To maximise the effectiveness of your Google Shopping campaigns, it’s crucial to optimise your product feed. A well-structured feed ensures that your products are accurately represented and effectively reach potential customers.
Optimising your product data feed is the key to unlock the full potential of Google Shopping. By ensuring your product information is accurate, comprehensive, and engaging, you can attract more clicks, boost conversions, and increase your sales.
Here are 5 key shopping tactics that you must try
Elevate Your Product Visibility with GTINs
While no longer a mandatory requirement, Global Trade Item Numbers (GTINs) have emerged as a valuable tool for product feed optimisation. These unique identifiers, often provided by manufacturers, offer several compelling benefits:
- Enhanced Product Identification: GTINs act as a universal language for products, allowing Google to accurately match your product listings to relevant search queries. This accurate identification ensures that your products are displayed to the right audience, increasing the likelihood of conversions.
- Rich Product Information: When GTINs are provided, Google can automatically populate your product listings with rich product information, such as product descriptions, images, and reviews. This enriched content provides a more comprehensive and informative experience for potential customers, further enhancing your product's appeal.
- Improved Product Matching: GTINs facilitate accurate product matching across different marketplaces and platforms, enabling seamless cross-selling opportunities. This broader reach expands your product’s visibility and potential customer base.
- Streamlined Inventory Management: GTINs streamline inventory management by providing a standardised identifier for each product. This standardisation simplifies tracking and managing product stock levels, reducing the risk of stockouts and overstocking.
- Enhanced Brand Visibility: GTINs contribute to brand visibility by associating your products with specific brands and manufacturers. This association can strengthen brand recognition and attract loyal customers seeking specific brands.
While GTINs are not applicable in all cases, their benefits are undeniable. In situations where GTINs are unavailable, such as for handmade items, vintage products, or books published before ISBNs, alternative product identifiers should be utilised to ensure accurate product representation and identification.
Master Product Titles for Enhanced Search Relevance
Product titles play a pivotal role in ensuring that your ads align with user searches. As one of the most crucial attributes in your product feed, optimising product titles deserves a significant portion of your attention.
One of the best tactics is to postpone product title optimisation until other attributes have been refined. This approach allows you to leverage the optimised attributes to craft the most effective product titles possible.
The specific attributes you’ll want to incorporate into your product titles will vary depending on your product category or niche. Here’s a breakdown of key attributes for different product categories:
- Brand
- Product type
- Material
- Style
- Colour
- Size
- Fit
- Special features
By incorporating these relevant attributes into your product titles, you’ll enhance the visibility of your products in search results, attracting more potential customers and boosting your sales.
To ensure that your product titles effectively attract potential customers, craft compelling titles and consider these key concepts:
- Keyword Inclusion: Incorporate relevant keywords that align with user search queries. Utilise search term reports to identify high-converting keywords and strategically integrate them into your titles.
- Keyword Testing: Employ keyword testing within your product feed to pinpoint the most effective keywords for your specific products and target audience. This data-driven approach ensures that your titles are optimised for maximum impact.
- Mirror Product Information: Maintain consistency between product information on your website and your product titles. When users click on your ad, they should be greeted with the same accurate and detailed product descriptions they encountered in the search results.
- Front Load Important Details: Place crucial product information at the beginning of your titles. This prioritisation ensures that essential details remain visible even if the title gets truncated on the results page.
- Avoid Salesy Language: Refrain from using overly promotional or salesy language in your product titles. Focus on providing clear and concise product descriptions that accurately represent the product's features and benefits. This approach allows your products to appear in the most relevant searches and attract genuine customer interest.
Additional Tips:
- Utilise Numbers: Incorporate numbers, such as product dimensions, weights, or quantities, to enhance the clarity and informativeness of your product titles.
- Highlight Unique Features: Differentiate your products by emphasising their unique selling points and special features in the titles.
- Keep Titles Concise: Strive for concise and impactful titles that effectively convey the product's essence while adhering to character limits.
- Try A/B Testing: Continuously experiment with A/B testing to identify what resonates best with your target audience and drives repeat customer conversions.
