Maximise your chances to quickly display your products on Google Shopping and increase your conversion rate.
Titles, images, description, promotion here are the main optimisations to do:
Reminder
To set up your catalogue for Shopping ads, follow advices gathered in this guide: "Google API Services".
Advice #1: Include brand in title systematically
If your title don’t include the brand, create a rule in Lengow.
Be careful, your title must not exceed 150 characters, knowing that only the first 70 characters are visible. The more accurate and relevant your title is, the more your product will appear in search results at top positions.
If your title exceeds 150 characters, Google’ll truncate it. You’ll be alerted.
Add a brand in title
Advice #2: Include size and color in title
In search results, Google offers other filters as color and size. Don’t miss them and include color or size, or both of them in your title.
You can also customise your title from the Attributes mapping (make sure to use space character between fields). Keep in mind that if you apply a rule on this field, this rule will overtake mapping. Always check in the Preview if your data are mapping your expectations.
Advice #3: Avoid duplicated titles
This advice is mainly for variant products (size, color ....).
Google expects single title per product. Therefore include variations in the title and add exclusion to exclude ‘parent’ products from Google display and display only variation products and simple products.
Exclusion: Don't send my product if it is a 'parent' product
Advice #4: Do A/B testings on title based on campaign results
There is no good way to build up titles. Results vary from one field to the other.
We advise you to do as many A/B testings as you want/can to know which formula works the best (Read our article about it: Google Shopping: Conduct A/B Testing with Custom Labels via Lengow)
A/B testing based on title
Good to know
- To maximise impressions indicate generic terms in your titles
- To optimise CTR indicate more specific terms in your title
- Place the brand in first place, if it is well-know brand
Advice #5: Provide an accurate 'Product_type' attribute
At first, Google wants you to categorise your products as in your catalogue.
The ‘product_type’ attribute is additional to Category mapping. It isn’t used to order your products in Google, but it helps to organise your Shopping campaigns in Google Ads. The more exact and granular, the easiest your campaign. ‘Product_type’ field is limited up to 750 characters in Google.
If your source feed includes products categories as a category breadcrumb, or your product category, you can map this field.
Also, create this category breadcrumb from fields of your source feed, thanks to rules or add in your source feed field(s) that could be useful for the category step.
Example 1: Let’s create a rule so that your brand will be placed at the end of your product_type attribute. (see image)
Please note that it exists as many rules as catalogues. We advise you to build your source feed properly before using it in Lengow.
Product_type attribute allow you to order your catalogue to ease your Google Shopping campaigns
Advice #6: High quality product page
A neat, clear and precise product page indicating the main characteristics of the product and the contents of the pack if necessary is essential to optimize the conversion rate.
Add the most important information within the first 160 to 500 characters.
Google accepts 5000 characters max for the description.
Use the following 'TRUNC' function to decrease characters number in your description:
Truncate description up to 5000 characters
If you don't want to cut the last word of your description, use the SMARTTRUNC function so that all your descriptions will end with a word fully written: SMARTTRUNC($textual_field,number of characters)
Truncate descriptions without cutting the last word using SMARTTRUNC function
Be careful, description must not include:
- Promotional text (ex: free shipping)
- Capital letters or fancy fields (PRO-MO-TION, ಠ_ಠ)
- Words in a foreign language
- Redirect link
Advice #7 : Soldes – promotions
For sales periods or other commercial highlight, we advise you to set up fields in advance (at least 7 days before the operation starts), to make sure your changes are taken into account the D day.
To manage sales/promotions, fill in these fields:
-
sale_price: your product price during the sales/promotion period
- price: your product price before the sales/promotion period
If you set up your sales/promotion in advance, fill in this field in order to avoid displaying your reduced price right away:
- sale_price_effective_date: dates when your sales/promotions start and end. Fill in the “2018-06-27T08:00-0200/2018-08-07T23:00-0200” value for all your on sale products.
Advice #8: Good quality images
Use a quality image accurately showing the product sold by filling in the 'image_link' field.
If you have other product views display them using the 'additionnal_image_link' field.
It has been observed that the more you provide with product views, the more conversion rate increases.
You can send up to 10 images
Recommendations
- If you are selling a blue product and another one in green, use the first image showing the blue on then the second image with the green one.
- Use good quality images with white background (more than 64 pixels and less than 16MB/image)
- Google advise to provide with 800*800 pixels images.
- Your product should cover between 75% to 90% of the image.
- In case of a pack, use as the main images the image of the product alone. Show a full image of the pack in a secondary image.
Advice #9 : Use 'Custom labels'
To save time and money, we advise you to optimise your Google Shopping campaigns, using Custom Labels. They’ll help you to create ads groups by segmenting your products catalogue.
Label creation (5 exist, from 0 to 4) can be done directly from Lengow using the feed you are sending to Google.
Custom Label attributes in Lengow, numbered from 0 to 4
According to your catalogue and your strategy, you have the possibility to divide your catalogue in five parts (few examples below). This way, you'll narrow the display of your products according to your strategy.
Segmentation example for a catalogue
Example
Let's say you are selling coats and swimsuits. In this case, you can create a "season" Custom Label to reduce swimsuit bidding in winter and increase coat biddings.
→ Don't send my products when “custom_label_0" is ‘Winter’.
Then, you'll be able to set up a rule, which'll indicate that from 1st of March, you won't send coats with the "Winter" label.
Examples of custom label uses (non-exhaustive list):
- Create a "New" label for your new products
- Highlight your promotions
- Group your best sellers
- Bet on seasonality. In summer, increase bidding on swimsuits and lower bids on coats
- Highlight outlet products
- Create segments by price range from 0 to 50 € / from 50 to 100 €...
- Isolate products with a high return rate or after-sales rate to reduce their bid
- Identify the products according to their launching date
