Google Shopping feed optimisation

Titles come first

The product title is the strongest single signal in the feed. Most stores export titles written for internal stock control, and they match nothing a customer would type.

A usable title follows the way people search. Brand, product type, the attribute that matters in that category such as size, capacity or material, then the model. The important words go at the front, because long titles get truncated.

Categories and product types

The Google product category tells the system what kind of product this is. Leave it empty and Google guesses, usually badly, which is why unrelated queries start triggering your products.

Product type is your own taxonomy. It is also what you will use later to split campaigns by margin, so it is worth filling in properly even though it is optional.

Identifiers

GTIN and MPN link your listing to the same product sold elsewhere. Without them the product competes with less context and is shown less often.

If you genuinely make the product yourself, set the identifier_exists attribute correctly rather than inventing numbers. Fake identifiers cause disapprovals that look mysterious later.

When the feed and the site disagree

The most common disapproval we see has nothing to do with policy. The feed says one price and the landing page shows another, often because of a currency setting, a discount plugin or a stale export.

Google's review checks the product page against the feed. So a feed that looks perfect in a spreadsheet still gets rejected if the page disagrees with it.

Keeping Merchant Center out of trouble

Missing shipping, returns and contact pages are a frequent cause of account-level suspensions, especially for new stores.

Once the underlying cause is fixed, a re-review takes anywhere from a few hours to three days, and large catalogues come back in batches. Appealing without fixing the cause simply gets you the same answer.

Then, and only then, campaign structure

Once the feed is clean, split the catalogue by margin and demand instead of running one campaign for everything. Otherwise the budget flows to the most popular products rather than the most profitable ones.