Google Shopping Feed Optimizations for 10X Growth (2026 Updated)

In this video I'm going to show how you can 10x your Google Shopping ad performance like this from these needle mover feed optimizations. I'm going to break down in this video. For those who don't know me, my name is Austin Claire. I'm co founder of Grow My Ads, the channel you're on right now. We're a Google Ads agency that manages millions in ad spend per month and we have a ton of e commerce clients. So we know a thing or two about optimizing feeds. Let's dive in. Okay, I have a cheat sheet here. This is a part of our training group called PPC Copilot. So if you're part of that group you will have access to this sheet. Now I have the required feed attributes in here as well as the optionals and everything we recommend. I'm not going to go one by one through all of these. However I am going to go through this right here. The biggest needle movers and this is really the most important part right now. So if you can crack and work on these needle movers you will absolutely will see performance uptick in your shopping ad performance. Now, critical reminder. One thing you should be doing is always checking your diagnostics tab inside of Merchant center to make sure all of your products are actually approved. So let me hop in real quick and share that with you. So I'm inside of a Merchant center account and I'm under products right here. All I'm going to do is go over to this needs attention tab and I'm just going to hit View history. This is going to share if I had any problems with my products. Now there are a few things that do need attention. There's an invalid additional image link. There's some mismatched pricing with automatic updates, too many colors provided and image too small for YouTube shopping ads I guess. So nothing here is super critical. There's no like disapproval. All 1237 products are approved. I'm not too worried about this but there are a few things here that I should go into investigate. But this is absolutely important. A lot of people forget about this. They wait till they get a notification from Google or they see a decrease in performance in their account. Go keep an eye out on this history inside of the Diagnostics center within your Google Merchant center account. That way you know what product issues you are having. Okay. The absolute number one thing you can do to improve the the results of your shopping ad performance is actually price. Now I get it. Many of you can't control price. Maybe you're you're under map pricing or your prices are what your prices are. Right? However, if I sell this Owala tumbler And so do 10 other retailers, and my competition is 20% cheaper than I am, it doesn't matter if I have the best images, the best feed, the best attributes, the best campaign setup. None of that matters. What's going to matter is people are going to see that I can buy the same product from a competitor for 20% cheaper. So price will rule all. And that's why it's the number one optimization. But I understand that many of you can't control the price, so you have to, you know, advertise it with the price currently is. But just know price will rule all. Especially if there's a same product that you're selling that a competitor sells cheaper. Now when what you should never do, and I've seen people try to do this then is price baiting. So they'll lower the price in the feed and then try to do like a checkout hack to make it higher to what their actual price is. This will not get approved or this could get you suspended. Same with fake sale prices. Misleading pricing tactics. Google will catch you. Don't try to game your way in this. You have to run real sales, real prices. So don't think you can just kind of game your way through it. But no, pricing will rule all. Okay, so take pricing out, right? That's not something a lot of you have control over. But what you do have control over is your titles. Okay, so titles are a top ranking signal for your Google shopping placements. And the first 30 to 70 characters in your product ads are the most critical. So think how people search and, and the keywords that are important, those first 30 to 70 characters are really where you want to start baking in those top performing keywords for those products in your title. Now There's a full 150 characters that can be used and you should use as many as you can. But just know that first 30 to 70 is the most important for word order. So this is where you want to front load your top performing keywords and in the titles of your products. Now Google can automatically shift keywords around depending on search. Okay, for example, let's say I sell a wall, a Tumblr, right? And no one knows who a walla is. I might put a walla at the end of the title. So now it's going to be like you know, 32 ounce black spill proof water tumbler, Owalla or biowalla or however that gets thrown on There. But if someone searches for a brand search for a Walla, they'll put a Walla Tumblr. Then Google actually might take Owalla and put that in front on the title. That way you know it is the Awala Tumblr. So they can actually dynamically put different keywords that are in your titles. They're not adding keywords, so this would have to be in your title already. But, but they can move around the word order depending on the search the ad is showing for. So just know that you don't have control over it and that's why you want to make sure you have these main keywords in here. How I show you on how to best structure your titles in this video. But just know Google can dynamically change it for better performance based off of how someone is searching. Okay, so title structures, there's kind of a formulas to it that we have broken out in this like cheat sheet but it will differ on the product. Right. So if someone knows a wall very well or like Nike, then you absolutely want to front load usually the brand to the front. However, if your brand isn't as well known as like