Google Shopping Product Feed Audit Checklist

Auditing your Google Shopping Product feed helps you spot missing data, structural issues, or non-compliant attributes that could be holding your ads back. The process also enables you to assess current data, identify problems in your XML feeds, and uncover powerful optimization opportunities.

It also has benefits such as improving ad performance, enhancing visibility, increasing conversions, reducing costs, and fostering a better customer experience.

Whether you choose a manual product feed auditing process or use tools, our guide highlights missing product attributes and helps you create a solid product feed audit plan. This ensures your Google Shopping product feed is fully optimized.

Step-by-Step Process of Google Shopping Product Feed Audit

1. Feed Health & Policy Compliance

The first step towards auditing your Shopping product feed is to check your Google Merchant Center account. Open your account and check for alerts or notifications regarding errors or product disapprovals. You can check the Needs Attention page in your Google Merchant Center.

If you find errors such as availability/price mismatch, Incorrect GTIN, or misrepresentation errors, it is critical to resolve them to avoid product disapprovals or account suspension.

Review your site and feed against the Misrepresentation policy (clarity of business identity, truthful claims, accessible contact/returns/shipping, consistent pricing) and remove information that could mislead your customers.

How to resolve errors?

Start by understanding the specific error in GMC, go through Google’s policies and guidelines.
Research the error and ask questions in Google Help Communities, Reddit, or the Shopify Community(if you’re a Shopify merchant).
In most cases, you should find a solution through Google help articles, official documents, or external sources.
If you do not find a solution, you can rely on communities.
After identifying the solution, follow a step-by-step approach to resolving errors.

Once you have fixed all the errors, you can inspect other key elements, such as titles, descriptions, product categories, and more.

2. Product Titles and Descriptions

When auditing your product feed, it is essential to remember that Google Shopping has its own specifications. Therefore, we need to understand Google Shopping requirements before performing an audit.

Google Shopping Requirements:

Google Shopping title should range between 70 and 150 characters.
The title should be clear, descriptive, and avoid promotional language.
The title must have relevant keywords and put the important keywords first.
Google Shopping description must have ≤5,000 characters, focusing on the product’s features and benefits.
Product description must use standard UTF-8 encoding.
Must follow professional language and grammatical rules.
Must maintain consistency with the product’s landing page.

How to check product titles and descriptions?

You can review the product details within your Google Merchant Center account. Go to products on the left-hand side menu >> scroll down to find a list of all your products >> select a product and click ‘Edit product.’

Note: This step is to review your product titles and descriptions alone. Not to make any changes or edits to product details. This is because, you should always make changes to the source product feed file and not directly on GMC. For example, if you have uploaded a Google Sheets, make changes and re-upload it.

edit product title and description in GMC

Pro Tip: If you have an extensive product catalog, try exporting all product titles into a spreadsheet to check each title thoroughly and quickly.

After exporting the data, look at product titles and ask yourself:

Does the product title have keywords?
Also, check if the title uses keywords repeatedly in an unnatural way.
Where are keywords placed: at the beginning or at the end?
Does the title reflect the search intent?
Most importantly, check if the title follows a channel-specific character limit. For example, Google Shopping lets you check if your title is within the limit.
Pro Tip: Best practice is to stick to a 50 to 70 character limit for product titles.
Check if the title follows consistent capitalization, punctuation, and a naming convention.

Post auditing, optimize titles for improved performance, here’s a detailed guide on Google Shopping title optimization.

When auditing product descriptions, check if:

Product description covers features, benefits, and all your customers’ common questions.
The description contains other attributes like size, material, color, etc.
It includes promotional content like buy 1 get 1, sale, etc. If yes, consider removing such promotional content.

These guidelines should help you identify issues with titles and descriptions. Keep a note of all your product titles and descriptions that do not meet the Google Shopping standards and specifications. If you’re using Google Sheets or an Excel to keep track of your auditing process, ensure to add a comment explaining the issue associated with each title and description to ease the optimization process in the future.

With that, let’s get ahead in the process.

3. Product Images

Next up is the most critical attribute for Google Shopping ads: images.

Google Shopping Requirements for images

Image quality: High resolution (minimum 100x100px, 250x250px for apparel)
The image must be of high quality and display the product accurately.
The image must not contain watermarks, logos, or promotional text.
Image must show only the product you’re selling.

Check for:

Check the quality of images and see if you have additional images that cover various angles and lifestyle images.
Look, if all the images are naturally-lit, and they have high resolution.
You must include a product image that indicates the size of your product.
Test if user-generated photos lead to higher engagement.
You must show the simplest of details in your product images.
Analyze the performance of images and track the engagement.

Have a checklist of all these factors when auditing product images. Keep ticking each factor as you review images and continue doing so for all your products.

4. Google Product Category & Product Type

Although the Google product Category and Product type are optional attributes, providing detailed information helps you appear for relevant search queries.

Google product category is a predefined category system that lets merchants categorize their products. Product type is a merchant-defined category that gives merchants the flexibility to categorize their products according to their choice. This attribute helps provide detailed information lacking in the Google product category.

