If you run Shopping Ads or Performance Max on Google Ads for your Ecommerce store, product titles are the single most powerful lever you have to pull when it comes to showing up for more keywords and thus, getting more sales. You could spend hours tweaking your ads, bidding strategies and targeting but if your product titles are crap, there’s really no point. This is why:
What Does Google Look For?
As a search platform first, Google uses its users’ search terms to decide when to show your product. These could be anything from exactly what your product is (e.g. ‘white men’s t-shirt’ if you’re a clothing brand) to some longer tail search terms that still show strong purchase intent (e.g. ‘what’s the best men’s t-shirt’). Ultimately, it’s your product title more than anything else in the data feed that decides which of these keywords you’ll be appearing for.
Let’s say the t-shirts you’re selling have an obscure, brand-specific name as their product titles:
These titles might work great and make total sense when on your Shopify store. But they’ll fail miserably if you simply copy and paste them into your data feed as your product titles for PMax. The titles do not include the words “t shirt” or “mens t shirt” in them, and thus are probably not going to trigger those searches.
A simple rule of thumb here is: if you have never customised your product titles, and instead your product titles are a copy and paste of what they are on your store, then you probably need to do that ASAP to ensure you are maximising your impressions, clicks and sales from PMax.
Use Keyword Planner
If you’re struggling with putting together these product titles, the Google Keyword Planner is your friend. This is Google’s tool for finding keywords with high search volume to make sure you’re not ignoring search terms that could be bringing you a vast amount of traffic. You can find this by navigating to the Tools and Settings tab at the top of the Google Ads interface, then clicking Keyword Planner under the Planning column.
Once you’re here, click ‘Discover New Keywords’ and give Google a couple of keywords related to your product to give it some guidance. After this, Google will give you a list of related keywords in order of average search volume. These high volume keywords are what you want to be including in your product titles to make sure you’re showing your product to as many relevant potential customers as possible.
After you’ve done this, it doesn’t matter what campaign type you run, you’ll start to see people start getting more engaged by your ads and you’ll be getting in front of a much more relevant audience.