Advice for optimising your product feed for Google Shopping

With an annual growth of more than 50%, Google Shopping is an essential display window for all e-vendors wishing to boost their visibility (and sales volumes). To succeed on this platform, you must be sure to make the very most of your product feeds.

Product feeds are the key to success in Google Shopping. The more comprehensive and specific your information is, the more chance your products have of finding their way into search results. Conversely, poorly-optimised feeds cause loss of visibility, high CPC and mean your products will not appear in certain requests. Here are 5 tips for optimising your feed.

1. Be attentive to the titles chosen for your product sheets. Ideally, they need to contain the keywords you wish your products to appear under in Google Shopping results, and should correspond to your ads on AdWords. To create a title, you can follow a structural method, such as: “Brand + gender + product type + features” for an item of clothing
2. Select the right category. Google Shopping offers more than 6,000 default categories. It is important for you to be as accurate as possible, even though it may be tedious to find exactly the right category for each product. If you are selling hard drives, do not settle for the general category “Electronic devices”, but rather opt for a specific sub-category: “Electronic devices / electronic accessories / computer components / storage devices / hard drives”.
3. Be careful what pictures are used. This is the first thing buyers will see. Make sure you use high-quality visuals, well associated with the products in question (same type, size and colour as detailed in the title), and without any external items (no texts or logos that do not belong to you).
4. Filling in the right GTIN code (Global Trade Item Number). This mandatory feature can have a real impact on your activity: boosted visibility thanks to improved SEO, being able to gather existing data on products already online via Google Shopping, improved consideration of your product feed by Google, etc.
5. Cleaning up the data in your product feed. There is always a good reason for cleaning up your data, as errors will have no doubt made their way into your feed over time: mistake in a product name, misuse of upper case letters, typos, etc. Use the “search/replace” function on your spreadsheet to change all entries in one go.