Shopping ads: it all hangs on the feed

With search ads you write the copy. With shopping ads your product feed writes it. That shift is underestimated, which is why in almost every shop the largest untapped lever sits not in the campaign but in the file.

The title is half the battle

The title field decides which queries an item can appear for at all. Many shops drop in the internal product name. That is the most expensive default error in the whole channel.

A workable title follows a pattern that differs by category.

The first seventy characters matter most, because they are what appears in the ad. Everything after that works only for matching.

The fields that decide visibility

• GTIN. Without a valid article number a branded product loses a large share of its visibility and never appears in price comparisons.
• Brand. Must match the manufacturer exactly, not your shop name.
• Product category. Fill the given taxonomy as deeply as possible. Too coarse an entry costs matching quality.
• Condition. New, used, refurbished. Wrong entries lead to account suspensions.
• Availability and price. Must match the landing page to the second.
• Image. Cut-out on white, at least 800 pixels, no watermarks, no promotional text in the image.

Optional fields that are rarely used and worth a lot

Three optional fields change what you can steer. Custom labels, up to five freely assignable fields, let you group items by margin, season, stock cover or bestseller status. Only then can campaigns be steered by profit rather than by product group. Product highlights appear as extra bullet points in certain placements. Shipping weight and lead time affect presentation and therefore click-through rate noticeably.

Campaign structure follows margin

Once the data is right, the structure is simple. Split the catalogue by contribution margin, not by product group. High-margin items get aggressive targets, low-margin items a strict cap, and slow movers their own clearance campaign.

That split is only possible if margin sits in the feed as a custom label. Which is exactly why it belongs there.

The weekly data check

Fifteen minutes a week covers four checks: compare active against disapproved items; look at the three most frequent disapproval reasons and fix them; identify items with no impressions, which are usually title or category problems; and spot-check price differences between feed and shop.

A shop with 5,000 items and 400 silently disapproved loses eight per cent of its possible revenue in the channel without it showing up in any campaign view.