and it's just riddled with disapprovals. So it's like, okay, hey guys, 20% of your products aren't even showing because you have these, you know, obscure disapprovals. Let's get that fixed and cleaned up first. So, so always be checking this. There are email alerts you can get and if you're using feed software solutions that I'm going to be recommending, some of them will actually email you when you have these disapprovals. So you can kind of automate the process. But if you can't automate it, just check this thing, you know, every other day or once a week at the minimum. At our agency it's an SOP for all of the analysts to be checking Merchant center, at least at the minimum, once a week. But a lot of our analysts are inside the accounts every single day. So this is something that's always just being checked. Make sure you're checking this out for your feed. So let's hop back into the cheat sheet. All right, so I'm back in this cheat sheet. Let's talk about biggest needle movers. So number one being price, right? Listen, price I put as number one just because it usually will always win. It doesn't matter if your title sucks, it doesn't matter if the description is terrible, doesn't even matter if it's properly categorized. If Google knows that you sell the same product as other resellers but your price is 20% cheaper, you always win. That is just due to the fact that Google knows price is always going to get the click through their, you know, analytics we've tested in cases where we are a reseller if we're able to sell cheaper price, you know, is just like the simple biggest needle mover now might not make macro sense for your business. You may not even be able to change price if you're products especially if there's map pricing involved with some of the the brands and manufacturers of products that you're selling. Totally get it. So I put this as number one. But you may have literally nothing you can do to move this. I get it. I just wanted to put that in there. The other comment, don't try sneaky price baiting tricks. Google always will catch this. We've had clients in the past where they want to try these certain click baity price tactics. And listen, it just no one built, you know, a billion dollar company by doing tricky little optimizations to, to their feeds. Okay, so that may work in the short term, but what happens is Google's algorithm or even the manual review team will catch it and in some cases you get suspended. A lot of times they're going to, you know, disapprove it and give you time to fix it. But this is not a long term strategy. So fine, you may get a week or two gain doing something a little on the sneaky or tricky side of things. It means nothing in the long term. So just play by the rules and figure out how to optimize these other attributes instead of trying to bait and switch people. And so I put that in there because I've had so many conversations with clients or even prospects on trying to do these sort of price baiting things to the feed and it just never works long term. I don't have a single client ever in our book that has done anything where it would be more on what I would consider the shady side of things on trying these price baiting tricks. Just that doesn't work long term. So just stay away from that title. This is so if we Take price out of the equation. This is the number one thing you should be optimizing. Out of everything we've tested, title always has the biggest needle mover for us. And I'm going to show you the case where I 10x clicks and impressions literally based off optimizing the title. So few things to consider. Word order matters. So keep the most important keywords in the front of the title. And also Google only reads 150 characters. And in the SERPs, the results on the, you know, actual search engine page of Google sometimes it gets cut off at the 30 characters. So that front part of your title always is the most important. So consider how people in your space search for your products. Are they typing in brand plus, maybe the product type or the exact product model first or do they not know brands and there's not a lot of brand awareness. It's, you know, maybe a commoditized type product where they're not really looking for a specific brand but they're just looking for a specific product that is key to how you want to optimize your title. If you sell Nike React Flyknit running shoes, people are searching that exact title. They want the Nike react Flyknit running shoe. So having Nike up front is very vital. You would not put running shoe in the beginning of the title and then push Nike to the back. Would it make sense? And, and potentially it gets cut off in the actual product listing when you're, when you're shopping on the ad. So actually let's do a quick, let's do a quick search. So I'm going to do Nike React Fly knit. Well, I didn't quite go there. Let's at least add the running shoe piece. So here you see how Nike is in every single one of these product ads. Well that they know that's very important. Right? So if, if in that example I was giving you, if Nike was at the back and then you didn't see it because it gets cut off here. Well, your chances of getting, you know, you know this type of impression is going to be less and that's mainly going to be from the fact that people are going to the click through rate will be lower on that. So here's an example though of why Nike upfront is very important. Check your search query report, see what are your highest converting searches and bake those terms into the title where it makes sense. So here's some title structure ideas for you. Clothing and apparel like I just showed you for Nike here we have brand gender is very important. Let's do a, a search here. I'm going to do Nike React flight net men's running shoe. You see how now men's in is in here pretty important right? If I go back to the original page here where I did not have the gender in the search term, you'll see the first one is women's. Well, not that I couldn't wear a women's shoe probably but that doesn't make sense. Right. So I'm, I'm looking for a men's Nike