In Google Shopping Advertising, there is no keyword targeting – the system picks relevant keywords based on the information you provided in the product feed.
So, a totally different advertising strategy is required.
In this short article, we will share our favorite tips that will help you to make your advertising on Google Shopping profitable.
1. Prepare the perfect product feed.
The results of Google Shopping Advertising highly depend on the content of your product feed.
The feed is a file containing all required information about your products. This file is submitted via the Google Merchant center where you can monitor how healthy your feed is.
1.1. All required fields must be filled, otherwise, you will get no traffic:
List of required attributes:
- Id
- title
- description
- link
- image_link
- price
- availability
- shipping (but it is possible to add specifications in the merchant center account)
- gtin or mpn+brand
1.2. Don’t limit yourself to the required attributes only.
There are a lot of other attributes such as:
- Brand
- Condition
- Color
- Size
- Age_group
- Gender
- Adult
- Sale_price
- Product_type
- GTIN
- MPN
- material
- custom_labels
- additional_image link
- google_product_category
- item_group_id
These attributes will help you to control your shopping campaigns more flexibly and still obtain a broader reach. Here is a detailed description of the most effective attributes:
Additional_image_link allows you to submit up to 10 additional product images. This can make a big difference, as you can present your product from different angles. As shoppers are mostly basing their purchasing decision on the image, you need to somehow stand out from your competitors.
By selecting the right image, you can tell shoppers the most important messages about your product, service, or brand. Shoppers need images as they are easy to digest.
The sale_price attribute. You can add a sale_price attribute for discounted products. These products will be marked with a badge that highlights your current sale. The sale price will be displayed and the regular price will be crossed out. In some cases, the discount percentage may be shown instead of the crossed-out price. The specific colors used for annotations differ depending on where your product appears.

The size_system attribute can be helpful in case you target several countries or a country where it makes sense to consider systems of different sizes. This information helps to create accurate filters, which users can use to narrow their search results.
If you don’t include a size type, the system will use regular as default. If that is not the right size type, then users will be misled, which could affect your sales.
The product_highlight attribute provides short bulleted lists of the most relevant highlights of your products. The product_highlight should provide easily consumable, quick to scan sentence fragments for shoppers that either answer the most common consumer questions or focus on the most important attributes of the product.

The custom_label attribute. This is the attribute you will recognize in your Shopping campaign. The value won’t be shown to your customers when they see your ads and free listings.
You can submit up to five custom labels per product by including this attribute multiple times:
custom_label_0
custom_label_1
custom_label_2
custom_label_3
custom_label_4