a Nike or a Walla, and many of you probably don't have brands that are that well known and people aren't generally searching for it, then you can put it towards the back. For example, I use a product here for a company called Home Reserve. Home Reserve is not like, you know, a household name. So we front loaded keywords like kid and pet friendly, sectional sofa and washable to the front and we pushed Home Reserve to the back. We still wanted our brand name in there, but I'm not front loading Home Reserve to the front of it when it's not as important as kid and pet friendly right now. Now if I'm Nike that's a little different. I more than likely want to implement Nike upfront. So it will depend on what you're selling. But like branded products like Nike, Apple, Samsung, you're going to definitely put those brands up front. You also are going to want to include other highly searched attributes. Right, like so I give an example Nike React Flight flyknit men's running shoes, Black gray, size 10 and a half. Well if someone's literally searching for that, that's what they want to find. So if I go do a search right now for Nike men's fly knit running shoes size 10, I want to see a size 10. And here we go. Here's a Nike react. This is fly knit 10 not give a color preference here. So that's fine. But there we go. I mean that could be the shoe I'm looking for. Right? And this ad was able to fire. Google was able to match that due to the fact that they also have that size attributes in there. So that makes sense a lot of times for branded products. That makes sense a lot of times for clothing and apparel. When you get down to like generic products or sometimes even like home goods or consumables, a lot of times there this is where you're going to want key benefits plus the product type and use cases. So for example, when I talked about home reserve, we front loaded kid and pet friendly sectional sofa, washable up front and then everything towards the back. Right? Which is like the product style and then the brand which is home reserve. Why did we do that? Because people are generically searching for like kid friendly sectional sofas, pet friendly sectional sofas, washable sectional sofa. So we want to bake that towards the front. We're not Apple, we're not an a wall, we're not like a super well known brand. So I'm trying to let Google know these are the top performing keywords for me and if someone searches that and sees that in the title, it's obviously going to have a higher chance of a higher click through rate because it resonates with their search. Okay, so for title optimizations you want to front load your highest converting keywords. Use natural language. How do people actually search for your products? Don't try to go to robot ish. ChatGPT can help by the way a lot with these title optimizations. If you just give it your products, give it this video to learn from and see how people are searching. So you want to use natural language. You want to include attributes especially if you're in apparel like size and color and gender when relevant and then you want to match the structure to how your customer searches. Just like I shared here with how different categories you kind of want to formulate the the title structures differently for some of those categories. Now things that people try to do and you never want to do, you do not want to add all caps in your titles. No excessive punctuation, no keyword stuffing. That doesn't make sense. That does not work. No generic titles without search relevant terms like this is a 32 ounce black Oala. I promise they're not like a sponsor or anything. I just use this thing all the time. So 32 ounce black OALA water tumbler. If I literally just had black water tumbler or even water tumbler as the title that's going nowhere. And by the way, I see a lot of people that have very, very generic titles. So if you have a generic title like that, you absolutely need to optimize your title and then ignore your search term report. Right? So when you're running campaigns, especially shopping campaigns, you're going to find certain searches are performing really well for you. Like I found for Home reserve with Kid Pet friendly and washable. Well, if you see those high performing keywords, bake those into your product titles, you will absolutely get a lift. And so here's a case study of Home reserve where we did exactly that and we got a 10x jump from clicks and impressions. That literally was from taking a title called Ali Sofa and Oscar Sterling because that was just how it was on the website back then. And we optimized it to this kid and pet friendly sectional sofa with washable and the brand of Home reserve and blasted off impressions and clicks. Our click through rate went through the roof when we did this. And guess what? Sales increased as well. Okay, the next important optimization is your G10 or GTIN, whatever you want to say, but this is a critical piece or attribute that people will ignore. A lot of times this allows Google to know what your product is. So you should have this global sort of trade identification number for your products. If you don't, you can look it up or you can contact your manufacturer supplier to provide that for you. There are cases when it's not available. So in our guide we tell you just set the identifier there to know. So this tells Google your product legitimately doesn't have a G10 number to it. But, but if you have and you should a G10, make sure it's added correctly to your products. This identifies from a universal level for Google the products, especially if you're reseller of products that other competition sells as well. So make sure you have this. It is a critical attribute and that's why I put it as one of the top attribute optimizations you can have within your feed. And it literally is just matching G10s to the correct products. Okay, images. Now this is where things can get kind of fun in today's world with AI technology and Google's