Is having a good feed important?
Absolutely!
The importance of a good feed is paramount when building out your Google Ads shopping campaigns, it can be the difference in having people click or not click on your advertisement once the campaign is active. While some may believe that the product ID, availability and price are the most important; it can be argued that description and the product title are even more imperative to make a sale.
When looking to detail a product or display a product on Google Shopping, they will provide the consumer with the product title telling them if it matches to their search/keyword and a description of the item if they click further into the product. The more relevant your description & title are to the customers the more likely you will be considered first in the auction if your bid is in line with the market trends.
If you are lacking in the relevant information in your descriptions or titles, or you are misleading people with incorrect information you are liable to be reported and have your ads disapproved and even suspended; so it is imperative that you have the correct and best information possible at all times.
Another important feature is the GTIN of an item, most products that are mass sold or mass-produced contain a GTIN to identify the product. Some people in the past have fallen into the trap where they are selling an item without a product identifier so have opted to make one up. This will lead to a disapproved product in the feed and you will be unable to serve that product on the Google Shopping interface. The way to get around this is by setting the ‘Product Identifier’ column in the feed to ‘False’.
Another issue that can be incredibly damaging to the health of a feed is mismatched prices or availability. For instance, your feed says you are selling a terracotta plant pot for £10.99. However, on the landing page for the item, it says £14.99, or you are stating a product is in stock when it isn’t? These will lead to item disapprovals, however, if you go over a certain threshold of incorrect prices and availability your feed will be targeted with pre-emptive item disapprovals; which will disapprove any new product added into your feed until all of the issues are fixed.
From some of the above reasons, you can see what it is crucial to have a well structured and well-detailed feed or it can lead to a variety of different errors with a wide range of consequences.
To re-iterate, a good feed is the bread and butter of your rankings in Google Shopping and whether or not you will be considered at all in the auction for a consumers click. So with all of the information above, we have a detailed description of what to do and what may happen if you do not.
Is it all worth it?
If you want to stand out in the saturated world of eCommerce it is absolutely worth the effort!
Firstly, if you are a retailer who deals specifically in product sales or products of a similar nature to a well-established brand – think electrical goods, furniture, food. On just Search campaigns, you are limiting yourself to text-based advertising, lacking in product images, titles and potentially the price; but a Shopping campaign paired with a healthy and well-detailed feed can bring you many ‘online window shoppers’. These are people who will be in the market for a specific product, like a chair. They may know they want an oak dining chair, so they search that. If you on your website have an oak dining chair but have it in the feed as just a dining chair, you are less likely to appear because you are not as specific as possible when it comes to pulling in interested traffic.
So, this means that if your description and title stated exactly what it is, what size, colour and even the material used on the cushioned part of the chair. You are able to get this relevant traffic that is more inclined to buy if the item they see is what they have searched for. Instead of being presented with a chair made from pine when they wanted oak.
However, there are multiple different things you can do to optimise a feed. Ranging from the topics discussed above to almost everything to do with the feed. If there is an option to change it, you most likely can optimise it with best practice. A few of the other options that require less detail than the others are making sure you have a high-quality image for your product, making sure your items are broken down into the correct product categories and brands, and ensuring the link for your product doesn’t redirect to another webpage.
