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About: Shopping Feed Audit
Radhika Shenoy avatar
Written by Radhika Shenoy
Updated this week

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What Is It?

The Shopping Feed Audit tool grades your merchant feed and shopping campaigns based on common parameters to identify quick opportunities for improvement. By providing a series of product, campaign, and product/listing group audits, the tool helps you maintain a well-structured and organized campaign setup. Use the audit to make data-driven optimizations to your campaigns and feeds, and ensure your campaigns perform at their best.

Why Use Shopping Feed Audit?

The Shopping Feed Audit tool saves time, enhances performance, and provides actionable insights to help you maintain the quality of your feeds, which will boost the performance of your Shopping and PMax retail campaigns. Stay on top of your e-commerce strategy with the tool’s audits and proactively address feed and campaign issues.

  1. Audit Merchant Feeds: Use the tool to review your linked Google Merchant Center feed and spot products with missing values. Uncover issues like disapproved products, items overlapping across campaigns, missing brand information, etc.

  2. Identify and Optimize Product Groups: You can find product or listing groups that contain too many products and split them for improved management and more precise targeting.

  3. Spot Campaign Gaps: Quickly identify Shopping campaigns without any negative keywords, helping you refine your targeting and reduce irrelevant clicks.

  4. Monitor Feed Performance Effortlessly: The Shopping Feed Audit widget on the account dashboard allows you to see your shopping feed health at a glance.

  5. Proactive Alerts and Reporting: Schedule the audit reports and receive regular email updates to save time and ensure continuous monitoring of your campaigns and feeds.

Shopping Feed Audit: Widgets

Data Sources

Identify products found by Google: Google may automatically include products it finds on your online store, to your ad campaigns (unless you have opted out of the feature), even if you haven't added those products to your Merchant Center account. These might go unnoticed if you don't frequently check your account. Such products may not be optimized or align with your advertising strategy. Find these using the Shopping Feed Audit and decide whether to keep and remove them.

Campaign Level

Active Shopping and PMax Retail Campaigns: Identify all active campaigns to ensure no campaigns are overlooked in your optimizations.

Negative Keywords (Standard Shopping)

  • Campaigns with zero negative keywords: Identify Shopping campaigns with zero negative keywords to refine targeting and eliminate irrelevant searches.

  • Negative keywords by campaign: Get a count of negative keywords by campaign and enhance campaign precision.

Product Level

  • Disapproved Products: Identify products that were disapproved and understand the reasons, so you can take corrective actions promptly.

  • Products Exceeding Benchmark Prices: See products priced higher than the benchmark to stay competitive. Customize the percentage threshold for identifying overpriced items.

  • Products Active in Multiple Campaigns: Avoid overlaps that might dilute campaign performance or inflate costs.

  • Products Not Active in Any Campaign: Spot products that aren’t being advertised and decide whether to include them in campaigns.

Product Group/Listing Group

  • Expensive Product/Listing Groups: Identify groups with higher costs to evaluate if they’re delivering proportional returns.

  • Large Product/Listing Groups: Spot groups containing too many products and split them for better targeting.

  • Empty Product/Listing Groups: Remove or optimize these groups to ensure they’re contributing value.

Product Titles and Descriptions

  • Long Product Titles: Identify titles exceeding 40 characters to ensure that important product information appears within the first 30-40 characters, which are most visible to customers.

  • Missing Brand in Titles: Ensure brand information is included in product titles for better relevance.

  • Short Product Descriptions: Review descriptions with fewer than 500 characters and add relevant details to improve user engagement.

  • Descriptions Missing Brand: Ensure product descriptions include brand details to enhance clarity.

Missing Product Information

Identify products missing crucial details such as:

  • Basic data like item ID, product name, or link.

  • Product identifiers (GTIN, MPN).

  • Attributes like price, availability, and expiration date.

  • Detailed descriptions (gender, size, color, material).

  • Shopping campaign configurations (custom labels).

  • Shipping details (label, weight, handling time).

Take control of your e-commerce campaigns with precision and efficiency. Try the Shopping Feed Audit tool or read more about how to set it up.

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