Have you had trouble capturing enough targeted volume via Google Shopping to make it a meaningful revenue source? You have a limited number of characters to play with in your product feed titles, so when you do pick a keyword or two to feature, it will be at the expense of many others. Keyword stuffing your shopping feed certainly isn’t a viable option, but wouldn’t it be nice if you could capture traffic for those other keywords in Google Shopping as well?
If you have been frustrated by limited targeting options for Google Shopping ads (namely, the fact that you can’t assign a list of keywords to a single product), this easily-implemented strategy will grow your reach and revenue.
Throughout this article, we’ll highlight Majux‘s strategy using a hypothetical brand for demonstration: SportsX™ Protein Shakes. SportsX™ has only one protein shake blend, but it’s applicable to a number of high-volume queries: “nutrition shakes,” “protein shakes,” “weight gainer shakes,” “high calorie shakes,” and more. We’ll revisit this brand later.
Some prerequisites before jumping in:
- This technique is ideal for businesses with a low number of SKUs that apply to a large subset of web searches.
- For the purpose of this article, we’ll be importing product feeds to Merchant Center using Google Sheets. If you are using a Shopify feed, WooCommerce API, or a similar method, you’ll have to adjust the strategy accordingly.
The Issues With Getting More Shopping Campaign Volume
Problem #1: You can’t use keywords for targeting like you would in a search campaign. Google determines your ad’s relevance based on the product title and description in your shopping feed, but this will never be as exact as phrase or exact keyword targeting.
Problem #2: You have to abide by strict character limits, thereby limiting your targeting more. While you can technically upload titles of up to 150 characters, Google strongly recommends 70 characters or fewer; no more than 70 will display in the SERPs. Since your titles need to be written for humans, you can’t simply stuff all of your target keywords into 70 characters — as a result, your reach is diminished because you have to pick one keyword to prioritize and maybe a second one tacked on elsewhere.
Problem #3: To complicate matters further, Google prioritizes words at the beginning of your titles and descriptions. So in the title “Nike Men’s Blue Lightweight Running Shoes,” the brand name Nike and modifiers “men’s” and “blue” will have more weight than “lightweight running shoes,” in theory.
Problem #4: Your product might be hyper-relevant to far more queries and keywords than you can reasonably fit in your product titles. This is exacerbated when you have a low number of products, say 3 of them, but there are 10+ phrases that are relevant. You can’t simply allocate one, or even two, phrases per product line in your feed.
Problem #5: Even if you did stuff your titles with keywords, only the first one in the title would reach its potential. Google would devalue the keywords towards the end of the title, more or less, thus leaving a good bit of traffic on the table.
To simplify, what should you do if you have a product that applies to more keywords than fit in the product feed title, and what can you do to reach those additional queries? – Read more
