Part 2 — The feed is the campaign
Titles, identifiers, taxonomy, and custom labels — the feed work that outperforms most bid changes.
In Search campaigns you write ads and pick keywords. In Shopping and Performance Max — where most ecommerce budgets live — Google generates both from your product feed. The feed is the targeting, the creative, and a large share of the bid signal. This is why feed work routinely outperforms bid tweaking: a title rewrite changes which auctions you enter; a bid change only adjusts how hard you compete in the auctions you were already entering.
Titles: front-load what people search
Google matches queries primarily against the beginning of your product title. Retailer defaults — brand-first, poetic names, internal SKU jargon — waste that position. The working pattern for most categories: primary product term, then the attributes buyers actually query (size, color, material, model), then brand where it earns its place. "Wool runner rug 80x300cm grey — Handwoven" enters auctions that "Handwoven Collection Aurora" never sees. Rewrite titles for your top revenue products first; the long tail can follow programmatically.
Identifiers and taxonomy: how Google understands the product
- GTINs matter where they exist: they connect your offer to Google’s product graph, unlocking better query matching and competitive price context. Missing or wrong GTINs quietly suppress eligibility.
- google_product_category tells Google what the item is; product_type tells campaigns how YOU organize the catalog. Maintain both — product_type becomes your subdivision skeleton in part 4.
- Availability, price, and sale_price must match the landing page exactly. Mismatches are the most common cause of item disapprovals and account-level trust damage.
Custom labels: your economics, injected into the feed
Custom labels are five free-text fields Google ignores but campaigns can segment on — which makes them the bridge between part 1 and everything that follows. Label products by margin band, price tier, seasonality, and stock depth. A feed labeled this way lets you build campaigns around economics ("high-margin core," "clearance") instead of around whatever taxonomy the store shipped with. This single practice is what separates feed-led accounts from structure-led ones — the full playbook is in the feed optimization layer.
Before part 3: confirm every product has an accurate title pattern, valid identifiers, both category fields, and at minimum a margin-band custom label. An hour in the feed here saves a quarter of confused optimization later.