Google Shopping ads are a powerhouse solution for driving ecommerce sales. The American Marketing Association reports that nearly a third of shoppers begin their purchase journey on Google, and many more will touch Google Shopping results at some point before making a decision.
Luckily, marketers can take a big step toward boosting their Google Shopping campaign success by optimizing their product feed. With an optimized product feed, you’re putting forward the most compelling copy, the highest-quality images, and the most relevant tags for every SKU in your catalog.
Let’s take a look at some of the most important paid search optimization techniques for your Google Shopping feed—with a quick stop to figure out why you should do this in the first place.
Why Google Shopping feed optimization is more important than ever
A merchant’s product feed is what Google uses to determine when and where Shopping ads surface. That’s why product feed optimization is the linchpin of a profitable Google Shopping campaign.
Product feed optimization–including relevant information and elements in a logical manner–helps increase the potential for impressions, click-throughs, and conversions. When your products are correctly tagged with high-quality images and informative copy on the product detail pages, you’re sending a signal to Google to surface your products on relevant Google Shopping searches. That means more visibility, more clicks, and improved ROAS.
Optimization in an era of change
If you’re in the PPC ad space, you’re likely aware of the big changes rocking ecommerce advertising. You probably saw Amazon conspicuously exit Google Shopping in the summer of 2025, then come crashing back in just in time for Labor Day. And you’ve probably seen innovations like Google AI Mode rapidly reshape how your customers are discovering products.
The opaque movements of big players make it nearly impossible to predict where the market will go next. One thing that’s for sure: Your brand will have a better chance of weathering the changes effectively if you’ve optimized your product feed first.
Compliant vs competitive product feeds
In a product feed, compliance means following all of Google’s rules for images, copy, and other elements of product listings.
Basically, a compliant feed is the bare minimum: what you need to avoid having your products rejected by Google Shopping, or rarely appearing in ads. If you’re experiencing any of these challenges with your Google Shopping ads, there’s a good chance you need to do some optimization work:
- Ads not showing for relevant searches
- Increased cost-per-click when adverts do surface
- Better performance from competitors relative to your campaigns
But compliance alone isn’t enough to win auctions or conversions. To get ahead, you need a competitive product feed that’s optimized for scale and efficiency.
Key product feed optimization strategies
These tactical moves can help you ensure Google Shopping is surfacing your products—and improve your conversions along the way.
Optimize product titles for search intent
In addition to including the right keywords, product titles should be search-friendly, clickable, and aligned with what users are searching for. This means that retailers should include other essential product elements, such as:
- Brand
- Color
- Size
- Attributes
Pay attention to title structure, too. Here’s a common generic title format that’s easy to optimize:
- Brand – Attributes – Product Type – Model Number
Keep in mind that different categories might need different title structures. For apparel items, you might use:
- Brand – Gender – Product Type – Attributes
Enrich product descriptions for relevance
One thing you won’t be lacking in Google Shopping descriptions is space: Google gives retailers a whopping 10,000 characters.
Sellers should take advantage of this to give shoppers relevant info, but be careful to avoid bogging down their descriptions with excessive word count.
Some of the most critical info that should go in most descriptions includes:
- Crafting descriptions between 500 and 1,500 characters
- Highlight the most prominent benefits gained
- Include highly relevant attributes (size, special features, etc.)
- Describe visual components like patterns or designs to help Google surface the item for related searches
- Always ensure proper grammar and punctuation, and limit the usage of special characters
Use high-quality, compliant images
Images are your first opportunity to put your best foot forward with consumers. To guarantee that product images stand out to shoppers, ensure that:
- All photos are the highest resolution available (a minimum of 800 pixels in height and width)
- The main image provides a clear view of the item against a white background
- Products are shown from multiple angles
- Supplemental images showcase product information to consumers, such as usage, relative size, benefits, etc.
- Ensure that variants match the picture (color, pattern, size, etc.)
If at all possible, you should try to include at least three high-quality images per product. For merchants who are just getting started and don’t have that many photos, at least make sure to meet this criterion for your flagship products.
