Shopping feed optimisation: the highest-leverage work in ecommerce PPC

There are no keywords in Shopping. Google decides which searches your products match by reading the feed. That makes product data the single highest-leverage asset in an ecommerce paid account, and it is almost always the least maintained one.

Titles do most of the work

The title is the strongest matching signal you control. Lead with what people search for, not with your brand — unless the brand is the reason they are searching.

Keep the important words within the first 70 characters, since that is roughly what displays. Never keyword-stuff: it triggers disapprovals and degrades match quality.

Attributes that change performance

• GTIN, brand and MPN — missing identifiers restrict eligibility on high-intent searches
• google_product_category, set explicitly rather than left to inference
• product_type, your own taxonomy, used for campaign structure
• Sale price with valid effective dates, which unlocks promotional annotations
• Availability and price, kept accurate — mismatches against the live site cause suspensions

Custom labels are your segmentation layer

Use the five custom label slots for the dimensions you want to bid on differently: margin tier, sell-through rate, seasonality, stock depth and price band. Without them, every campaign structure you build is arbitrary.

Images and disapprovals

Use clean images on white where the category expects it, with no promotional overlays — overlays are a common and avoidable disapproval. Work the diagnostics report weekly rather than monthly; a disapproved best-seller sitting for three weeks is a substantial and completely silent revenue loss.

A maintenance rhythm that holds

1. 1.Daily: automated feed fetch, with alerting on failure
2. 2.Weekly: clear the disapproval queue and check price and availability parity
3. 3.Monthly: refresh custom labels from current margin and sell-through data
4. 4.Quarterly: rewrite titles for the categories with the weakest impression share