If you’re an online retailer, you likely manage a Google Shopping feed. Odds are, it’s a mess, and it’s negatively impacting performance. It’s likely taking more time and resources to manage than might otherwise be necessary.

Many clients feel like they need everything they sell; every color, option, and upgrade, represented in their product feed. In reality, they just need the basics, the most popular items, enough to guide Google and get consumers in the door (to your site). Google likely takes care of it as best it can, but consider that people don’t often query as specific as your product feed gets. Particular colors, varying sizes, those sorts of details don’t need to be distinguished in your product feed. That is, not every combo of attributes should be listed in your product feed. Because of the lack of that level of specificity in most queries, what you want is to put a basic, popular “version” of each product in your feed. Not every color or size, just a few picked because they’re popular or otherwise standard and applicable to most of the population. At least, applicable enough that consumers express interest, and can later customize the colors, sizes, and other details on their way to a purchase on your website.

Your website contains all – ALL – of the details necessary for accurate purchase of your product, but your product feed doesn’t need all of the info related to every possible purchase on your site. Your Shopping feed does need all of the attributes available for the products that you do include in your feed, it just doesn’t need to contain every iteration and combination of all possible values of those attributes. If you sell bathroom vanities for example, there are dozens of variations in sizes, door patterns, top styles, beveled edges, handles, faucet styles, on and on. Your product feed could be 30,000 rows deep if you let it, when it might perform just as well with 300 or 500 products listed.

At a glance, some of the fields are unnecessary, but lend as much info as you have available. It’s a set it & forget it process unless your core products change frequently. Performance Max now being the mandate, expect product feeds to basically go away at some point, with AI taking over completely.

We’re always looking for problems to solve, and we’re happy to show you how we do it. Drop us a line here or email us directly at info@whitelabeldigital.co for more info.