Shopping Ads & Feed Management
The feed is the campaign, and most Shopping problems are data problems
There are no keywords to write. What decides which searches you appear for, whether you appear at all, and what the listing looks like is the product data you send. Bidding is the smaller half of this job and it is the half most agencies spend their time on.
The premise
There are no keywords, so the data has to do that job
In a search campaign you decide what you want to appear for by writing it down. In Shopping you do not get that choice. Which queries you become eligible for is inferred from the product data you send: the title, the description, the product type, the category, the attributes and the identifiers.
That inversion changes where the work lives. A Shopping account with excellent structure and careful bidding sitting on top of titles copied from a shop platform is a well-tuned engine attached to nothing. Meanwhile a plain campaign structure sitting on accurate, well-constructed product data will usually be the one showing up.
It also changes what a review meeting should look at. If a product is not appearing, the first questions are whether it is approved, whether it has the identifiers and attributes its category requires, and whether its title describes it the way a person would. Bid adjustments come after all of that.
What is usually wrong
Five feed faults behind most Shopping disappointments
- Titles are internal product names.
- A title of "SS24-BLK-0042 Ladies Jacket" tells the system almost nothing and tells the shopper less. Titles carry the weight that keywords carry elsewhere, and they need brand, product type and the distinguishing attributes of that category arranged in an order a person would recognise.
- Identifiers are missing, invented or wrong.
- Google asks for a valid identifier where one has been assigned and is explicit that you should not guess: use the packaging or the manufacturer, and omit the field entirely rather than submit something incorrect. Substituting an internal SKU or a similar product’s code is worse than leaving it blank, and products with assigned identifiers submitted without them can have limited visibility.
- The price in the feed and the price on the page disagree.
- Price and availability must match what the shopper finds when they arrive. Caching, currency handling, tax display and sale pricing all introduce mismatches, and each one is a route to disapproval. This gets worse the more frequently the shop changes prices, which means the refresh mechanism matters as much as the values.
- Category-specific attributes were never filled in.
- Some categories carry their own requirements. Apparel and accessories, for example, need gender, size, colour and age group, and missing them produces both disapprovals and weaker matching. Nobody notices because the products that are affected simply never appear, which is a silent failure rather than a visible error.
- Disapprovals are being handled one product at a time.
- A catalogue with thousands of errors almost never has thousands of causes. It usually has four or five rules being broken repeatedly by the way the platform generates the feed. Fixing items individually is endless; fixing the rule that generates them is a week of work and it holds.
Scope
What feed and campaign management covers
- Merchant Center account review, including account-level warnings and any enforcement history
- Product data audit against the current specification, item level and rule level
- Title construction rules written per product category, not one pattern for the whole catalogue
- Description, product type and category assignments reviewed for how they affect matching
- Identifier strategy: where to submit brand, part number and identifier, and where to omit them properly
- Category-required attributes completed, including apparel fields where they apply
- Price and availability accuracy, including feed refresh frequency and how sale pricing is expressed
- Image compliance and replacement where images are the cause of disapproval
- Supplemental feeds for anything the store platform cannot output natively
- Promotions and sale price handling set up so they display rather than disqualify
- Campaign structure, segmentation and bidding once the data underneath is sound
Order of work
Data first, structure second, bidding last
This order is not a preference. Bidding decisions made on a catalogue where a third of the products cannot appear are decisions made on unrepresentative data.
Establish what is actually eligible
Count what is approved, what is disapproved, what is pending and what is not in the feed at all. Until that is known, every performance number in the account describes a subset of the catalogue nobody has defined.
You get: Eligibility snapshot by category
Group the disapprovals by cause
Cluster errors by the rule being broken rather than by product. Five rules usually explain the overwhelming majority of a large catalogue’s problems.
You get: Cause-grouped error report with owners
Fix at the source where possible
Change how the platform generates the data, so the correction persists. Where the platform cannot express something, use a supplemental feed rather than manual edits that will be overwritten.
You get: Corrected feed rules and supplemental feeds
Rebuild titles by category
Write the title construction rule for each product category, apply it, and check a sample by hand. This is the single change with the widest effect on which searches you become eligible for.
