Supercharging Google Shopping pt 2: Mastering the Shopping Feed

To maximise your investment in Google Shopping, it’s vital to understand how the shopping feed works.

Google Shopping is powered by two separate platforms, Google Merchant Center and Google Ads (Formally AdWords). Merchant Center acts as a hub for your shopping feeds, where all the details of your products are stored. Google Ads is home to Shopping campaigns, it’s where budgeting, bids and optimisation take place.

When you first get started with Google Shopping, it’s likely you’ll rely on your ecommerce platform to automatically generate what will be a very basic feed.

For many retailers, this is simply plugged into Merchant Center in XML format and off they go.

While this quick and simple to do, there are significant challenges associated with relying on this basic approach:

• It tends to generate functional product titles that utilise internal terms, such as:

Liberty Eyelet Voile Silver — Ready Made Curtains — 138cm(w) x 183cm(d) (54” x 72”) — Panel

…rather than descriptive, user-friendly wording. Consider this as an improved title for the same product:

Silver Grey Curtains — Ready Made — Eyelet — By 247Curtains

• It is unlikely to offer a way to filter down to a specific set of products, making it impossible to structure bids in AdWords
• It doesn’t include product types or custom labels
• It is probably lacking other important product information like size, quality, product specific details etc.

This lack of sophistication will lead to a significant drop in ROI.

So, if an automatic feed is too basic, what is the right approach?

There are five important steps you need to take to build and effective feed:

ONE Ideally you should be using Google’s Content API to pull data from your website, so it updates in real time. This is very important for large retailers running multiple promotions or price changes every day.

TWO You need to enrich your Shopping feed with business data such as size, profit margin and best sellers.

THREE You need to ensure you invest time working on the structure of your feed, for instance keeping products organised into categories and subcategories using custom labels.

FOUR You should ensure you have the ability to change the product titles specifically for Google Shopping, either via your CMS in combination with the Content API or through your supplemental feed.

FIVE To really optimise your Google Shopping activity, you need specific, regularly-tested, Google Shopping product images.

The results of taking such a structured approach can be a significant increase in ROI. For our client Christy, we restructured and merged multiple website data feeds to create a new master feed, which was implemented via the content API to ensure real-time product updates across 1000s of product lines.

This resulted in non-brand shopping revenue increasing by 1407% and non-brand Shopping ROI increasing by 83%.

What are the cost implications of all this?

None of this should be a big drain on resources. If you have manipulated feeds before, the technical side of things really isn’t that difficult.

Time is the biggest demand in getting your shopping feed right — time required to design a solution, build a feed structure and write the content for a supplemental feed.

Overall cost should be minimal, especially as most ecommerce platforms will offer a good enough solution on which to build.

And of course, you can always speak to an agency or third-party feed provider provided to help.

The role of supplementary feeds

Supplementary feeds give you an additional level of control in Google Shopping. They are easy to set up using Google Sheets and allow you to update any feed attribute on the fly.

Supplementary feeds allow you to:

• Capitalise on consumer search behaviour
• Add in seasonal search terms (for instance seasonal keywords like Halloween, Christmas or Black Friday)
• Add in sales messaging
• Experiment with different terms

Now you’ve got a firm grip on the importance of shopping feeds in building a scalable, profitable Google Shopping strategy, it’s time to move onto successful campaign build, which we’ll cover in part three of our series.