How to Optimise Product Listing Ads: 8 Feed Attributes
Table of contents
Picture an online store with good products, fair prices and a Shopping campaign that has been live for three months. The budget never fully spends. Impressions trickle in for a handful of items and the rest of the catalogue barely appears. The owner has changed the bid strategy twice and raised the budget once, and nothing moved.
That pattern points to one place. Almost everything that improves a Product Listing Ad happens outside Google Ads, in a product feed that many advertisers never open after the store is built.
Product Listing Ads have no keywords
A Shopping campaign has no keywords to bid on. Google decides which searches your products appear for by reading your product data, so the feed does the job keywords do in a Search campaign. There is no ad copy to rewrite, no keyword list to expand and no match type to loosen. There is a file of product attributes, and Google’s interpretation of it.
Product Listing Ads was the original name. Google renamed them Shopping ads years ago, but the acronym stuck in the industry and in older documentation. If you are searching for PLA guidance and finding Shopping articles, you are in the right place.
What you can change, in order of impact
- Product data: titles, images, categories, price, availability and identifiers. This is where most of the gains sit.
- Account structure: which campaign type you run and how products are grouped for bidding.
- Bids and budgets: useful once the data is clean, close to useless before that.
Many accounts arrive with the third item being adjusted weekly and the first untouched since launch. A Shopping campaign has few levers: a budget, a bid strategy, a location and a set of product groups. When it underperforms, the cause usually sits in the feed. Changing the bid strategy on bad product data changes how fast you lose money, not whether you lose it.
You can check this yourself. Open the search terms report on a Standard Shopping campaign and read what Google matched your products against. If the terms look wrong, nothing in the campaign caused that. Your titles and categories did.
The 8 feed attributes that decide performance
Google’s product data specification lists dozens of attributes. These eight do most of the work, and the table shows where each one tends to go wrong.
| Attribute | What Google uses it for | Most common mistake |
|---|---|---|
| Title | Matching your product to searches | Short, generic titles such as “Blue Jacket” with no brand, model, size or material |
| Image link | The picture that wins or loses the click | Lifestyle shots with a small product, compressed thumbnails, or overlays such as watermarks and logos |
| Google product category | Placing the product in Google’s taxonomy | Leaving it to Google or choosing a broad top-level category |
| Product type | Your own categories, for organising campaigns, bidding and reporting | Leaving it empty, so product groups cannot mirror the site |
| Price | Shown to shoppers beside other sellers; must match the landing page | Feed price differs from the page price, or sits well above market |
| GTIN and brand | Identifying the exact product and matching it to other sellers of the same item | Missing GTINs, or guessed values that do not match the product |
| Description | Extra matching detail, especially for longer searches | Thin or manufacturer-copied text with the key details buried |
| Custom labels 0 to 4 | Your own filters for bidding and reporting; never shown to shoppers | Not using them, so budget follows popularity instead of margin |
Title carries the most weight
Your product title is the closest thing Shopping has to a keyword list. Google’s title attribute guidance allows 1 to 150 characters, says the title is used to match your product to a customer’s search, and notes that users usually notice only the first 70 or fewer characters. Use the full allowance and put the most important words first.
The gap between a weak and a strong title is specificity, not creativity:
- Weak: Blue Jacket
- Strong: Kathmandu Men’s Epiq Hooded Down Jacket Navy Blue Size L Water Resistant 600 Fill Puffer
The second can match searches for the brand, the model, the colour, the size, the fill rating and the category. The first matches very little and competes with every blue jacket in the country.
Image quality decides the click
Titles win the impression. Images win the click, because a Shopping result is mostly a picture. Google’s image link requirements recommend around 1500 by 1500 pixels or larger, with the product filling 75 to 90 percent of the frame on a solid white or transparent background. Google has also announced a 500 by 500 pixel minimum for all products from 31 January 2027. Watermarks, logos, borders, price information and calls to action are not allowed and can get a product disapproved.
Two habits cost Australian stores here: reusing lifestyle photography where the product is small in frame, and letting a platform theme serve a compressed thumbnail instead of the full-resolution file. Both are usually website build decisions rather than advertising ones.
Google product category and product type
Google assigns every product a category automatically, but its product category guidance recommends setting the most specific one the taxonomy allows. “Apparel & Accessories > Clothing > Outerwear > Coats & Jackets” works far harder than “Apparel & Accessories”. A vague category risks putting products in auctions they should not be in and out of ones they should.
Product type is your own categorisation, separate from Google’s, and it is often left blank. Mirror your site structure with it, and you get a clean way to build product groups and bid differently by range.