Additionally, having a product_type attribute lets you gain insights into reporting and bidding strategies for specific product groups.

Therefore, ensure you have provided attributes like Google_Product_category and Product_type in your Shopping feed.

Tip: Be specific about the category and provide all the details.

For example:

For a t-shirt, the product type can be as follows, as shown in the image below:

5. GTIN (Global Trade Item Number)

Although GTINs are not mandatory for all products or most sales channels, having GTINs guarantees increased visibility.
If your product is assigned a GTIN, including one in your product feed is mandatory.
Google recommends always adding product identifiers if you have them available.
If you do not have a product identifier like GTIN, Brand, or MPN, leave them blank and do not include incorrect identifiers.
If your products do not have assigned unique product identifiers, do not include GTIN, MPN, Brand, or internal SKU values.
If you manufacture products, keep the brand value as your store name and use a unique identifier number for MPN.
If your products come under handmade or customized ones that do not have GTINs, you can apply for an exception.

If you don’t have a product identifier, tick the box ‘ I don’t have a GTIN, UPC, EAN, JAN, or ISBN. ‘ You will see the following options. Choose the corresponding option and save the changes.

When auditing GTINs for your products:

1. Identify the products that do not have GTINs or have incorrect GTIN formats.

2. Validate existing GTIN using a GS1 Check Digit Calculator.

3. Here’s how to get GTIN for your products.

4. Fix GTIN-related issues such as GTIN not registered, not assigned, or duplicate value.

6. Price and Availability

Checklist for reviewing price and availability attributes:

Check if your landing page and price attribute show the exact same pricing.
Check if the currency code, such as USD, and decimal positions are correct.
Check if the availability status is consistent across the website and your feed. However, GMC notifies if it identifies a mismatch. If you find errors related to availability mismatch, here’s a guide on how to fix availability mismatch error in GMC.

Important: Automatic Item Updates in GMC automatically update the price, availability, and product’s condition in your Shopping ads (Product listing ads) and free listings. It fetches the information from your website and adjusts the values to maintain consistency across your store and product feed. However, merchants must ensure they have structured data markup for Google to pick up the information from their website.

You can enable it by going to your GMC account >> Products >> selecting the Automatic Improvements tab >> enabling the option.

7. Links

Check for Google Shopping feed links such as link, image_link, and additional_image_link. Verify the functionality of all these links and ensure they are not broken.

8. Additional Fields

If you sell clothing, you might have to fill in additional details like color, material, size, size system, etc. Therefore, review all these details when auditing product feed and add any missing information.

Important: Use item_group_id to group product variants in your product data.

9. Shipping Information

Google requires merchants to add complete shipping information, including speed and costs involved in shipping and delivering a product. The costs should include all shipping, delivery, handling, logistics, and carrier fees.
Calculate the shipping costs accurately from picking up the order to delivering it to an individual.
If you cannot determine the exact cost, slightly overestimate it and be mindful of the overestimation cost to avoid a negative impact.
You should also confirm that customers can view product details even when you don’t ship to those countries.
Ensure you abide by local laws and provide the country as a sub attribute for the shipping attribute to ensure you ship products to a country correctly.

10. File Format

File formatting issues, such as wrong delimiters, broken headers, or encoding errors, are detected automatically when you upload your product feed to Google Merchant Center. If your feed has already been accepted, it means those basic formatting checks have passed successfully.

However, if you manually manage your feed, for example, in a spreadsheet or use the same feed across multiple channels like Meta, Bing, or Pinterest, it’s worth doing a quick formatting sanity check. This ensures that the file structure, attribute names, and encoding remain intact.

If you use files such as XML, CSV, spreadsheets, etc., to upload your product feed to Google Merchant Center, ensure the file has no formatting issues, is less than 4 GB, and is configured with UTF-encoding to avoid problems with special characters.
If you upload a file URL, ensure it begins with either http://, https://, ftp://, or sftp://.

11. Feed Update Schedule

As part of the auditing process, it is crucial to take alook at your current feed update schedules and consider changing them if need be. You can change the syncing frequency to ‘daily’ to stay up-to-date and provide accurate information to your customers (if not already set). You can also set scheduled fetches to allow Google to fetch data regularly.

Choose frequency and time in your Google Merchant Center account >> Settings >> Data sources >> Primary Sources tab >> select a data source >> About this source tab >> click pencil icon in Scheduled Updates tab >> Update frequency and time.

You can also sync changes hourly using methods like the Content API. Content API is the best method when you have an extensive inventory.

A few things to audit:

Google requires you not to block the user agents ‘Googlebot’ and ‘AdsBot-Google’ from the directory containing your product data source.
The product data source URL must direct you to your product data source file, not an HTML page on your website.

Tip: Enable ‘Automatic Item Updates’ in Google Merchant Center to let Google automatically correct price and availability data when it detects mismatches between your feed and your website.

12. Landing Page

You must maintain consistency across the website, product feed, and landing page to avoid disapproval.

