A shopping feed is the foundation of your Microsoft Advertising campaigns, informing the platform about the products you have available to sell. The feed provides key details such as price, brand, and colour, which Microsoft Advertising uses to automatically generate ads and reach users in product search and beyond. This makes the shopping feed the backbone of your campaign structure, as the feed replaces traditional ad copy and keyword bidding.
This article will guide you through optimising your product titles, descriptions, and images, avoiding duplicates, and making sure all product attributes are correctly populated to maximise your campaign performance.
- Product Titles
Product titles are one of the most critical factors in determining the relevance of your ads. For instance, if you’re selling men’s lightweight black running shoes and only label them “black shoes,” your ad won’t appear in many relevant searches. Shoppers search for specifics, like “red trail-running shoes” or “road racing trainers,” so including as much detail as possible is essential.
Even though you don’t bid on keywords in shopping campaigns, you can still run a search terms report to see which queries triggered your ads. For example, if someone searches for “men’s green parka” and your product title is simply “down parka,” your ad is unlikely to perform well. To optimise titles, follow a format like brand + product name + product type + gender + size + colour, as this reflects buyer behaviour and priorities when searching.
Avoid using promotional text like “free shipping” in titles, as this can be added through extensions and labels rather than in your product titles. As your product feed takes the place of target keywords, ensure your product titles are detailed enough to clearly indicate the exact product you are promoting, in the same way you’d ensure target keywords are tightly themed.
- Product Descriptions
Product descriptions should expand on the information in the title and reinforce the details most relevant to users. For example, if you’re selling yellow spotty hats, place “yellow spotty hat” at the start of the description, rather than generic terms like “hat, cute, outdoor.” People are searching for specifics, so front-load the description with key details to improve ad relevance.
It’s also important to ensure descriptions match the product details on your landing page. For example, for women’s shoes, the description should include features such as material, size, and colour. Make sure there are no errors like HTML tags or duplicate words, as these can reduce the quality of your ad.
Descriptions should avoid things like capital letters or excessive punctuation, as these can make your ad appear unprofessional and may violate ad policies.
- Avoid Duplicate Titles
Duplicate titles can hurt your campaign performance just like duplicate keywords. If two products with the same title and price appear in your feed, Microsoft may only serve one ad, meaning variations in colour, size, or style won’t be shown. To avoid this, expand the titles of variants by including attributes like colour, size, material, or pattern to highlight the differences.
Also, use the Item Group ID attribute for products that have variations. This ensures that all versions of a product – such as different sizes or colours – are correctly grouped and displayed.
- Shopping Image Considerations
Images play a vital role in showing customers a visual of the product as if they are in the store. Use high-resolution images, and if possible, show the product in multiple colours and in use to give shoppers a better idea of how it looks.
Here are some essential guidelines for images:
- Minimum image size: 220px by 220px
- Maximum image size: 3.9MB
- Acceptable formats: .bmp, .gif, .exif, .jpg, .png
- Prefer images with a white background and avoid adding text like “free shipping” or watermarks
Ensure the image link is case-sensitive, and if you update the image, also update the URL in the feed to reflect the new image in the ad. Microsoft’s bots will crawl your site in order to reference the image you’ve provided via a URL; ensure your website’s robots.text file is configured to allow Bingbot to crawl your site and retrieve product images.
- Ensure Attribute Columns Are Populated
The shopping tab allows users to filter products by attributes like colour, size, material, and gender. To maximise your product’s visibility in these filters, it’s essential to populate your feed with attributes that help to surface your products to in-market searchers. For example, if a customer searches for “womens brown leather satchel with buckle,” and your feed includes these details, your product will appear more prominently in the filtered results. Ensure to populate feed columns including words or attributes that a shopper might search, rather than small details that wouldn’t sway a purchase decision either way.
- Additional Feed Optimizations
Product URLs
Your feed includes both an image URL and a product URL (the destination) and it’s essential that redirects are not applied to these URLs, as redirects can cause issues with ad serving. In cases where both the link and ads_redirect attributes are used, they should resolve to the same product landing page.
Product Pricing
Price is another critical factor in feed optimisation. Ensure that the price listed in the feed represents the price for a single unit. If you’re selling a bundle or multipack, ensure that the total price is listed (not the unit price), as listing only the unit price can lead to rejection.
If your product uses instalment pricing (e.g., mobile carrier plans), be sure to specify this in your feed. Additionally, attributes like sale price and sale price effective dates can be used to highlight discount pricing, adding further appeal to your shopping ads.
Conclusion
Given product feeds replace keywords and ad copy usually found in Search campaigns, the attributes within your feed act as levers to improve the searches your ad is serving against, as well as increasing CTRs and conversion rates. By optimising your feed to appeal to search behaviours and purchase preferences, your ad is more likely to gain visibility within beneficial searches. Think of your feed not as a stockroom, but as a storefront – every detail matters in attracting and converting potential buyers.