React Fly flyknit running shoe. Having that in the title is very, very important especially for clothing and apparel. So always make sure to have that product type, color, size, material so clothing and apparel can get, you know there's a lot you can be doing there. Consumables, brand, product type attribution like weight and count, hard goods, electronics, books and even seasonal type products. What's the occasion? Is it a Halloween specific? It is a Christmas specific product. Bake that stuff in there. So here's a complete, you know breakdown for you on title structure ideas. This should be a great templated format for you guys to be able to use when looking at your feed and how to optimize it. I even made the note here. You'll notice the most entitled structures put brand in front of the titles but if your brand is unknown, throw it in the back. So for example and this is one of the cases I have, this is a furniture company called Home Reserve. Their old title was just Ali Sofa and Oscar Sterling. What does that even mean? Well if you're shopping on their website it you know what you're looking at. So if I go to Home Reserve's website and we go to sectional. So here's Ali. So if I'm here I know this is a sectional that I'm looking at on Home Reserve's website, right. And so alley sectional in Oscar Sterling. This is big basically what the feed was because the feed was just pulling this information from the back end because they're, they have lots of SKUs. So their product feed was set up from a lot of this back end data. Well this is not an optimized title for, for a product ad. So what we did here is we baked in and Home Reserve is not some well known brand. It's a big brand but it's people aren't necessarily looking for home reserve. They are looking for pet friendly washable, kid friendly sectional sofas. Those are some of the top search terms for us. And so what we did is we took this old Title Ali Sofa and Oscar Sterling. And then we changed it and baked in the top converting search terms that we have or at least some of them. So we have kid and pet friendly sectional sofa, washable Ally and Oscar Sterling. I'm still adding that because that's technically the, the product. And then I even put in home reserve there. Check this out. We had a 10x if not more in our clicks and impression. So this is back in April when we made this test. You can see here, you know, we were probably in the, I don't know, 3000 impression range and we've shot up to over at the peak we almost hit 60,000 impressions and clicks were about 300. So here I believe again, you know, we might have been getting like 30 clicks a day down here. I don't have the actual account pulled up right now. This is just a graph, but this, I'm not, I'm not kidding. We didn't do anything else. All we did was change that title and this shot up like that before. Here's why. Before we were like, we would search for kid friendly sectional sofa or pet friendly sectional sofa and our product ads were never shown. I'm like, well how's that possible? So we, you know, we're looking at the feed. Oh well, we don't even have those terms baked into the title anywhere. Okay. So I just searched kid and pet friendly sectional and here we are in the second spot here on, on our product ad listing. So before I would search this exact same search term and we would not show at all. This is why our impressions and clicks 10x because we baked in those top terms. And you'll notice home reserves at the end there. Because most people who are searching this have no idea who home reserve even is. We're introducing them to it. But here we are. When you look over, what do you see? You see that kid and pet key keyword right there? That's instantly going to get your attention. So title optimizations are massive when it comes to increasing impressions and clicks, which hopefully increases your conversions and overall. All right, then we have gtin. So our gtin number. If you don't know what or where that's at, ask your manufacturer or supplier where you're getting your products. You can do a barcode lookup. You can even search at this link here. If you have this, add it. Google wants this in the feeds now. They, they harp on it quite a bit over the last couple years. I don't really have any data proving a percent gain or anything. I just know Google has Put a huge emphasis on adding this in the feed. So make sure if you have it, get it added images. Make sure you have high quality images. Make sure transparent or white background and no watermarks or text. If you're taking photos of your products on your iPhone, on your desk, your images are no good. And I've seen that happen by the way. Test different images for your top sellers. This is a big one. So a lot of e commerce companies, they're kind of just pulling the images that they get from their suppliers. Well then all their competitors are using those same images too. That may be fine in the beginning. However if you have some top sellers it might be worth investing in some better quality photos. Lifestyle Photos vs Studio. Doing different types of AB test for for those styles or even just a different shot of of the product itself. If all the competitors that you have are using the same sort of a image just by changing the angle could, could make a difference for you. So image is important. I would, you know this is like an 8020 thing or like a 9010. Just do it for your top products and then start testing from there. You don't need to go and pay you know a bunch of money to have like 20,000 SKUs redone. That wouldn't be a wise decision. So just take your top products even if it's just start with one and and test your image qualities there. Descriptions. Listen Descriptions. Kind of same idea as your product titles. We have a full blog post by the way up here. Feed optimization guide so you can go to this. This is going to break down a lot of like titles and descriptions and give you like some more visual examples than I have in the cheat sheet. So make sure to go read that. But descriptions just make sure biggest key point here. Bake in primary