Price is part of the comparison
Shoppers see your price next to other sellers of the same product, and a price well above market tends to lose both impressions and clicks, however good the feed is. In Australia, Google’s price attribute rules require the price to include GST and to match the landing page and checkout.
If your margins cannot absorb competitive pricing on a product, leave that product out of the feed. The same margin arithmetic decides whether Google Ads will work for your business at all.
GTIN and brand make matching possible
A GTIN tells Google exactly which product you are selling. Google’s GTIN guidance says accurate matching cannot be assured when the GTIN is missing, and that products with missing or incorrect GTINs may have limited visibility. It also warns against guessing: if you are not sure of the value, leave it out. Brand is required for any product with a clearly associated brand or manufacturer. Together they let Google place your listing beside other sellers of the identical item, which is where a competitive price earns the click.
Description and custom labels
Descriptions allow up to 5,000 characters, and Google’s guidance is to list the most important details in the first 160 to 500. Thin, duplicated or manufacturer-copied descriptions leave matching signal unused, which is why serious stores treat product copy as content work rather than an afterthought.
Custom labels do nothing for matching. Google gives you five (custom label 0 to 4), never shows them to shoppers, and intends them as filters for bidding and reporting. Use them to separate products by margin, season, stock level or bestseller status. Bestsellers and highest-margin products are rarely the same list, and labels let budget follow profit rather than popularity.
How to write a product title that wins
Put brand, product type and the key distinguishing attribute in the first 70 characters. Everything after that still counts for matching, but it is rarely read.
Then pick one structure per category and apply it across the range. For apparel, brand plus gender plus product type plus colour plus size plus material works. For homewares, brand plus product plus material plus dimensions. Consistency matters more than the exact order, because it makes weak titles easy to spot across thousands of rows.
Describe the product, not the offer. Google bans price, sale dates, shipping and delivery details from titles and flags all caps and symbols as common in spam. The title must also describe the product on the landing page, though the wording does not have to be identical.
Finally, do not stuff in popular searches you cannot serve. Loosely related terms pull in traffic that does not convert, and every click costs money. Over time it also trains you to judge the account by volume rather than margin, which is how stores end up attracting the wrong customers entirely.
If you want the feed audited properly before you spend more on it, that is where our Google Ads work for ecommerce starts.
Fixing what stops products showing at all
Disapproved products cannot enter an auction, so a Shopping campaign can look like a bidding problem when it is a compliance problem. Check the Products section in Merchant Center before touching Google Ads.
Disapprovals tend to come from a short list: a price or availability mismatch between the feed and the landing page, missing or incorrect GTINs, images that break the overlay rules, and missing shipping settings.
Availability mismatches are the most common and the most costly, because they appear whenever stock changes faster than the feed refreshes. Google’s availability rules say a mismatch between the feed, landing page and checkout triggers a disapproval. A store that fetches its feed once a day will spend part of every day advertising items it cannot sell.
Shipping catches newer Australian accounts in particular. Australia is on Google’s list of countries where shipping costs are required for Shopping ads and free listings, and until they are set up, whole categories can sit unapproved without any obvious error inside Google Ads. Return policies are optional, but worth adding while you are there.
Prices work the same way. If the page says AUD 149 and the feed says AUD 129, the product is disapproved. That is a website problem more than an advertising one, and the same underlying issue as product pages that do not hold up to search. Fix the source of truth rather than editing the feed around it.
What still matters in the campaign
Performance Max covers more inventory and gives less visibility. Standard Shopping offers priority settings and clearer search term data, at the cost of reach. Larger accounts increasingly run both, using Standard Shopping to control specific ranges. Smaller accounts are usually better served by one Performance Max campaign and a clean feed.
Negative keywords work in both. Standard Shopping has always supported them, and Google now allows negative keywords in Performance Max campaigns as well, applied to Search and Shopping inventory.
Resist splitting into many campaigns early. Shopping budgets divide the same way Search budgets do, and six campaigns on a modest budget starve all six of the conversion data they need.
Performance Max also accepts audience signals, and customer lists are the strongest ones you can supply. They are hints rather than targeting, and they work differently from lookalike audiences in Google Ads.
Frequently asked questions
How long before feed changes appear in your ads? Most edits take a few hours to a full day to process, and some product changes trigger a fresh review that takes longer. Judge a title change after a week, not overnight.
Do you need a GTIN for handmade or custom products? No. Products without a manufacturer-assigned identifier, such as custom T-shirts, art or handmade goods, are handled with the identifier exists attribute set to “no”, rather than a blank or invented GTIN. Only set it when you are certain the product has no unique identifier.
Vignesh runs paid media, social and design at Enigma Scale. He has managed spend across every major ad platform and rebuilt the sites those clicks land on, which is usually where the real problem turns out to be.
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