Making the Perfect Product Data Feed for Google Shopping

One of my first roles within Digital Marketing was to update the Google Shopping Product Feed for our clients. So, on my first day I was greeted with something that looked like this.

I mean what even is that? Look at it, what are you supposed to do with it? It’s fair to say I was immediately regretting putting ‘Proficient with Excel’ on my C.V at this point. But once you get to grips with it it’s really not that difficult.

Let’s start at the beginning, what is one? A Google Shopping Product Feed holds all of the information about every product you have. It gets all of this information from your website which you can download and then open up into a nice big spreadsheet. Google uses all of this information when people type in a search query and decides whether the search query matches the information within your data feed. With Google Shopping you can’t bid for keywords, so this is the only way of making sure that Google knows what you’re trying to sell.

Product titles are arguably the most important part in the whole Google Shopping (probably with the exception of bids). The key to a great title is to actually say what the product is. None of these wishy washy titles. For example ‘Really nice beautifully designed exquisite pen’. You might think wow, this pen is sounds pretty good. But this doesn’t help when it comes to Google Shopping. Important information that needs to go in the title includes; product name, brand, size and colour.

This is where you can use words such as beautiful and exquisite. Really try and sell your product, as this is what the consumer will read. However, you also want to use this space to add important keywords that you necessarily couldn’t fit into the Product Title. For example maybe your product could be associated with more than one thing. If I’m selling a table, maybe it can be used as an entrance table or a console table. Use these keywords in your Product description.

The Google Taxonomy is a way of tagging your products to let Google know what it is you’re selling. It looks something like this.

You may read some studies out there that claim that adding the Google Taxonomy doesn’t make a difference, they may be right… they may be wrong. Who knows? But my thinking is that Google wouldn’t have created it, and update it if they didn’t use it in some way. You’d be pretty gutted if you were the guy to write down every type of product associated with cat supplies just find out they’re not going to use it.

You will need to provide an image link for each product. Make sure that you use a high quality image with no water marks. A poor image could result in disapproval. This will be the image that people see within the search page so you want to make sure that it looks good enough to make someone want to click on it.

You will also need to provide a link for the landing page for the ad. It goes without saying that this needs to be the actual product page that you’re advertising. What type of a world would we live in if you clicked on an ad for cat supplies just to land on a page for bird supplies?

• Price
• Availability
• Brand
• Colour

Depending on what you sell you may also be asked to provide additional attributes for example gender if you’re selling clothes.

On May 16^th Google is making it a requirement for all new in-stock products to have their own GTIN number (Global Trade Item Numbers). Don’t get caught out by this latest penalty.

Once all your hard work is done you should have something that looks something like this:

Here at Zelst we invest a lot of time in improving our clients Google Shopping Data Feed. For more information on Google shopping and what it could do for your business please visit our Google Shopping information page or contact us today.