product suite which I'm about to show you. So old approach here was usually white background only studio photos or professional photos which is usually expensive and time consuming. So now with the technology that we have with AI and with Google's product studio you can take pretty bad images and make some really cool images from. From the AI tech that we now have this has proven in certain markets. I have a YouTube video by the way where I talk about this using chat GPT that you can get a 2 to 3x lift in click through rate just by utilizing lifestyle images, taking a generic photo. Look what I did in that YouTube video and then creating a lifestyle image out of it. I did it for home reserve. So again, check that video out after this video if you want to learn more. Okay, I'm going to hop into Merchant Center. I'm going to show you how Google's Product Studio you can edit images inside of Merchant center today. Also I'm going to show you using Google's Nano Banana which is separate on how I used their AI technology there and created a boring static mattress image and then created a lifestyle image from it with one simple prop. So let's dive in. Okay, so I'm in Merchant center and I'm just going to go down to this creative content which by the way I do believe like this pretty new stuff here. I do believe we're going to see a continued expansion of the creative asset control that you have in the future. So right now I have Product Studio and video assets. Let's just go to Product Studio. So here you can do some things like generate product images in seconds. So we can hit here generate an image. We could upload an image or we could use one of our static images here. So I'm going to go add a product. So I'm going to click one of our products that we don't have. We're just using like a generic manufacturer product image right now. So I'm hitting next. So this uploaded that I'm going to hit confirm and then this is going to generate a scene. So you can we, we can do remove background. So let's say this had like bad background to it. We could literally just have Google remove it. We can increase the resolution. We can generate video from it here though if we wanted to do like a scene, which I'm going to have done. So let me add another one. I'm gonna hit next and then we're gonna hit confirm. So it says describe the product. Sectional sofa. That's really all you really need to do. Okay, so describe the scene. I just put Modern living room. There are some inspiring themes here. If you wanted to do, you know, events or nature or specific like studio settings. I don't really want that in this case. And then I'm just going to hit generate scene. Okay, there we go. So Google did come up with like four different scenes. These first Two I'm not a fan of. It makes the sectional sofa look too small. These bottom two aren't too bad. So if I come here like this one's not terrible. And so what I, I could do here is literally add to Merchant center or I could download this and then upload it to my products inside of Merchant Center. So I mean I took a very basic image of and I was able to AI generate something from there. They also gave me. So here on the main product studio they're giving me some inspiration that they've done. Some of these aren't really bad. Like this one's pretty good. Now I already have a lifestyle image for this specific product so it's kind of taking a really good image and just making it, in my opinion, actually worse. They just removed some of the background stuff. But Google will have, if you go into your product studio, there's probably some inspiration or products that they've already done some of this to that you can go check out. Okay, so that's what's available to you in Merchant center next. But if you're not thrilled with what you're getting there, you can take it a step further. Now I've already mentioned the video that I've done in the past on how I use Chat GPT to optimize my images. I'm going to share with you using Nano Bananas technology now on how easy this can be. So I am inside of my Google AI studio. If you don't know what any of this is, just, just like look it up, ask ChatGPT or Gemini, you can figure it out. But this is like a paid service that I have, but I'm using Nano Banana Pro. Okay. What I did is uploaded this generic mattress image which is not good. I don't want just to run this mattress. And what I did is also gave it a scene. So I took a reference image that I liked of another mattress but I liked, you know, you know they've got a rug. It's lifestyle, it pops it's way. This is going to make me click over this for sure. So all I said, and this is like the dumbest prompt you could ever do. I'm not like doing some sophisticated secret prompts here. Okay. So if I can do it, anyone can do it. All I said is show this mattress in a modern bedroom on a bed frame similar to the reference image I provided. Use light room colors. And within one prompt it came up with this. That is really good. And I, I, I didn't even have to like try to edit that and it's pretty dialed on the mattress itself. It didn't like go screw up what the mattress actually looked like. Sometimes these AI image generators do take the image of the product and turn it into a completely different product. I don't believe you should market that. I think that's unethical. So you want to make sure the product actually aligns with what your true product looks like. This does this like nailed it. My Chat GPT video I did. I kind of had a reprompt some of it because it wanted to make. It wanted to change the physical product that I was using, which was a mattress example as well. Again, I don't think you should go advertise product images that don't really align with what the true product is. So make sure AI gets it correct. I think they did a fabulous job in this example. So here I was able to go optimize a generic mattress image into this beautiful lifestyle image. I could simply download it and then just load