You get: Title rules and applied catalogue
Then structure the campaigns
Segment by margin, price band, brand or performance so that budget can be directed rather than averaged across the whole catalogue. Only now does bidding have something reliable to work with.
You get: Campaign structure and bidding plan
Where the lever is
Which problems the feed solves and which the campaign solves
| Dimension | Fixed in the feed and Merchant Center | Fixed in the campaign |
|---|---|---|
| Whether the product can appear at all | Approval status, required attributes, identifier validity, image compliance | Nothing. A disapproved product cannot be bid into existence |
| Which searches you match | Title, description, product type, category and attributes | Only in the negative direction, by excluding queries you do not want |
| What the listing looks like | Title, image, price, promotions and sale price display | Very little beyond which products are included |
| How much you pay for a click | Indirectly, through how relevant the data makes you | Directly, through bidding and budget allocation |
| Which products get the budget | Through the attributes campaigns can segment on | Directly, through structure and priority |
| How fast a change takes effect | Slower: corrected data has to be re-reviewed before items are reapproved | Faster: settings apply on the next refresh |
Questions
What retailers ask about feeds and Shopping
Why are so many of our products disapproved?
Usually for a small number of repeating reasons rather than thousands of separate ones. The common causes are missing or incorrect identifiers, missing brand values, image problems, excessive capitalisation in titles, and missing category-specific attributes such as gender, size, colour and age group for apparel.
Google also treats this as an account-level matter. If product data does not meet the requirements for a destination, both individual products and the whole Merchant Center account are subject to disapproval, and repeat violations carry cool-down periods.
What actually makes a good product title?
A title that reads like the phrase a person would use to describe the item they want, with the attributes that distinguish it placed where they will be seen. In practice that usually means brand, product type, and then the attributes that matter for that category, such as size, colour, material or model.
What makes a poor title is an internal naming convention, a SKU, or a marketing slogan. The title is the strongest signal of what the product is, and there are no keywords in Shopping to compensate for a weak one.
Should we submit a GTIN if we are not sure it is right?
No. Google’s guidance is clear that you should only provide an identifier you are confident is correct, that the accurate source is the product packaging or the manufacturer, and that you should leave the field out rather than guess.
Some products genuinely do not have one, including custom-made, handmade and vintage items. In those cases the correct action is to omit it, not to substitute an internal SKU or the identifier of a similar product.
How quickly will a fix take effect?
Not immediately, and we will not pretend otherwise. Corrected data has to be re-examined before an item is reapproved, and Google indicates that review periods are measured in days rather than minutes.
That is one reason we triage by cause and fix in groups. Making one change and waiting, then making another, turns a week of work into a quarter.
Our developer manages the feed. What would you do instead?
We work alongside whoever generates the feed rather than replacing them. The developer usually controls how data leaves the platform; the marketing decisions are which attributes to send, how titles should be constructed for each category, and what to do about products with no identifier.
In most engagements the practical arrangement is that we specify the required output and the rules, and the platform or a feed tool implements them, with supplemental feeds handling anything the platform cannot express.
Can you guarantee our account will be reinstated?
No. Reinstatement is Google’s decision and no agency has any influence over it, so anyone promising a specific outcome is telling you something they cannot know.
What we can do is identify every violation we can find, correct it properly, document what changed, and submit a request that gives the review the best chance of succeeding.
Find out how much of your catalogue can actually appear
We will look at your Merchant Center account, count what is eligible, group the errors by cause and tell you how much of your Shopping performance is a data problem rather than a bidding one.
If we don't deliver the work we agreed to deliver for reasons within our control, you don't pay for the undelivered work. Read our guarantee
Related
Where to go next
- the full paid media serviceShopping rarely runs on its own.
- automated shopping campaignsThe same feed drives these, which is why the data comes first.
- organic product visibilityThe same product data problems affect organic listings.
- the store build behind the feedMost feed problems originate in the platform generating it.
- retail and ecommerce marketing
- growing revenue from an existing catalogue
Last updated · Reviewed by Zubair Afzal