What Is The Shopping Feed Audit?
The Shopping Feed Audit 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.
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, in turn boosting 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.
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.
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.
Spot Campaign Gaps: Quickly identify Shopping campaigns without any negative keywords, helping you refine your targeting and reduce irrelevant clicks.
Monitor Feed Performance Effortlessly: The Shopping Feed Audit widget on the account dashboard allows you to see your shopping feed health at a glance.
Get 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.
Widgets in Shopping Feed Audit
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 that you can take corrective actions promptly.
Products with Price lower than Benchmark Price: See products that are priced lower than the market benchmark, helping you identify which of your products are most competitive from a pricing perspective.
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).
Setting Up The Audit
Press the 'Create New Audit' button and enter a name to get started. You'll see a set of audits for Product Level, Product Titles and Descriptions, Basic Product Data, Product Identifiers, Price and Availability, Product Category, Detailed Product Description, Shopping Campaigns and Other Configurations, and Shipping.
You can choose to disable or enable any of the items on the list before running or scheduling the audit. You can also choose to hide or show the disabled ones from the list. The audits can be expanded or collapsed as needed.
Once you define the enabled and disabled sections and are ready to audit, press 'Save' and 'Run Now.'
Analyzing Results
On the results page, you'll see an overall score out of 100, which is an average of the items below.
Each audit has its own individual score, and when you click on the result, you'll see a more detailed range of information displayed.
Note: Some of the audits in our Shopping Feed Audits are not scored, as they’re meant to be informational, and they do not contribute to the overall audit score. You'll see these audits grayed out and with an "i" sign.
Applying Changes Based on Results
For audits related to Merchant Center product data (e.g., missing attributes, short descriptions, or incorrect formatting), you can fix issues directly from the tool's results page.
For audits like missing brand, color, or GTIN, you can click 'Fix Now' to view and add the missing values. For fields like product descriptions or titles where the audit recommends improvements, you can edit the text directly in the expanded editor. You can edit or add values for up to 25 affected products at a time.
Here are four ways you can update the product values:
1. Enter or edit values manually
2. Choose from suggested values (you will see suggested values only if there are any existing values for the field)
3. Generate AI suggestions, or
4. Bulk update the same value for all the products
Once you're done, 'Confirm & Apply' to complete the process for selected items or choose 'Apply & Fix Next 25' to move to the next set of products.
After Applying Fixes
Once you confirm and apply changes, Optmyzr creates a supplemental feed in your Merchant Center and pushes the updates within a few minutes. The audit will then display a “N fixed” label next to the 'Fix Now' button for sections where changes were made. If you open 'Fix Now' again, the products you already fixed won’t appear in the suggestions.
Audit scores do not update immediately. A note is added to the section to indicate that fixes were applied. If you simply reload the audit, the “N fixed” label will disappear, but the fixed products will still be excluded from suggestions. To reflect the latest state of your feed and get updated scores, you need to resync the feed and rerun the audit.
You can download the audit at any time, but for the most accurate results, resync and rerun the audit after making fixes.
Downloading Results
Once done, you can save the audit in two separate ways:
As a full PDF file with all the information
When downloading as a PDF file, you can choose to keep the original colors of the
audit by selecting the Background Graphics option.
As individual results in an Excel file
Scheduling Results
Your saved audits can also be scheduled to be sent out on a weekly basis. This sends out an email with the link to the recently run audit. You'll find this option in the top right, next to Save and Run Now. When scheduling the audit, you'll be able to send the results to multiple team members.
