How to optimize Google Shopping ads (start with the feed)

Start with the feed, not the bids

Optimizing Google Shopping ads starts with the product feed, not the campaign settings. Your feed decides which searches you can appear for, what the ad looks like, and how well Google understands what you sell. Bids and budgets only decide how hard you compete once all of that is settled.

There is no keyword list in a Shopping campaign. Google reads your product data and matches it to searches, which means the product title is doing the job a headline does in a text ad. If the mechanics are fuzzy, we walked through them in how Google Shopping ads work.

Most product titles were written to be found in a warehouse, not on a search results page. That gap is the first thing worth closing.

Work in this order:

1. 1Rewrite product titles.
2. 2Fix the main images.
3. 3Fill in GTIN, brand and MPN.
4. 4Set product types and custom labels so you can segment.
5. 5Add negative keywords from the search terms report.
6. 6Decide which products deserve spend at all.

Nothing on that list is a bid adjustment. That is deliberate.

Most of this work happens in Merchant Center rather than Google Ads, which is part of why it gets skipped: it sits with whoever owns the store, not whoever owns the campaigns. It is also why it pays twice. The same product data drives your free listings, so a rewritten title improves the unpaid surface at the same time.

Product titles: the single biggest win

If you only change one thing, change the titles. The title is the strongest matching signal in your feed and the first line a shopper reads, so it carries both jobs at once.

Front-load the words people actually type. A rough formula, adjusted per category: brand, product type, key attribute (size, color, material, model), then variant. So not "SKU 44821 Blue", but "Bosch 18V Cordless Drill Kit with 2 Batteries, Blue".

• Google allows up to 150 characters, but placements truncate long before that, so put the words that matter at the front. The title attribute spec has the full rules.
• Use the shopper’s vocabulary, not the internal catalog’s. If customers search "work boots" and your system says "occupational footwear", the customers win.
• No promotional text. "Free shipping", "sale", "best price" and all caps get titles disapproved, and they were never doing much anyway.
• Spell out the variant. Size, color, capacity and pack quantity all get searched, and a title without them loses the long-tail queries that convert best.

Do not stuff. A title crammed with every synonym reads like spam, and a lower click-through rate feeds straight back into how often you get shown. Write for the shopper, with the search terms in mind, in that order.

If your store platform generates titles automatically, do not sit down and hand-edit three thousand products. Use feed rules or a supplemental feed to rebuild titles from fields you already hold (brand, category, color, size), then hand-write the top sellers where the extra care actually pays for itself.

Test it honestly: change titles for one product type, leave the rest alone, and give it a couple of weeks before you judge anything.

Images and the attributes Google actually reads

Images are the second lever and the cheapest one to fix, because in a Shopping ad the image is most of the ad.

• Main image on a plain background, product filling most of the frame, no logos, watermarks or promotional overlays. The image link spec is strict here and overlay disapprovals are common.
• Add lifestyle and detail shots as additional images. They can appear in the product view and they help people who are comparing.
• Big enough not to look soft on a phone. A lot of Shopping browsing happens on a small screen, and a fuzzy thumbnail loses to a sharp one every time.

Then the identifiers. GTIN, brand and MPN are how Google ties your listing to the same product everywhere else it appears. Feeds missing them get weaker matching and, in some categories, no listing at all.

Also worth getting right: availability, condition, shipping, and a price that includes GST, because that is the number Australian shoppers are comparing on the results page. Prices that do not match the landing page are one of the quickest routes to a suspended account. If products have stopped appearing entirely, Google Shopping ads not showing covers the usual causes.

Product types and custom labels: how you get control back

Two attributes do all the segmentation work, and most feeds waste both.

• google_product_category is Google’s taxonomy. Set it as specifically as the list allows, because it helps classification and, in some categories, eligibility.
• product_type is yours. Use your own hierarchy ("Tools > Power Tools > Drills > Cordless") so you can split campaigns and read reports the way your business actually thinks about stock.
• custom_label_0 through custom_label_4 are free-form buckets you invent. This is where the money is.

Useful labels: margin band (high, medium, low), price band, season, best sellers, clearance, stock level, new arrivals. Once products are labeled you can bid, budget and exclude by group, instead of managing three thousand items one at a time.

Keep the labels to decisions you will act on. Three well-maintained labels beat five that nobody has updated since launch, and a margin band that is two price rises out of date will quietly send budget to the wrong shelf.

This matters even more in Performance Max, where you have fewer direct controls and the feed is often the only place a decision can be enforced. We go deeper on that in Performance Max campaigns.

Negative keywords and where the spend leaks

You cannot choose keywords in Shopping, but you can rule them out. Read the search terms report weekly at first, then monthly, and negate the searches you never want to pay for.

• Research language: "how to", "review", "manual", "instructions", "repair", "DIY".
• Wrong commercial intent: "free", "second hand", "wholesale", "jobs", "hire".
• Brands and part numbers you do not stock.
• Searches for a completely different product, which usually points back at a vague title rather than a rare query.

That last one is the signal worth acting on. A search term that is wildly off is feed feedback, not bad luck.

One product group can look fine at the campaign level while the search terms show two different jobs sitting in the same bucket: people ready to buy and people still researching. Separating them, by negating the research terms and giving the commercial ones their own campaign, makes the budget easier to control and the reporting easier to trust.

Which products deserve spend at all

Here is the part most guides skip. Not every product should be advertised, and in plenty of accounts the fastest improvement is exclusion rather than optimization.

Start with breakeven ROAS per product: divide 1 by your gross margin after shipping, payment fees and returns. A product on a 30% margin needs roughly 3.3x to break even. At 15% it needs about 6.7x. Now compare that to what each product is actually returning, and be honest about the ones that have had a fair run.

Exclude or bid down:

• Products sitting below breakeven after enough clicks to know.
• Thin-margin items with high return rates, where the reported revenue and the banked revenue are two different numbers.
• Out of stock, or so close to it that the ad spend buys a disappointment.
• Cheap accessories where a single click costs a meaningful share of the sale price and nothing gets added to the basket.
• Items where you are the tenth cheapest listing on the page. Shopping is a price comparison surface, and being visibly dearer is an expensive way to advertise a competitor.

More budget is not a strategy. It only makes the current strategy louder. A bigger daily budget across a catalog full of unprofitable products just buys more unprofitable orders.

Which leads to the honest version of this advice. If your margins cannot support paid traffic at all, Shopping is not your answer and no amount of feed work changes the arithmetic. Same if your range is a handful of custom or made-to-order pieces with no identifiers and no comparable listings: that money does more in email, organic search or a better product page. And if the account budget itself is still an open question, sort that first with how to set a PPC budget.

For everyone else the sequence holds: feed first, structure second, bids last. That is how we run e-commerce Google Ads accounts, because a fixed feed keeps paying back long after a bid adjustment has been written over by the next one.

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