Shopping Feed Optimisation

The performance of s shopping campaigns is directly related to the quality of the feed. I optimise shopping feeds for ecommerce growth.

Shopping Feed Optimisation

Shopping is the bedrock of ecommerce

Google Shopping should be the bedrock of any ecommerce store, with the potential to put your product in front of huge amounts of customers intent on making a purchase.

Most of shopping campaigns are automated with machine learning now, so the most important part of ecommerce PPC could be said to be the shopping feed. If the feed does not contain the keywords and attributes your customer and Google are looking for then the account performance will suffer.

This is why it is so important to understand the products - they can't just be another sku. I optimise the products on the website with titles and attributes that sell the product to the customer as well as provide the data required for Google to match the product to a search.

Halfords just get in the top of the results with #1 organic position, everything else above the fold here is paid.

Automate Feed Generation

For a store with a large number of fast-changing products then the feed generation must be automated from the ERP / stock system or website. This will ensure new products are automatically added, items are set as out of stock and custom labels are updated in line with sales strategies.

A feed would contain the following fields:

Titles

Titles should be between 75 and 150 characters long.

To help “fill out” your titles, attributes are vital bits of information that although relevant for all items, it’s important to get as many in as possible to help increase impressions, clicks and conversions.

Product Descriptions

This can be improved to help improve your overall impressions, clicks and ad rank on Google.

  • There should be no duplicates in the feed
  • Optimal length for Google is 501 to 1,500

Product Type & Depth

The feed should contain g:product_type, the product type, which should be set up following a consistent easy-to-follow structure to allow for detailed campaign segmentation.

Hikoki > Power Tools > Drills > SDS Drills

The ideal depth is a string of 4 or 5.

Data & Structure

Every product in the feed must have a link to an image, a brand and a GTIN (barcode)

Adding attributes into product titles is only half the battle, if you want to maximise your feed potential it’s important that attribute fields in the feed structure is also populated where possible. 

Target ROAS

Once the feed has been set up and optimised to a sufficient standard the shopping campaigns can be built and a target ROAS set for each campaign.

  • Lowering the targeted ROAS on campaigns will allow for more generic traffic to filter through.
  • An aggressive ROAS will be focusing highly on efficiencies, so to get the conversion the terms will need to be very specific to a user who’s far down the funnel and is ready to convert.