keywords. Just make sure you're baking in primary keywords. I have also witnessed a lot, a lot of companies try to invest a lot in description optimization. Title is more important. So focus more on title versus description but don't have sucky descriptions either. Make sure your descriptions are decent but spend more time on title optimizations than description. And again bake in those core keywords in there category not as important. You can check out Google's sort of taxonomy here of all the different product categories and types. Here's the thing, if you don't add this, Google will automatically add it for you. You can actually check that in merchant center if you go to the product itself. So it will get auto applied. I still think it's in. It's an Optional attribute. Having the correct Google product categories can make a difference and so do your best to put it in the correct category based off of this, which again is linked in the cheat sheet. But if you don't know in some cases just just leave it blank and then see what Google Auto applies to it and then go manually add it yourself if you want to. Again so this is optional attribute but it is important and so do the research, put the time in, try to find the correct category. Then we have custom labels. This you'll notice is not a required field either. Here's why I like custom labels. It doesn't actually impact your feed quality, however it impacts the management of your shopping campaigns or performance max campaigns at this point. And so account analysis data is easier to pull when you're using custom labels and then it's off. Also just easier to do, you know, splits, whether that's asset group splits or shopping campaign splits. So some ideas for custom labels. Bestsellers, margin, season price tiers, new products we use custom labels all the time. It just makes a world of a difference when you're actually managing especially a large feed. You know, hundreds of thousands of SKUs or even tens of thousands of SKUs makes it way easier for us when we're actually doing the campaign structures and build outs to be utilizing custom labels. Don't overload your feed with too many of them. It can make it kind of hard then to manage and track your data. I've seen people go way overboard here, so try to just really focus on the core custom labels that you'll need for your account for whatever account management structures that you're looking for on your campaigns, then other attributes. I just threw this in here. Go look at our blog. I've already mentioned it. Just go look at the post. We've got a lot of information in there, but it is good. You know, if you, if you're apparel, you know, we use this Nike example here. If you sell this Nike shoe, it's good. Add your part numbers, add your material. If you can add, you know, it's a low cut, it's a round toe, it's a flat heel. If you can get all of this information in there, Google's just going to have more data to work with. Again, a lot of this isn't required, but the more data usually the better quality you're going to get in regards to the search terms that are being shown or your ads are being shown for. And so if you can take the time, put in as much data as possible, that's why you know, other attributes even though they may not be required. Take the time to go in there and actually make that happen. All right, to sum it up, recommended tools, you're like, how do I actually do this? Well, that's where software comes in handy. So there's one if you're enterprise level, if you're spending $100,000 plus per month or more and you've got tons of SKUs, tens of thousands or even hundred thousand plus, I recommend Feedonomics. Feedonomics is expensive now, but it's worth it in the long run when you run into feed issues. And Feedonomics support team actually helps with a lot of that. I've worked with Feedonomics now probably for five plus years for our big spenders. Doesn't make sense if you know you're only spending 10k a month on, on ads. Feedonomics is going to be way, way too pricey for you. So it is more enterprise level. But if you are a big spender, if you're E Commerce, you know, 80% of that's probably going to your performance max campaigns or shopping ads, Feedonomics is a great resource to have and so I do recommend them. Then if you need a more inexpensive option, maybe you're only spending a few thousand or $10,000 or less per month even if you're under $100,000 per month in ad spend. Data Feed Watch I like Data Feed Watch a lot. There is a bit of a learning curve to it, but if you're working with an agency like ourselves, you just can rely on them to take care of that for you. But if you are managing this yourself in house, Data Feed Watch is great, great tool. So we use this for a lot of our clients now it is a more do it yourself but it just makes the data feed management a lot, a lot easier versus you know, just relying on sort of merchant center and you know, your developer or yourself if you are, you know, in control of all of this. So their price is, it's not too bad. You can, you know, go on their website and check this out. I think it's for most of our clients it's only, you know, about a hundred dollars a month. Again, little learning curve to it if you're going to be using this yourself. But a great solution overall for the, the more inexpensive side. There are some other companies out there. We've used several of them. They could be okay. We've just had the best experience with Data Feed Watch. And then if you're enterprise level, Feedonomics all right. If you made it this far, first off, congratulations. I know there's a lot to talk about with feed optimizations. However, the cheat sheet that I created for your Google Shopping feed optimization. I wish I had this resource when I was starting out, you know, a decade ago. Utilize this focus on those main needle mover optimizations and you will start seeing uptake in those impressions, clicks and then hopefully conversions. I hope you enjoyed the video. I hope this helps many of you who actually watch this full video and I will see you on the next video. Thanks.