So you’ve read our blog on Starting a Google Shopping Campaign with £100, you’re campaign’s up and running and you’re feeling like you’ve got this Digital Marketing malarkey – so what’s next?

Here’s the thing – whether it’s going great or not so well, your campaign can probably do better! So now it’s time to optimise.

Optimising your Data Feed for Google Shopping

Optimising the data you send Google in your feed is crucial because:

1
The more data you give Google the more likely Google is to show your products above others. It’s no secret that Google rates what it perceives to be “quality” information, so the better “quality” the information you can send to Google the better your products will perform.

2
Google matches the keywords your customers are searching for to the Title and Description feeds in your data – so if you’re missing any of your biggest keywords your products aren’t going to be shown

3
Google also factors the “Google_Product_Category” you send in the feed into its search results so it’s important to get the categorisation right.

Product Titles and Descriptions

It’s considered best practice to put your top keywords first in product titles – but obviously they need to make sense to a customer. Title length is important – Google Shopping will accept titles up to 150 characters long BUT only shows the first 70 to your customers in search results so make sure everything they need is in the first 70. Google do recommend you use all 15

0 characters – but conversely will then warn you about long titles (over 70 characters) in your feed diagnostics, so keep an eye on that in just case they decide to change that 150 character recommendation. Warnings won’t affect your adverts (Errors do though, so make sure you deal with those quickly).

Best Practice Title structuring

Brand Model/Product Size/Variant Colour Features

Customising AdWords Bids using Feed Rules & Custom Labels

The Merchant Centre will allow you to add Custom Labels to your products, you can then use these labels to set different bids in AdWords based on the Label. For example, if you wanted to put a higher AdWords bid on all the red products in your product catalogue you would use a Custom Label to do this.

 

Optimising your bids in AdWords allows you to target your AdWords spend to align with product margin and market competition by allowing you to:

  1. Increase bids on groups of products which give you a high return, without increasing your spend on lower revenue products
  2. Increase bids on groups of products which have a number of high-bidding competitors in the market
  3. Reduce spend on low revenue products
  4. Temporarily exclude items from Google Shopping without deleting them from your feed

To set a Custom Label for a group of products:

1
Select “Create a value based on criteria in a feed field:”

2
Fill in the fields as per the picture below. Here you can select any of your input columns from your feed so don’t worry if you’re not using “colour” you can match a word in the product title instead (e.g. any title containing “phone”). We have named our Label “all-red-products”

how to set Google shopping target attributes

3
In the Merchant Centre, go to “Product” -> “Feeds” and click on your feed

4
Click “Feed Rules”

5
Under “Add target attribute” select “custom label 0”

how to set target attributes google shopping feed

6
Click “Continue” (or you can Preview your rule if you wish)

7
Click “Save and Apply Rules”

8
The Label will now be applied to your product list

9
You can add as many values for custom label 0 as you wish, and you can set more than one custom label if you wish (currently there are 5 available).

Use Custom Labels to Optimise AdWords

To use this Custom Label to set bids in AdWords:

1
Log in to AdWords and click on your Google Shopping campaign

2
Click “”Product groups”

3
Click the “+” next to “All Products” – this opens a “Subdivide” window similar to the one below:

using custom labels to optimise adwords

4
Select “Custom Label 0” from the dropdown list and you will see your Label “all-red-products” appear in the box below (NOTE: this can take some time, you may need to leave 24-48 hours for the Labels to populate through to AdWords from the Merchant Centre)

5
Select your label and click “Save”. You will go back to the Product Groups list and your Label will be there as a group. Success! You can now change your bid for this group without affecting any other products.

6
Note that there are lots of options within the “Subdivide” functionality of Product Groups in AdWords, have a look through them to see what else you might be able to use to target your bids even further

7
You can also use Custom Labels to exclude a group of products from bids should you wish to, simply by setting the bid amount to “Excluded”.

You’re now all set to get targeting, saving money and maximising revenue. If you feel you need further help improving your Google shopping feed, call us on 0161 974 0974. Depending on where you are based you may be able to get funding towards your digital marketing projects.