up Merchant center and I could go into my products and I could just go into one of my generic products here, click into it. You hit Edit Product and I could just go upload this image now. Now I talk about tools later on. I. If you have big feeds, I highly recommend using a feed optimization tool that can do all of this for you in bulk. That way you don't have to one by one work with inside of Merchant Center. Next. I personally like a company called Channable, but there's others like Feedonomics and Data Feed Watch. So there are tools that make this easier. But if you want to, if you're scrappy and you just kind of want to play around with some Feed Optim stuff now you literally can just hop into your Google Merchant center account and go edit products and upload these images that you use Google Product Studio or Chat GPT or Gemini to go create. So I wanted to share this too. Google also has this video asset thing. I don't. I don't know. You can't use this for product images yet. So you could download this stuff that it's creating for you and then use it for like Performance Max Assets or something. But it's quite interesting. It like did this prompt for a product that I auto added. So like literally if I went video assets generate videos with AI and I just selected a product like this and then it was able to go through this animation. So it prompted like this, it created this prompt. I had to edit the prompt a little bit, but then it created like an animation like this which I don't think is terrible. Now the original one it created before I had to re edit the prompt makes the section sofa look like it's on fire. That I don't like. So this is new. You can see this is an experiment right now. I think if you're paying for tools like we have then you can do better than what's available in the anime image thing right now. But just know like Google as they're killing it in my opinion with their technology especially within Gemini and like the image generator with Nano Banana, that all of this is going to be baked into Merchant center and continue to evolve inside of Merchant Center. So you're going to have a ton of creative ability just inside Product Studio and it will continue to evolve in the future I believe. So there should be no excuse to have unoptimized images. Now what do I recommend doing? You don't want to probably go sit there and AI optimize every image you have. But what I do recommend you do is take some of your top performers, go create some lifestyle images or take bad images that you might have and increase the resolution, remove the background, whatever you have a problem with and go test. And all you have to do then is come inside your products inside Merchant center and you literally can just click in and go edit the images, go add it as an additional image inside Merchant Center. Again if you're using tools like Channable, you can do all of this with the tool in bulk but have you don't need to change your main image. Like I don't need to go change this main image right now. I need to. I'll keep that because you do want a static white background image still. But now I'll go add some lifestyle images here and see if it works. By the way, it usually does increase your click through rate. If I took especially like something like furniture, absolutely anything that could have a lifestyle image to it, it will increase the performance from at least a click through rate standpoint. Now ultimately I want more sales so you have to review the data but you will get a massive lift then on impressions and clicks generally from what we have found. Okay, so we have descriptions now. Now here's the thing. 8020 rule, okay. Spend 80% of that on titles and that's why titles is the second highest needle moving optimization you can make aside from price. Right. Descriptions we have found are important but they're not as important as titles. So we don't spend as much time trying to optimize the best descriptions in the world. We'll work on titles first. If that starts working, then we'll kind of take our top products that are performing and start adding optimize descriptions to it. Again, what do we really want to do? We, we want to make sure that we're putting high converting keywords naturally in those descriptions if they're missing using secondary keywords that might not be a part of our main title, but we want to bake that in. So Google knows these keywords are also important to us. Now we do want to write naturally in readable sentences, include key features and benefits and keep it accurate and honest. We don't want to do is keyword stuff descriptions. Like I say, don't keyword stuff titles, don't copy competitor descriptions, don't try to over optimize this and do not use all caps and excessive punctuation. So priority remember, fix titles. Then if you've got some high performing products and you've already done image optimizations, you've already done title optimizations, you've got G10s and the top attributes in there, then go in there and work the descriptions. But it's lower on the priority list. And I've seen a lot of people waste a lot of time on descriptions in my opinion. So only do it on products that are already top performing. And you've already done some of the main optimizations too. Okay, then you have categories. So Google has like 6000 plus categories. Good news is if you put a valid GTN in, Google will auto assign the category because they'll know what exactly that product is when you have to manually set that up. Google does a pretty good job of auto assigning if you don't know. And so there's this entire taxonomy here that I list in the sheet. But normally just know like Google's gonna do a pretty good job of auto categorizing. Just keep an eye out on it, make sure it's set up correctly. I've seen like obscure products where Google will misrepresent the product category it's in and so they get a decrease in true impressions on what they probably should be getting just due to