Google Shopping Feed Optimisation, What to Fix First

Google Shopping feed optimisation means fixing the product data you send Google, so each product shows for the searches it should and looks worth clicking when it does. Shopping has no keywords to bid on. Your feed is the targeting.

Most of the work sits in a handful of fields, with the title, the main image and the barcode number doing the most.

The order matters more than the effort. A product Google hasn’t approved can’t show, however good its title. A perfect photo on a product that never matches a search earns nothing.

So fix things in the order they cost you sales, and start with the products that make you money.

What is a Google Shopping feed?

It’s the list of products you give Google Merchant Center. One row per product, one column per detail: ID, title, description, link, image, price, availability, brand, barcode and the rest. Each colour and size goes in as its own row, tied to the others by an item group ID.

Merchant Center now calls a feed a product data source. It’s still the data Google builds your free listings and your Shopping ads from.

It reaches Google in one of a few ways. Shopify and other platforms sync it for you. You can upload a file in .txt, .xml or .tsv format, up to 4 GB, fill in Google’s Sheets template, or send it through the Merchant API. Our walk-through of how to set up Google Merchant Center covers each route.

How it arrives matters far less than what’s in it.

What in your feed decides which searches you show for

Google reads your product data and decides which searches each product fits.

Some fields do the matching and some win the click. One is only ever seen by you.

The order to fix a Google Shopping feed

Google’s own advice is to “prioritise your most valuable products when allocating resources”. We’d work in this order.

1. Anything Merchant Center has flagged. A product that isn’t approved doesn’t show, free or paid.
2. Barcodes, brands and part numbers on branded stock. They tell Google exactly what you sell, and copying a number off the box is quick work.
3. Titles on the products that sell. The title carries most of the matching, and it’s the first thing a shopper reads.
4. Main images. The wrong one gets a product disapproved. A weak one loses the click to the shop beside you.
5. Descriptions, highlights and details. Everything the title had no room for.
6. Product type, and the Google category if Google got it wrong. These organise your campaigns and tidy up the matching.
7. Custom labels, once you’re paying for ads and want to bid by margin or season.

Forty fixed titles on products that sell beat four hundred on products that don’t.

Start with what Merchant Center already flags

Open Products in Merchant Center and select Needs attention. Google renamed it from Diagnostics, so older advice uses the old name.

Three cards at the top show the issues hurting your account most, and how many products each one touches. Below them sits every product with a problem.

Two things make that list worth reading. Leave the Prioritised fixes switch on, where your account has it, and Google hides issues with little or no effect on clicks. Then look at the Click potential column. Google rates each product High, Medium or Low from past traffic, your product data and demand.

Fix the Highs first.

Each product also carries a status.

Limited is the one to watch. Google says products with warnings keep showing, but “may appear with limited performance, such as lower impressions and clicks”. Nothing is switched off, so it’s easy to miss.

One catch with Google’s suggested fixes. Merchant Center sometimes offers values for missing details, and Google says an accepted suggestion “will override subsequent changes that you’ve made using another method for adding products”. Check each one against your product page before you accept it. Your next upload won’t undo it.

Do you need a GTIN for Google Shopping?

If the manufacturer gave the product one, yes. Google’s product data specification lists the GTIN as “Required (for all products with a known GTIN to enable full offer performance)”. Leave it off and, in the words of Google’s GTIN page, the product “may have limited visibility”.

The GTIN is the number under the barcode. In Europe it’s usually the 13-digit EAN.

Google puts a figure on it. Its tips for product data say “Retailers who’ve added correct GTINs to their product data have seen a 20% increase in clicks on average.” That’s Google’s average across retailers, not a promise for your shop.

A wrong number is worse than none. Google warns that incorrect product identifiers can get products disapproved. A GTIN that doesn’t belong to the brand you’ve named shows up as a conflicting values warning.

On Shopify, the barcode field and the custom product setting are where this gets fixed. Our piece on Google Shopping for Shopify stores shows both, with the number ranges Google refuses.

How to write Google Shopping titles that match searches

Put the words a shopper would type first, in roughly the order they’d type them. Then add the details that separate this product from the one beside it.

Google allows 150 characters and advises using them. It also says shoppers “will usually notice only the first 70 or fewer characters”, depending on screen size. So the first 70 do the selling, and the rest give Google more to match.

Google’s title rules come down to four things to put in.

• What the product is, in plain words. “Corner sofa”, not the name of the range.
• The brand, when it matters to the buyer. Google says to add it “if it’s a differentiating factor”. A brand nobody searches for yet can sit further back.
• The details people search by. Material, size, colour, gender, capacity, scent. Google’s own examples include “maternity” for clothing and “waterproof” for mascara.
• What makes each variant different. Every colour and size gets its own title. Google’s example is “Sleeveless polka dot skater dress, medium, black”.

Some things stay out. Price, sale wording, delivery, dates and your shop’s name don’t belong in the title, and most of them have attributes of their own. Capital letters for emphasis and symbols used to catch the eye break the rules too.

