Google Shopping feed optimisation: the checklist that actually moves sales

In Shopping, you don't choose keywords. Google reads your product data and decides which searches you're eligible for. That makes your feed the closest thing Shopping has to a keyword strategy, and it is usually the least maintained part of the whole setup.

Here is what to work through, roughly in order of how much difference it tends to make.

1. Product titles, front-loaded

The title is the strongest signal in the feed and the first thing shoppers read. Google shows a limited number of characters, so the important words need to be at the front.

A workable pattern for most retailers is: Brand + Product type + key attribute + variant. So "Barbour Ashby Waxed Cotton Jacket. Navy, Medium" rather than "Ashby Jacket | Free UK Delivery | YourShop".

• Drop promotional wording, free delivery, sale, best seller. Google's policies don't allow it and it wastes the space that could hold a searchable attribute.
• Use the words customers use, not your internal product names.
• Include size and colour for anything sold in variants; those words appear in real searches constantly.
• Don't keyword-stuff. A title that reads badly to a human converts badly too.

2. Missing attributes

Every empty field is a set of searches you can't appear for and a filter you can't be found through. The high-value ones are brand, GTIN or MPN, condition, colour, size, material, age group and gender where relevant.

GTIN deserves particular attention. If you sell branded goods and your GTINs are missing or wrong, you're competing badly in exactly the comparisons where you should be strongest.

3. Product type and Google product category

These are two different fields and both matter. Google product category is Google's taxonomy, pick the most specific one that fits. Product type is yours, and it is the field that makes campaign structure possible later, so keep it consistent and hierarchical.

4. Disapprovals and warnings

Disapproved products earn nothing while sitting in the account looking like inventory. Warnings are the quieter version of the same problem: the product still shows, but limited.

Work through disapprovals by count first, one policy fix often clears hundreds of items at once, because they usually share a cause in how the feed is generated.

5. Price and availability accuracy

If your feed price and your landing page price disagree, Google will eventually disapprove the item, and in the meantime you are paying for clicks from people who feel misled. The same goes for availability.

Update frequency matters more than most people think. A daily feed on a fast-moving catalogue is not fast enough; use scheduled fetches or the content API where you can.

6. Images

Clean product shot, white or plain background, no logos, no watermarks, no promotional overlays, and large enough to meet Google's minimums. Lifestyle images have their place as additional images, the main image should be the product.

7. Descriptions

Lower impact than titles, but still read. Put the useful specifics in the first couple of lines: materials, dimensions, fit, compatibility. Boilerplate about your delivery policy belongs elsewhere.

How this connects back to your campaigns

Feed and campaign problems get diagnosed separately far too often. A product with a poor title gets few impressions, so it looks like a bidding problem. A product with a wrong price gets clicks that never convert, so it looks like a landing page problem.

AdKing looks at both sides of the same account and ranks feed fixes and campaign changes in one queue, ordered by the money attached to each. You approve what you want; nothing is applied on its own.