Shopping Ads
Adam
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In Search, you choose your keywords. In Shopping and Performance Max, your product feed chooses them for you. Google reads your titles, descriptions and attributes to decide which searches each product is eligible for. That makes the feed the most important piece of "creative" in your entire account — and the most ignored.
Most stores generate a feed once when they install an app, confirm it's "approved" in Merchant Center, and never think about it again. Meanwhile that feed is quietly deciding how much of your potential demand you'll ever see.
Your titles are doing the keyword targeting
The product title is the heaviest-weighted field in the entire feed, and the default — usually just your store's product name — is rarely how customers search.
A title like "The Aurora — Midnight" means everything to your brand and nothing to Google. Restructure it the way shoppers actually search:
[Brand] + [Product Type] + [Key Attributes] + [Model/Variant]
"Lumio Aurora Linen Bedding Set — King, Midnight Blue"
You haven't changed the product. You've made it eligible for hundreds of relevant searches it was silently missing. For most catalogues, title optimisation is the single highest-leverage feed change you can make.
The attributes that quietly decide eligibility
Titles get the attention, but a handful of structured attributes decide whether you compete at all:
GTINs. Missing or wrong GTINs limit eligibility and can suppress products entirely. Get them right.
Product type and Google product category. These give the algorithm the context it needs to match intent. Vague categorisation means vague matching.
Images. Your main image is held to Google's standards, but it's also your click-through rate. A clean, correct image is both a compliance and a performance lever.
Availability and price accuracy. Mismatches between your feed and your landing page trigger disapprovals and erode trust signals — and they're maddeningly common after a sale or a price change.
Use custom labels to take back control
Out of the box, Shopping and PMax treat every product as equal. Custom labels are how you reintroduce your business logic into Google's automation. Tag products by the things that actually matter to you:
Margin tier — so you can bid harder on the products that fund the business and rein in the ones that don't.
Bestseller vs long-tail — so proven winners get priority and dead stock doesn't quietly absorb budget.
Seasonality — so you can push seasonal lines when they matter and pull them when they don't.
Price band — so you can segment and target by how premium the product is.
Custom labels don't change what Google sees. They change what you can control once it does.
Monitor it like a campaign, not a setting
A feed isn't "done." Prices change, stock moves, new products launch, and Merchant Center quietly disapproves items in the background. Every disapproved product is a product earning you nothing.
Build a simple rhythm:
Check Merchant Center for disapprovals and warnings weekly.
Review your lowest-impression products monthly — they're usually a feed problem, not a bidding one.
Re-test titles on your top revenue products quarterly.
The mindset shift
The brands that win in Shopping stop thinking of the feed as a technical export and start treating it as living creative — the most important creative they have. Every title is an ad. Every attribute is a targeting decision. Every custom label is a lever of control.
Most of your competitors set their feed up once and forgot it. That's exactly why optimising yours is one of the most reliable ways to find growth that's been sitting there the whole time.