- Schedule Updates: Schedule daily updates to ensure seamless synchronization with your feed and avoid mismatches, warnings, or account suspensions.
Optimise Colour Attributes: Enhance Product Searchability
Want to satisfy shoppers seeking specific product colours? Colour attributes are mandatory for apparel and accessories in certain countries, including Brazil, France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Past practices of simplifying product colours to match user search queries, such as changing “pomegranate” to “light red” or “red”, are no longer recommended. Google now matches colour attributes in your feed to the colour values on your landing pages, leading to disapprovals for mismatches.
Here are some of the best practises for colour attribute optimisation:
- Use the full colour name, except for Chinese, Japanese, or Korean languages, where a single character like 红 is acceptable.
- Avoid using numerical colour representations like HTML colours.
- Include one primary colour and up to two secondary colours.
- Combine the material attribute with the colour attribute for precious metal items, such as “silver necklace” or “gold ring”.
Choose the Right Image: Captivate Shoppers with Compelling Visuals
Product images are the first impression your products make on potential customers, so it's essential to ensure they are of the highest quality and effectively represent your products. Here are some key points to optimise your product image links:
- Embrace High-Quality Images for Mobile-Responsive Devices: Utilise high-resolution, clear images that showcase the product’s details and features in sharp focus. Consider the increasing prominence of mobile devices and ensure your images are optimised for smaller screens.
- Align Variants with Product Images: Accurately match the product variants displayed in your images with the actual variants available for purchase. This prevents customer confusion and ensures they receive the exact product they expect.
- Eliminate Distracting Overlays: Refrain from placing text, watermarks, sales pitches, or manufacturer part numbers directly on your product images. These overlays can obstruct the product's visual appeal and potentially lead to ad disapprovals.
- Test Product Images vs. Lifestyle Images: Experiment with both product-focused images and lifestyle images to determine which resonates better with your target audience. Product-focused images provide a detailed view of the product, while lifestyle images depict the product in a more contextual setting.
- Mismatched Variants: Failure to ensure that your product variants align with the corresponding images can lead to customer dissatisfaction and potential returns. As illustrated by the misplaced orange umbrella, mismatched variants can create confusion and undermine customer trust.
Sales and Merchant Promotions for Enhanced e-Commerce Success
Sales and merchant promotions serve as powerful catalysts for consumer purchasing decisions, often leading to significant spikes in click-through rates and reductions in cost per conversion. In fact, a Google study demonstrated that these promotions can trigger a remarkable 28% increase in conversion rates.
Consider an apparel retailer running a 30% off sale on T-shirts during spring break. To incorporate this promotion into their shopping ads, they would first create an attribute named “promotion_id” and assign the promo code "SAVE30" to the specific T-shirts included in the sale.
Next, they would navigate to their Google Merchant Center account and create the promotion under the “Promotions” tab. If the “Promotions” tab is not visible, they would need to complete the merchant promotions form first.
Google provides comprehensive instructions on how to create promotions, including setting effective start and end dates, specifying the applicable products (all or specific), and incorporating promo codes. These promotions can remain active for up to 3-4 months without requiring updates, making them ideal for extended sales or free shipping offers.
For businesses with multiple or frequently changing promotions, utilising a Google Promotions Feed to upload promotions to the Google Merchant Center may be a more suitable option.
A Google Promotions Feed is a structured file (txt, xml, or Google Sheets) that consolidates all online promotions and their associated data. The essential attributes to include in this feed are:
- promotion_id
- product_applicability
- offer_type
- long_title
- promotion_effective_dates
- redemption_channel
If you’ve been hesitant to embark on the Shopping ads journey, fret no more! Remember, a successful Shopping ads campaign hinges on a well-structured foundation. Seeking expert guidance? Get experienced professionals who can navigate the complexities of Shopping ads and elevate your campaigns to new heights.
At 360 OM, we specialise in helping ecommerce brands take their marketing efforts to the next level. Our team stays on top of industry trends, uses data-informed decisions to maximise your ROI, and provides full transparency through comprehensive reports.