Google Shopping title examples, before and after

These are examples, not real listings. Each “before” is the kind of name shops give products on their own site.

Look at what moved. Every “after” opens with the thing a shopper would type. The names that meant something to the shop have left the front.

The ring, the moisturiser and the dog bed run past 70 characters. That’s fine. A shopper recognises each one inside the first 70, and the size, the engraving and the skin type are still there for Google to match. Google’s rules for customised goods ask for exactly that. If a product can be engraved, the title says so.

Other rules shape that column too.

• Colour names. In the title, Google’s advice is the colour a shopper searches for, since people are “more likely to search for ‘red dress’ than ‘cinnamon apple’ dress”. The colour attribute itself should match your product page exactly. If the page says Toasted Walnut, so does the feed.
• Irish-language names. Google wants most of your product data in the feed’s language, and asks you not to use words from other languages “unless they’re well understood”. In an English feed, lead with the English words. Keep the Irish name for the product page, or later in the title.
• The product page. Google’s tips ask you to use “the same product title and description that you do on your landing page”, without synonyms or search terms the page doesn’t contain. So rename the product on your site and let the feed follow.

That last one pays twice. A better product name helps the page in the ordinary results too, which is why our Shopify SEO checklist spends so long on product titles.

What if AI wrote your product titles?

Then Google wants to know. Titles written with generative AI must go in a separate attribute, the structured title, with its source type set to trained_algorithmic_media. AI-written descriptions follow the same rule through the structured description.

AI text in the plain title attribute breaks the rule. Send both, and Google uses the plain title and ignores the other.

Drafting titles with AI is allowed. Check each one against the product. A title that names the wrong size or material misleads a shopper, whoever wrote it.

Product images that get the click

The image decides whether anyone reads your title. It’s also a field Google disapproves products over, so the rules are worth knowing to the pixel.

If your main images were shot small, plan for the 2027 date now. Reshooting a few hundred products is not a January job.

Clothing has its own advice. Google suggests clothes worn by a person, without cropping the model’s head or feet. Shoes, bags and accessories go on their own in the main image, with the model shots as extras.

When you replace an image, give the new one a new web address. Google’s image rules say a new URL is typically recrawled within three days. A new picture saved over the old address can take up to six weeks to be noticed.

Pictures made with AI must keep the metadata that says so, such as the IPTC Digital Source Type tag. Don’t strip it out on export.

Descriptions, product highlights and product details

Each of these fields has its own job and its own limits.

The description rules are mostly about what to leave out. No links to your shop, no comparisons with other products, no category paths, no promotional text and no business history. Google wants you to “describe only the product itself”.

Highlights and details are optional, so they’re easy to skip. Google says both help shoppers discover your products “across AI-driven surfaces, like AI Mode in Google Search and more”. Our piece on Google AI Mode explains what that surface is.

Keep the three apart. Google asks you not to repeat in one field what you’ve said in another, and to leave keyword lists and search terms out of highlights and details.

Google Shopping categories and product type

Two fields file your products. One uses Google’s list. The other uses yours.

What are Google Shopping categories?

They’re Google’s product taxonomy, a tree of categories that every product on Google Shopping sits in. The current English list runs to 5,595 categories under 21 top-level ones, from Animals & Pet Supplies to Vehicles & Parts.

Google gives every product a category automatically, and says accurate titles, descriptions, prices, brands and GTINs help it get that right. Its help page treats the Google product category attribute as optional, and Google only accepts your override in three cases. Shopify is stricter on its side and still asks for a category on every product, which our post on Google Shopping for Shopify covers.

• Google filed the product somewhere with extra requirements. Clothing and accessories, mobile phones and software all demand extra fields. If a product lands there by mistake, your category takes the requirements away.
• Your campaigns are built on categories. If you bid by Google category, the override moves products within that structure.
• Alcohol. It has to sit in the right category to stay within Google’s alcohol policy.

When you do set one, pick the most specific category and give its ID number, which Google recommends over the full path. Its tips ask for categories “at least two to three levels deep”.

The full list downloads as a spreadsheet or a text file from Google’s help page on the Google product category.

What product type does in your feed

Product type is the category you write yourself, usually your shop’s own menu. Google reads it to understand the product. Your Shopping campaigns can split bids and reports by it, up to five levels deep.

Write the whole path, broad to narrow, with a space either side of each “>”. “Home > Candles > Soy candles > Large jars” works. “Large jars” on its own doesn’t.

You can send up to five product types, but only the first organises bidding and reporting. Send one.

It also fills the gaps in Google’s list. The English taxonomy has no category named jumpers or knitwear. Your product type can still say Knitwear > Aran jumpers.

Keep synonyms and search terms out of it. Google’s tips say products “should only be categorised by type”.

Custom labels, the feed fields only you see

Custom labels are five spare fields, numbered 0 to 4, for groupings Google knows nothing about. You use them to split products in Shopping, Performance Max and Demand Gen campaigns, and to bid on each group differently.

The rules are short. One value per label per product, up to 100 characters, and no more than 1,000 different values for each label across the account. New or edited labels can take 24 to 48 hours to appear in Google Ads.

