Every shopping account we take over gets the same first look, and it isn’t the bidding tab. It’s Merchant Center diagnostics. Bids feel like the active part of shopping ads, so that’s where everyone spends their time. But the feed decides which auctions you’re allowed into at all, and what Google understands about your products once you’re there.
A recent example. A fashion retailer came to us spending about €60k a month on Google Shopping across roughly 14,000 SKUs. Their diagnostics showed 2,100 products disapproved or flagged with limited eligibility. That’s 15% of the catalogue effectively invisible before a single bid was placed. Fixing it took eleven days and cost nothing per click.
Titles do the heavy lifting
Google matches search queries against your product titles. A title like “Aria” tells the algorithm nothing. “Aria linen midi dress, navy, sizes 36 to 46” enters the auction for “navy linen midi dress” and half a dozen related queries.
The pattern that works in most categories is brand, product type, then the two or three attributes people actually type: material, colour, size. Put the highest-signal words in the first 70 characters, because that’s what survives truncation on mobile. A home retailer we work with rewrote titles for their top 500 sellers along those lines. Impressions rose 38% over the following four weeks, on the same bids and the same budget. Click-through went up too, because the title finally echoed the query.
GTINs are not optional paperwork
With a valid GTIN, Google can match your product to its own catalogue data. That means more auction entries, price benchmarking against other sellers and richer result formats. Without one, products drop to limited eligibility, and in categories like electronics they may barely serve at all.
Run one check per category: what share of your SKUs carries a valid GTIN? Under 90% in a category where GTINs exist means you’re leaving impressions on the table every day. The fix is usually less work than teams fear. Most of the missing codes already live in the supplier data or the ERP; they were simply never mapped into the feed.
Stale availability is the quiet budget leak
If your feed syncs once a day and your best sellers move fast, you’re paying for clicks to out-of-stock pages every afternoon. Worse, price and availability mismatches between the feed and the landing page are a classic disapproval trigger.
A food retailer we audited was syncing nightly while their top 40 SKUs sold through by mid-afternoon on weekends. Moving to a three-hour sync recovered roughly €1,800 a month in wasted clicks. A small fix with a permanent payoff.
Categories decide which race you’re running
The google_product_category attribute sets your auction context and your price benchmarks. Map everything to a broad top-level category and you’ll compete against the wrong products at the wrong reference prices. Aim for the deepest leaf that fits: “Kitchen & Dining > Kitchen Appliances > Blenders”, never just “Home & Garden”.
Where to start on Monday
- Open Merchant Center diagnostics and clear the disapprovals. This is the closest thing to free money in paid media.
- Read the titles on your 100 best sellers as if you were the shopper. Would the query match?
- Check GTIN coverage per category.
- Compare your sync frequency to how fast your top SKUs actually sell.
- Check category mapping depth. Leaf categories, not top level.
Feed work is unglamorous, which is exactly why it’s still an edge. Most of your competitors will keep fiddling with bid adjustments on top of a broken catalogue. Do the feed first. Every improvement you make there multiplies the return on everything downstream.