The 5 Google Shopping feed
mistakes I find in 9 out of
10 accounts
The shopping feed is the engine that drives shopping performance. No amount of bid strategy tweaks or search term report work is going to save you.
Here are the top 5 mistakes I see when auditing Shopping feeds - and what you can do to get ahead of 90% of advertisers.
Fix the feed first. No bid strategy or SQR work fixes a broken foundation.
Titles & descriptions
Leaving your product titles and descriptions as whatever Shopify spits out is lazy - and actively working against you. These two attributes carry enormous weight in Shopping, as they're what Google uses to match your products to user searches. There's no keyword targeting. The feed is the targeting.
Leaving it as "1234 - Black - T-shirt" with a vague brand-focused description does you no favours. Instead, harvest your search term reports, Search Console high-ranking queries, and product reviews to understand the exact language your customers use and the features they look for.
Once you've built a strong, search-orientated base of queries, integrate them into product titles systematically. Iterate and test different orderings of this structure:
Same goes for descriptions. Make the most of the long character limit - layer in long-tail keywords, value propositions, benefits and use cases that your title can't fit.
Before you start excluding thousands of queries in the search term report and blaming the algorithm — fix the feed.
Product reviews
Human psychology - built over millions of years - tells us we rely on social approval and group behaviour to inform decisions. Having zero product reviews integrated on-site and in your feed gives users no reason to take a chance on you.
You can get started for free with Google Reviews. Products with low review ratings should be monitored and then filtered out of feeds - preventing negative brand associations, wasted clicks and wasted spend on underperforming SKUs.
If you're struggling to build up reviews on a product, don't send it out at unique ID level. If you have GTINs, use those instead - reviews left by others on the same GTIN are inherited automatically.
Similarly, if you've got thousands of variants per product, use the Item Group ID when sending reviews. This pools all reviews under one parent product, so every variant inherits them — provided you've accurately applied the Item Group ID attribute.
Product Type & Google Product Categories
Similar to titles and descriptions, Product Type and Google Product Categories (PT & GPC) do heavy lifting for query matching - and are consistently under-used.
Product Types let you segment shopping campaigns in your ads account, going up to 5 levels deep. That's 5 layers of keyword and converting search term integration, completely customisable and not pre-set by Google. Even if you only use them for campaign segmentation, the query relevance boost alone is significant.
Google Product Categories are less flexible - you're selecting from Google's pre-defined taxonomy - but they are equally important. And as bad as wrong values are, empty values are just as costly. Don't leave these blank. You're literally leaving visibility on the table.
Attribute coverage
Once the minimum required attributes are covered to serve product ads, too many accounts call it a day there. That's a mistake.
You should be passing as much data as possible from the "optional" attributes list. Depth of attributes directly improves query matching and relevance - leading to increased search visibility and a higher likelihood of conversion from a better-aligned user.
- Colour, Size, Material, Pattern
- Additional images
- Video link
- Product Highlight
- Product Detail
These aren't nice-to-haves. They're the difference between Google showing your product to the right person or not at all.
Incomplete delivery & returns policies
Not filling out your delivery and returns policies is holding back more than most people realise. When left blank, Google attempts to infer this information from your site documentation - and often gets it wrong.
Delivery and returns include speed and price elements that Shopping actively rewards. Advertisers who outperform competitors on both get pushed harder by Google. Leaving this information incomplete or inaccurate means you're potentially being penalised in visibility for no good reason.
It also makes Google's "Top Quality Store" badge - a visible marker of excellence that increases SERP visibility - completely unattainable. Having a genuinely better delivery and returns proposition than competitors is not only a key conversion differentiator, it's something Google actively surfaces to users on your behalf. Don't give that up.