Fill out required and optional attributes
Blank fields in your product information are often missed opportunities to get your product in front of consumers. At a minimum, you’ll need to fill out all of the following for most products, as listed by Google Merchant Center:
- id: Unique product identifier
- title: Product name (max 150 characters)
- description: Product description (max 5000 characters)
- link: Landing page URL
- image_link: Main product image URL
- availability: Product availability status (in_stock, out_of_stock, preorder, backorder)
- price: Price including currency (e.g., 19.99 USD)
- brand: Required for all new products except books and media
- gtin: Global Trade Item Number (if available or required by category)
- mpn: Manufacturer Part Number (required if GTIN not available and required by category)
- condition: Only required if product is used or refurbished (new is default)
- shipping: Required in some countries (e.g., US) or if variable by region
- identifier_exists: (Optional but recommended, clarifies if GTIN, MPN, brand are not available)
Beyond these basics, there are dozens of other attributes to consider. Some may not apply to your product, but note that even attributes that aren’t directly relevant for consumers (such as cost of goods sold) can provide you with more data in whichever analytics platforms you use to track sales.
Assign the right Google product category
The product categories section often doesn’t get the love it deserves from retailers. There are scores of sellers who simply select a single category for the entirety of their feed, leaving it woefully under-optimized.
Part of the reason for this is that Google’s Product Taxonomy can be frustrating to use. Sometimes, things will be condensed into a single category, whereas others are broken out into extreme detail.
For instance, if a retailer is selling posters, the category they would select is:
- Home & Garden > Decor > Artwork > Posters, Prints, & Visual Artwork
This category encompasses many different kinds of products.
On the other hand, there’s a whole category dedicated to keyhole escutcheons:
- Hardware > Building Materials > Door Hardware > Door Keyhole Escutcheons
(It turns out an escutcheon is the plate around the keyhole on a door. Who knew?)
This is the point exactly. Escutcheons get their own category, while anything visual that hangs on someone’s walls is crammed into a single group. Because of this type of dichotomy, it can be challenging for sellers to know if they are using the most relevant category possible, which leads to sellers settling for “good enough.”
As Google continues to move further away from keyword matching, the company will increasingly rely on other indicators (such as categories) to surface relevant products for users. So it’s worth taking the time to figure out which category truly offers the best fit for your product.
Enrich product descriptions for relevance
One thing you won’t be lacking in Google Shopping descriptions is space: Google gives retailers a whopping 10,000 characters.
Sellers should take advantage of this to give shoppers relevant info, but be careful to avoid bogging down their descriptions with excessive word count.
Some of the most critical info that should go in most descriptions includes:
- Crafting descriptions between 500 and 1,500 characters
- Highlight the most prominent benefits gained
- Include highly relevant attributes (size, special features, etc.)
- Describe visual components like patterns or designs to help Google surface the item for related searches
- Always ensure proper grammar and punctuation, and limit the usage of special characters
Use high-quality, compliant images
Images are your first opportunity to put your best foot forward with consumers. To guarantee that product images stand out to shoppers, ensure that:
- All photos are the highest resolution available (a minimum of 800 pixels in height and width)
- The main image provides a clear view of the item against a white background
- Products are shown from multiple angles
- Supplemental images showcase product information to consumers, such as usage, relative size, benefits, etc.
- Ensure that variants match the picture (color, pattern, size, etc.)
If at all possible, you should try to include at least three high-quality images per product. For merchants who are just getting started and don’t have that many photos, at least make sure to meet this criterion for your flagship products.