That’s one way to set them up. Google’s own example uses season, selling rate, clearance, margin and release year.

If you set only one, make it margin. In the worked example in our piece on Google Shopping ads in Ireland, a candle and a corner sofa cost about the same per click. One sale loses money and the other leaves €376. A margin label lets you bid up the sofa and hold back on the candle.

You need each product’s margin to set it. Our profit margin calculator works it out from your costs.

Labels don’t have to be typed in product by product. Google suggests filling them with rules, such as a price band set automatically from each product’s price.

What changes when your feed sells from Ireland

A few rules land differently for a shop selling from Ireland, and a couple of them only show up when you add a second country.

If you sell appliances or electronics, start with the energy label. It’s the one rule in that table that exists because of EU energy labelling law.

Supplemental feeds and attribute rules

Sometimes the fix can’t happen in your shop. Your platform has nowhere to store a custom label, or the barcodes live in a supplier’s spreadsheet. Merchant Center has two tools for that, both behind one add-on.

Switch it on under Settings, then Add-ons, by choosing Advanced data source management.

• A supplemental data source adds details to products already in your main feed, or overrides them. It can be a Google Sheet. It can’t add or remove products, and each row must match a product ID in your main feed exactly.
• Attribute rules, which Google used to call feed rules, change your data on its way in. They can set a value, add words before or after it, find and replace, calculate, split text or clear a field, for all products or only those that meet conditions you set.

Say one maker’s products arrive with no barcodes and the brand name in capitals. A supplemental sheet holding each product’s ID and GTIN fills the first gap. A find-and-replace rule on brand fixes the second.

Test before you apply. Rules have a draft preview and a Test rules button, and they run in order, first to last. Once they’re applied, reprocess the data source so they take effect.

Rules patch the feed. They don’t change the page behind it, and a title a rule builds still has to describe the product on that page. On Shopify, product edits belong in Shopify itself, and our Shopify piece explains why.

One fix runs itself. Merchant Center’s automations read your product pages and correct price, sale price, availability and condition when they don’t match your feed. Google switches them on by default, and says they’re for temporary slips, not a replacement for keeping the feed current. They need product structured data on your pages to work.

How to tell if your feed changes worked

Merchant Center reports on every product. Under Analytics, select Products. You’ll see impressions, clicks and click-through rate, which you can split between ads and free listings and download.

Read the two numbers separately. More impressions means the matching improved. More clicks on the same impressions means the listing got more tempting.

Keep the comparison honest.

• Never change a product’s ID. Google says keeping the same ID “will preserve its historical data”. A new ID loses it.
• Change one thing at a time, on a test group. Google’s own suggestion is to add colour to some clothing titles and measure the difference.
• Compare like with like. A title changed in November meets Christmas searches. Compare it against the same weeks last year, or against products you didn’t touch.

Questions people ask about Google Shopping feeds

What are the 5 key fields to optimise in a Merchant Center product feed?

The title, the main image, the GTIN with its brand, the description and the product type. The title and image do the most work, one for matching and one for the click. Once those are right, add highlights, details and custom labels.

How do I get my Google Shopping feed?

On Shopify, Google’s own Google & YouTube app builds and syncs it for you. Otherwise, in Merchant Center go to Settings, then Data sources, and add a product source: a file, a Google Sheet or the Merchant API. Google recommends keeping all your products in a single main data source.

Is there a Google Shopping feed template?

Yes. When you add a product source, Merchant Center can generate a Google Sheets template for you. You can also build the feed in any spreadsheet and save it as a tab-delimited .txt or .tsv file.

Is a Google Shopping feed free?

Yes. Merchant Center costs nothing, and the products in your feed can show in Google’s free listings. You pay for Shopping ads if you choose to run them, and for any paid feed app you add. Our piece on how to list products on Google Shopping for free covers the free side.

Does Google change my product titles?

Sometimes. Google may move key details forward in a Shopping ad title, “using content from your landing page, images and other signals”, to fit the search better. Its example is a king-size mattress whose title leads with “King” for someone searching for one.

If your title already fits the search best, Google says “no changes will be made”. You can ask your Google account manager or support to opt you out. Google says that takes three to five working days.

How often should a Google Shopping feed be updated?

Every time a price or stock level changes. Merchant Center marks a product Needs update 30 days after its last update, and Google warns that neglected data can lose visibility and be removed.

Where can I download the Google product taxonomy?

From Google’s help page on the Google product category, as an Excel sheet or a plain text file. The English (UK) version with IDs is a single text file, one category per line.

If you’d like your feed read before you spend more on it

You can do all of this yourself. What takes the time is knowing which products to start with, and which fixes will bring clicks rather than just clear a warning.

Send us your shop’s web address and the products that make you the most money. We’ll go through your Merchant Center data against Google’s rules and tell you what to fix first. If your feed is already in good shape, we’ll say so.

We’re a Google Partner and a Shopify Partner. Our Google Ads team fixes the feed and runs the Shopping campaigns on it, in your own business name, and management starts at €450 a month plus VAT.