Google Shopping Agency: Shopping Ads And Feed Management

Every product must meet Google's product data specification before it can show. An incorrect Google product category can trigger disapprovals, and Google says products with a missing or incorrect GTIN may have limited visibility. Account-level policies matter even more. Under the misrepresentation policy, egregious violations lead to suspension without warning, while other issues come with 7 or 28 days to fix. We monitor diagnostics so problems are caught before they cost a season's sales.

A title can run to 150 characters, but Google says shoppers usually notice only the first 70 or fewer. So we put the words people search for first: brand where it matters, product type and the attributes that separate one variant from another, such as size, colour or material. We use product type to mirror your own category structure, because only its first value is used to organise bidding and reporting in Shopping campaigns.

Supplemental feeds add or override attributes on products already in your primary feed, matched by product ID, without asking developers to rebuild the main export. They cannot add or remove products, so the primary feed still has to be sound. Custom labels 0 to 4 take up to 1,000 unique values each and are never shown to shoppers, which makes them ideal for margin bands, bestsellers, clearance lines and seasonal ranges.

Performance Max used to take priority over Standard Shopping for the same products. Google's Shopping guidance now says that when both target the same products, Ad Rank decides which campaign serves, which makes running both a deliberate choice. Standard Shopping gives you product groups, search terms and negative keywords. Performance Max reaches more of Google's inventory with less manual control, and its brand exclusions apply to Search and Shopping inventory. We decide category by category which suits each product line.

We review your Merchant Center account from the top: business details, shipping and returns settings, data sources, product diagnostics and policy warnings. Google treats shipping settings as mandatory for free listings in many countries, including the UK, and missing return information or unclear business details can cause wider problems. The audit ends with a ranked list of fixes, starting with whatever is stopping products from showing at all.

Ongoing product feed management, so the data Google holds matches your site as prices, stock and ranges change. We work with your platform's export, use supplemental feeds and rules to correct and enrich attributes, and keep primary and supplemental sources matched by product ID. When products are added, renamed or discontinued, the feed is checked so new lines go live quickly and old ones stop absorbing spend.

Titles are rewritten around the terms shoppers actually use, drawing on your search terms data, with the most important words in the first 70 characters. We fill gaps in brand, GTIN, Google product category and product type, and add the colour, size, age group and gender details that apparel listings need. Where titles are written with generative AI, Google requires them in the structured title attribute, and we set that up correctly.

Revenue targets reward the products that sell easily, not always the ones that make money. We use custom labels to group products by margin band, price point, stock depth, bestseller status or season, and set separate ROAS targets for each. If you add cost of goods sold to the feed, Google can report gross margin alongside revenue, so we can judge each product group on profit as well as sales.

Standard Shopping still gives the most direct control over what you pay for. Product groups can be split by category, product type, brand, condition, item ID or custom label, and each product sits in only one biddable group per ad group. We use that to bid harder on proven lines, review search terms and add negatives, and keep a clear view of which queries each product is buying.

Where Performance Max earns its place, we build it around the same feed segments: asset groups and listing groups by category or margin, brand exclusions where branded searches would flatter results, and regular checks of where spend actually goes. Our approach to Performance Max best practices without losing control covers the detail, and our Performance Max service runs it day to day.

In the UK and much of Europe, Shopping ads are placed by Comparison Shopping Services. Google Shopping is one of them, and merchants can work with several at once and see which are active in Merchant Center. We help you decide whether another CSS makes sense for your account. We also switch on free listings, which can show your products across Search, the Shopping tab, Images, Lens and Maps at no click cost.