Fill out required and optional attributes
Blank fields in your product information are often missed opportunities to get your product in front of consumers. At a minimum, you’ll need to fill out all of the following for most products, as listed by Google Merchant Center:
- id: Unique product identifier
- title: Product name (max 150 characters)
- description: Product description (max 5000 characters)
- link: Landing page URL
- image_link: Main product image URL
- availability: Product availability status (in_stock, out_of_stock, preorder, backorder)
- price: Price including currency (e.g., 19.99 USD)
- brand: Required for all new products except books and media
- gtin: Global Trade Item Number (if available or required by category)
- mpn: Manufacturer Part Number (required if GTIN not available and required by category)
- condition: Only required if product is used or refurbished (new is default)
- shipping: Required in some countries (e.g., US) or if variable by region
- identifier_exists: (Optional but recommended, clarifies if GTIN, MPN, brand are not available)
Beyond these basics, there are dozens of other attributes to consider. Some may not apply to your product, but note that even attributes that aren’t directly relevant for consumers (such as cost of goods sold) can provide you with more data in whichever analytics platforms you use to track sales.
Assign the right Google product category
The product categories section often doesn’t get the love it deserves from retailers. There are scores of sellers who simply select a single category for the entirety of their feed, leaving it woefully under-optimized.
Part of the reason for this is that Google’s Product Taxonomy can be frustrating to use. Sometimes, things will be condensed into a single category, whereas others are broken out into extreme detail.
For instance, if a retailer is selling posters, the category they would select is:
- Home & Garden > Decor > Artwork > Posters, Prints, & Visual Artwork
This category encompasses many different kinds of products.
On the other hand, there’s a whole category dedicated to keyhole escutcheons:
- Hardware > Building Materials > Door Hardware > Door Keyhole Escutcheons
(It turns out an escutcheon is the plate around the keyhole on a door. Who knew?)
This is the point exactly. Escutcheons get their own category, while anything visual that hangs on someone’s walls is crammed into a single group. Because of this type of dichotomy, it can be challenging for sellers to know if they are using the most relevant category possible, which leads to sellers settling for “good enough.”
As Google continues to move further away from keyword matching, the company will increasingly rely on other indicators (such as categories) to surface relevant products for users. So it’s worth taking the time to figure out which category truly offers the best fit for your product.
Align feed data with landing pages
The data in your product feed should be aligned as much as possible with the titles and descriptions on your landing pages. For an example of how this works, let’s look at the product color attribute, as you might find on clothes or home decor that comes in multiple colors.
Formerly, Google Shopping ads best practices dictated that sellers list the colors of their items as something that a user might search. For instance, “Macaroni and Cheese” would be listed as “Orange” instead, for the sake of simplicity.
However, since Google crawls the microdata of landing pages and cross-references the information found with the feed data, retailers could end up harming their campaigns with such mismatches. The takeaway: Either change the color on your site to a simpler identifier, or just list it as is in the product feed.
Monitor GTINs
Global Trade Identification Numbers (GTINs) are a set of standardized codes for items that include everything from UPC barcodes to ISBN book codes. GTINs aren’t strictly required by Google, and some products (such as antiques or handmade goods) don’t have them at all. However, there are a lot of benefits to making sure you list any GTINs associated with your item.
First, the engine uses a product’s GTIN to place merchant ads into an auction with other sellers of the same item—so, without GTINs, your listings are unlikely to be competitive. GTINs also enable Shopping ads to earn placement for high-in-the-funnel searches, utilizing terms like “Top” or “Best.”
This means that the inclusion of GTINs can help retailers to gain exposure to large audiences, thereby increasing brand awareness and conversions. As Google itself states about GTIN usage:
“A GTIN helps us make your ad or unpaid listing easier for your customers to find. Products submitted without any unique product identifiers are difficult to classify and may not be eligible for all Shopping programs or features.
Some products don’t have a GTIN assigned, and so you don’t need to submit one. However, if the product does have a GTIN assigned and you don’t submit it, the performance of the product could be significantly limited.”
Segment products with custom labels
Creating custom labels for Shopping campaigns is an excellent opportunity for product feed optimization, as it relates to internal reporting and campaign structuring. With custom labels, retailers can better segment their products for optimized bidding and reporting.
Some of the most common things you can use as custom labels (outside of price competitiveness) include:
- Best-selling products
- Price range
- Profit margin
By using labels, merchants can effectively prioritize their bidding strategies and more accurately report the outcomes of campaigns along various verticals.
Enable merchant promotions and annotations
Google merchant promotions are an ideal tool for product feed optimization, often resulting in increased click-throughs and reduced cost per conversion.