that. Then you also have product type. This would be for your own internal organization. This also tells Google though how you are viewing this product and how you are categorizing this product. So it's still important, but this is going to be important from your own internal management standpoint. But it is, it's important. I always like to have correct product types set up as well. Okay, so then you have these custom labels, right? And let Me show you what a custom label looks like inside of our actual merchant center account. So if I go into merchant center and I go to products, what you're able to do with these custom labels is and again this won't impact like any sort of performance of the feed, but this will impact how you're able to manage the feed. So here we have a custom label zero set up and it's tagged new. This allows us to know hey this is a new product, this is a new product to the feedback and we have campaign structures then where we're optimizing or segmenting our campaigns by the custom label new. So we know only new products are going into that campaign to get a feel for how those products are doing. So we're using a custom label to actually do that. Again if you're not using something like Channable, you can kind of just come in here and add them at this label setting with inside a merchant center. Now some examples as to why you would want to use custom labels. You could have margins broken out, you could have performance segmentation. So like best sellers standard slow clearance or I just showed you like new products. So adding that there helps then seasonality. So if you have a holiday specific or summer or winter or back to school, whatever it's really great for that. Pricing tiers, if you want to go to like a pricing tier level that way you don't have a $10 product mixed in with like a $10,000 product. And then product life cycles like new arrivals, catalogs, retiring, discontinued, there's infinite ways of utilizing them. Now you don't want to over complicate it because then you're never going to even use these things. So this is a strategic thing on how you're managing your Google Ad shopping campaigns. But custom labels are very powerful and I love using them from a management and organization standpoint. So absolutely I love having custom labels set up. Okay, then you've got all your other attributes, right like brand which by the way is important. So especially again if you're like a Nike and then you've got all these other attributes. So if I hop back into like what that can look like it gets pretty crazy, right? So there's all these different product conditions, availability. Now some of these are required, I have that on that sheet. But we've got all of these other attributes that could be added especially depending on what your product type is. So again like apparel is going to have a bunch of different like sizes and materials and all of that age groups, things like that. We've got additional details and then you can even add further product attributes here. This can get super complex, right? This is where if it gets really complex you absolutely need to use a feed tool. Otherwise you're you'll go crazy. If you kind of have like a generic setup. Just make sure you're nailing the top recommended attributes that I lay out in this sheet or the Google Ads support page which I'll have a link to that will break down all the required feed attributes here. Make sure you're doing really well there and all the needle mover optimizations that I've talked about in this video. But go through if you have material, if you have colors, if you have part numbers, if you have styles, add as much as you can without going crazy because the more data you give Google, the more Google knows the better performance you usually end up with. Now you don't have to go on a hundred thousand SKU feed. Go crazy right away. So 80, 20 this start with your top sellers. Utilize feed tools if needed but add as much data that you can that you think will help. The more attributes in a feed generally means the better performance you'll have versus someone who has a very generic just like Shopify auto feed fetched with generic titles descriptions and generic attributes added then we have recommended tools. So I've already talked about Channable. They are my number one recommendation for feed optimization. There's Feedonomics if you're enterprise Feedonomics does it incredible job. They do hands on support with you so they'll actually build it the feed for you. They'll take care of all the issues. Again it's more enterprise level. It's going to be super expensive compared to like channel blower data feed watch. But if you're spending significant amounts of money on Google Ads so like a couple hundred thousand a year to millions. I do think it's well worth having a team like Feedonomics making sure you have a well optimized feed at all times. Getting on top of issues at all times. Especially if you have a large SKU feed like that's in you know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands in some cases millions. If you're smaller or even if you are big and you want to be more price conscious than channel to me is the number one recommendation. And then Data Feed Wash is another great inexpensive tool. It's definitely more diy so you will have to learn how to use the tool chainable. You have to as well. But they do seem to have really good support that can help when you have questions there. From what I've seen, those are my recommended tools. You don't need them. I showed you. You can go hack your way inside a merchant center so don't feel like wow, thanks for sharing all these optimizations with me. I don't know what to do with them now. You can literally go in. I just showed you. Go start with titles for a few products, go start with some images and go optimize those inside a merchant center and see the before and after performance you get just from a few simple tweaks that I shared in this video.