Beyond average: Ultimate guide on how to tune your Google Shopping feed 

A quality feed is a key part of mastering Google Shopping

To even run Google Shopping campaigns, you need to have a product feed. But to make your goods stand out, you should create the best possible input. You can solve most of the ways to make product ads more attractive right in the feed. In addition, you can improve product information yourself in bulk and automatically, so you save on paying programmers and you can do everything in less time. Just use Mergado.

3 requirements that a feed should meet before you start editing it

1. Actuality
   1. You should have your feed updated at least once a day.
   2. This way, you will be sure that all current changes (most often, the availability or prices) will be included.
2. Correctness
   1. The data contains correct information about each product.
   2. Typical mistakes include an incorrectly set delivery time or displaying an incorrect price (e.g. no VAT indicated).
3. Completeness
   1. In the feed, you have all the necessary or useful information about the product.
   2. This often refers to missing alternative images, unfilled parameters, or missing EANs.

These are the basics of how to create a quality feed

Product names

• Optimizing product names in your feed increases the chance that your item will appear in relevant search results, leading to higher click-through rates.
• REMEMBER: Changing names is not beneficial for all products.
  • For example, in electronics, product names are given.
  • On the contrary, in areas such as fashion (but for example also in the Home & Decor range and others) you can test different word order or different synonyms in the names because the entire product name is not always displayed in the campaign at once.

Images

• Make sure the images in your product feed are as high quality as possible. It is essential for:
  • Improve click-through rate (CTR): Quality images attract more attention and make customers more likely to click on the product.
  • Increase of:
    • page loading speed
    • product and brand credibility
    • probability of ad approval
  • REMEMBER: Google Shopping does not allow text or watermarks on images.

Segmentation

• One of your most common actions when working with a feed should be to divide products into segments — ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠typically by categories, prices, tags (such as products on sale or sale), or by other definitions.
• Product segmentation most often takes place based on:
  • data –⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ used to track results for individual segments, on this basis you can evaluate how each product group is doing
  • campaigns – the products selected on the required data are further divided into campaigns (or advertising groups) so that you can set different budgets, bidding, etc. for their advertising

Hiding products

• Don’t advertise all items if they’re not worth it.
• In the case of non-performing products, categories, or brands (also with low-margin products, out-of-date inventory, or its irrelevance in the current period) we recommend hiding such goods.

Bidding

• Bidding settings allow you to more efficiently manage how much you invest in advertising specific products or categories.
• The main ways to set bidding in the feed are:
  • Using an attribute for bidding (e.g. cpc or max_​cpc): Comparison engines, such as all of the Heureka group, offer the possibility to enter a bid per click directly in the product feed.
    • Using a special attribute in each product item, you set and determine the maximum cost per click (CPC) you are willing to pay for a certain product.
  • Sort products by priority: You can use the custom_​label attribute in your feed to sort products by importance (e.g. in the Google Shopping feed).
    • This is how you assign them a label, with which you prioritize the products (usually those with better margins) and set CPC prices for them as needed.

With Mergado, you become programmers yourself and create quality feeds

Use Mergado to set up advertising even without technical skills. It lets you create and edit data feeds exactly as you want without waiting for a programmer. This is how you gain control over your data and open your way to effectively managing advertising on more than 650 platforms.