For retailers who want to include a promotional code in their Google Shopping ads, you can create an attribute called “promotion_id”, which populates paid ad listings with a “Special Offer” tag that shows consumers the related code.
Some tried-and-true promotions that sellers can run include:
- Free shipping
- Buy one, get one free
- Buy one, get one half off
- Percentage or dollars off offers
The process starts with activating the Promotions add-on within your Google Merchant Center Account. Once the add-on is activated, you can create promotions from the “Promotions” tab. Here, sellers can find instructions on how to create promotions for their Google Shopping ads, including how to set start and end dates, select specific products or all items, and other pertinent details.
If you have a variety of promotions or offers that change frequently, use the Google Promotions Feed to upload promotions to the Merchant Center.
Maintain consistent availability and pricing
It’s also critical to keep availability and pricing data consistent between your product feed and the actual status of your items. Shoppers don’t want to click an item in their Google Shopping feed and find that it’s no longer available, or that it’s increased in price from the listing they saw. Since Google wants to cultivate trust with customers, you might find your products delisted or downranked if you fail to keep availability and pricing data consistent.
To prevent this, most merchants use tools that automate feed updates. Google offers several ways to do this, including setting up scheduled fetches from your website and turning on the Automatic Item Updates feature in Google Merchant Center. Major ecommerce platforms like Shopify and Magento also offer built-in options for using APIs to automate your product feed.
Suppress low-performing or out-of-stock SKUs
You can keep certain SKUs out of your feed if they go out of stock or are failing to meet your business goals.
For out-of-stock items, you can set up your feed to automatically change the availability, as we just mentioned. You can also use the “pause” attribute to prevent your product from showing up in paid ads, organic listings, or both.
Items with unfavorable attributes, like high CPAs or low conversions, can be automatically excluded from your feed by setting attribute rules in Google Merchant Center. You can have Google automatically exclude items above or below certain values in these categories, and third-party feed management tools or Google Shopping feed services can help you optimize even further with advanced rules that automatically reallocate ad budgets.
Conduct regular feed audits and diagnostics
Product feed optimization will never be a one-and-done proposition. In addition to regular updates, sellers should always check the announcement section of Google Ads to make sure they’re in the know about the latest policies.
Audits and diagnostics will also help you keep your product feed clean and in good shape. The “Needs Attention” tab in Google Merchant Center is the perfect place to start. It shows you current issues with your feed, categorizes them by potential impact, and even suggests potential fixes.
Leverage first-party data for personalization
First-party data—information such as emails and phone numbers that you collect directly from customers—can power some impressively robust new personalization offerings in Google Shopping. A McKinsey report found that personalizing ad experiences can reduce CAC by up to 50%, so retailers should consider jumping on these opportunities wherever they’re available.
The fastest way to get started is with Google’s Customer Match feature. You can upload your first-party data into Google Ads, then use it to tailor your campaigns in Performance Max and Shopping campaigns. What’s more, once the data is ingested, you can use it across the Google Ads ecosystem, including Gmail and YouTube.
When to bring in a feed optimization partner
The benefits of feed optimization are clear: More visibility for your products. Lower CPC. Higher ROAS. Basically, it’s key to unlocking all of the goals that are the reasons you’re using Google Ads in the first place.
While Google Ads and Google Merchant Center are designed to accommodate users with limited technical knowledge, the fact remains that this stuff is a lot of work. That’s especially true if you have a large catalog, are part of a highly regulated industry, change products frequently—you get the idea.
Nailing feed optimization in-house takes extensive coordination between multiple teams within your organization, usually including Paid Media, Development, and Product (among others). For a lot of businesses, working with a paid media services agency saves a lot of time and effort that your team would otherwise spend wrangling your feed.
See where this is going? Wpromote is a team of data nerds, marketing veterans, and ecommerce savants who know how all this stuff works and keep up with how it’s all changing. We manage intimidatingly large and complex catalogs for some of the world’s biggest brands—and we’re ready to help you get on their level.