Google Shopping Product Title Optimisation – Best Practices

Sara Jones Author

One of the most effective things you can do to optimise your Google Shopping Campaigns is to optimise your product titles.

When it comes to optimising your product titles, what you're doing is telling Google what keywords you want your products to be found for. Obviously you don't target with keywords in shopping campaigns, you target using the product details in your feed. In order to tell Google what keywords you want to show up for, you have to optimise your product titles.

To make this easier you have to start thinking about the product titles on your website as being separate from the product titles in your feed. The reason for this is that in order to get the right keyword structure and enough keywords into your product title to make them perform well in shopping, they are likely to end up too long and too cumbersome to use on your website.

To solve this problem you need some mechanism by which you can optimise those titles for Google Shopping without having the change them on your website. Otherwise you can end up with ridiculously long product titles on your website that just don't look right. We've all seen those product titles on Amazon and eBay that are just stuffed with keywords and look completely ridiculous! You don't want your website to look like that, but you do need your titles in your shopping feed to have all those relevant keywords in them.

Feed Management Platforms

This is where we use a feed management platform. We use DataFeedWatch, but there are others like Go Data Feed, OneFeed & Feedonomics. These platforms allow you to manipulate your feed: you pull your product details out of your website and into your shopping feed platform. You can then edit the titles (as well as many other elements) before you push them through to Google Merchant Centre to be used in your shopping campaigns.

Your Product Title Structure

It's very important to think about the keywords you want in your product titles when you're optimising them for shopping. It really will make a massive difference to the results that you're getting in your campaigns. What I've done to help with this process is to create a little cheat sheet showing the suggested structure of a product title depending on what you're selling (the format I've used here is courtesy of Go Data Feed).  What it gives you is a summary of all the different types of product categories, ranging from apparel to electronics.

Apparel:

• Brand + Product Type + Gender + Keyword 1 + Keyword 2 +Colour + Size
• Gender + Keyword 1 + Keyword 2 + Brand + Colour + Product Type
• Gender + Brand + Material + Product Type + Size + Colour

Athletic and outdoors:

• Type of Sport/Activity + Sports Team/Brand + Age Group + Product Type
• Brand + Sport + Product Type + Colour
• Brand + Gender + Colour + Size

Jewellery:

• Brand + Weight+ Shape + Style + Occasion + Metal
• Style + Metal Type + Shape + Product Type + Size (i.e., Length, Width, Weight) + Gender + Product Type
• Age Group + Metal Type + Gem Type + Shape + Product Type + Size (i.e., Length, Width, Weight)

Home and garden:

• Brand + Product Type + Colour + Room Type
• Brand + Usage + Material + Usage + Product Type
• Style + How it’s made + Product Type + Colour + Size + Brand + Product Type

Generic:

• Brand + Product Type + Colour + Material
• Brand + Size (length, width, height) + Product Type + Colour
• Material + Product Type + Colour + Brand
• Style + Colour + Product Type + Brand
• Product Type + Size + Colour + Keyword + Brand

The list gives you some formulas to help you think about how to structure your product titles when you're producing your feed.

For example let's look at the 3rd example for 'apparel': Gender + Brand + Material + Product Type + Size + Colour'

This might translate to 'Ladies Nike Cotton Joggers Size 10 in Pink'.

This example isn't too bad to actually use on your website, but some of them would produce a product title that would be impractical to have on a product page because they're simply too long.

[A brief note about google shopping title length.  Google allows up to 150 characters after which it will truncate the title and give a warning in GMC.  Your shopping ads will only show the first 20 or so characters - it's your image and price that most people will be looking at here.  You need to make full use of the character limit where it will help you include relevant keywords but don't add extra 'stuffing' for no reason] 

Hopefully you see from this why you really need to use some kind of feed management system or platform in between your website and your Merchant Centre account so that you can optimise these product titles for Google Shopping. You can even do this automatically using rules that will pull in the various attributes of your feed to build your product title on the fly.  You can also do the same with any attribute of the product feed!

Finally, make sure that at the very least you try and think about using some keywords in the product titles on your website even if you aren't using a feed management tool. In this way you'll help to make sure that people will find your products when they're searching for them.

Categories: : Google Ads