If there’s a mismatch in price or availability, it might lead to product disapproval.

To avoid this, check for:

Populate price and availability in the initial HTML and not just through JavaScript.
Keep feed/API timing in sync with site updates.
As mentioned earlier, you must enable Automatic Item Updates in GMC.
When you localize pricing, ensure the landing page for that particular ad also reflects the same region and currency as per your product data.

Post-Audit Support and Recommendations

Well, you have come to the end of inspecting your product feed audit and are ready with actionable insights. What do you do next?

Instead of acting immediately, take a step back to prioritize the issues.

Pay attention to those that can lead to product disapprovals or account suspensions.
Then, focus on less critical issues like optimizing titles, descriptions, etc.
Later, focus on improving product images, site speed, etc.

Approaching the implementation phase this way ensures you’re prioritizing the most critical issues first and helps prevent product or account disapprovals.

Product feed tools can help resolve product feed issues. If you use AdNabu for your Shopify store, our customer support team can help you easily resolve several critical issues/errors.

You can contact them via email/chat, and they will be able to guide you in building a Google Shopping-compliant product feed that is free of errors.

Importance of Product Feed Audit for Google Shopping Feeds

Why Product Feed Audits are Crucial?

Auditing your product feed, whether for Google Shopping, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, etc., is crucial as it ensures that it is accurate, complete, and optimized for channel-specific requirements.

When you perform a product feed audit:

You can spot potential errors that can prevent product disapprovals and Google Merchant Center account suspensions
Improve data accuracy and quality
Review and optimize key attributes like titles, descriptions, categories, images, etc.
Additionally, auditing boosts your product visibility and performance.

Common Issues Identified When Auditing Product Feeds

A few common auditing errors found during a product feed audit include:

Missing attributes in product feed, like GTIN, shipping details, and category.
Using incorrect currency formats
Outdated inventory levels
Product identifier errors
Misclassification of products
Poorly optimized titles, descriptions, and images, and more.

Benefits of regular product feed audits

Improved visibility: As mentioned earlier, when you perform a product feed audit, you can improve the quality of the feed by filling in missing attributes and providing accurate information. When you provide Google with additional and relevant information, your ads appear for relevant search queries, thus improving visibility.

Increase in Click-through rate: Optimizing titles, descriptions and providing high-quality images improves relevancy with user search terms, thus encouraging more clicks and conversion rates.

Accurate Data: Audits enable you to spot and correct inconsistent data and errors in your feed, improving the shopping experience.

Conclusion

A successful product feed audit helps uncover hidden issues, strengthen data quality and accuracy, and ensure platform channel compliance.

Here are a few key takeaways:-

Check the Needs attention tab in Google Merchant Center to identify errors like disapprovals, price mismatches, etc.
Prioritize errors that can lead to product disapprovals or account suspensions before focusing on optimizations.
Craft SEO-optimized titles to align with search intent. Be sure to add product benefits and attributes to descriptions.
Use high-resolution, clean images with white backgrounds. Test lifestyle and user-generated images to boost engagement.
Add GTINs and ensure Google product category and Product type fields are correctly mapped.
Match feed data with your website to avoid disapprovals and customer frustration.
Ensure your XML/CSV files are error-free and set automated daily syncing to maintain up-to-date product details.
If you sell on Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest, tailor the product feed audits to each platform’s specifications.
Use product feed tools (like AdNabu) or expert support to streamline error resolution and long-term optimization.

FAQs

How can I identify and fix errors in my Google Shopping product feed audit?

You can use a Google Merchant Center account to identify issues and errors in the Google Shopping feed. You can find them in the Needs attention tab. Once you identify issues, understand their root cause, and go through Google’s help articles to thoroughly understand the issue and resolve the errors. These errors could be related to price mismatch, GTIN errors, missing attributes, etc.

What are the most common reasons for product disapproval in Google Shopping feeds, and how can I prevent them?

Common reasons for product disapproval include price and availability mismatches, policy violations, and misrepresentation errors. To prevent such issues, ensure your product feed is accurate, up-to-date, and consistent across your store, GMC, and Google Shopping product feed.

How can I optimize product titles and descriptions in a Google Shopping product feed audit?

To optimize titles, use relevant keywords, keep them concise, and put keywords at the beginning of the title. To optimize descriptions, expand on features and benefits, use some product attributes, and stick to the Google Shopping character limit.

Why is it important to include high-quality images in my Google Shopping product feed, and how can I ensure they meet Google’s standards?

Online shoppers rely on as much information as possible on a product before making the decision. And high-quality images boost click-through rates. To meet Google’s product image standards, use clear, well-lit images without overlays and audit regularly for compliance.

How can I use custom labels in my Google Shopping feed to improve campaign performance?

Create different product groups based on bidding strategies, their performance, and budgets. Assign labels like bestsellers, on-sale, etc., to segment campaigns in Google Ads. This approach lets you allocate your budget wisely and control your bidding, leading to efficient ad spend and improved ROI.

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