If you needed more reason to pay attention to all the attributes available for your products in your Google product feed, here’s one: Google is surfacing more attributes from merchants’ product feeds in Shopping Ads.
The example above, spotted by Jackson Lo, SEO lead, international growth at Shopify, this week, shows apparel ads with the “Material” attribute. A Google spokesperson told Search Engine Land that surfacing attributes in Shopping ads is live on mobile and is now being tested on desktop.
I was curious if this was mainly showing on ads for brand queries, but I was also able to get the materials attribute to surface on a non-brand query on mobile:
Why we care. Google says it is continually testing showing different information in Shopping ads relevant to specific verticals.
That means it’s even more important to fill in as many attributes for your products as possible because you never know when it might be surfaced in Shopping ads. That’s in addition to using them to ensure your ads surface for relevant queries and when users click on available search filters.
If you haven’t audited your Google product feed in awhile, this is a good reason to bump it up on your to-do list.
How to optimize your product feeds for Google attributes. Review all of the attributes available, paying particular attention to those relevant to the types of products you sell. Sticking with the apparel category as an example, the material, pattern, gender, age_group, color, size, size type, size system. You can find the full list of Google product feed attributes here.
In addition, be sure you’re using the item_group_id attribute to group product variants together in your feed (see this help page). This way, when someone looks at your product in Shopping, it will show the product with its variants (colors, patterns, etc). This is applicable to apparel, shoes, electronics, furniture, makeup and groceries.
Surfaces across Google. You’ll notice many product feed attributes are required in order to be eligible for enhanced listings on Surfaces across Google. Be sure to opt-into surfaces across Google in your Google Merchant Center if you want to be included in the free product listings in Google’s Shopping tab, Search, Images, Google Maps and Google Lens.
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