In Shopping, the feed is your keyword targeting.
You do not choose keywords in Shopping. Google reads your product data and decides which searches you deserve. That is why feed work is the campaign work — and why most stores are invisible for the searches that would have converted.
How Shopping actually decides what to show
A Shopping ad is matched from your product feed: title, description, product type, Google category, brand, GTIN, price, availability and images. There is no keyword list to edit. If your titles read like a supplier catalogue, you will be matched against searches nobody makes.
The title is the lever
"Ring — SKU 4471, elegant, gift" tells Google almost nothing. "Gold-plated stacking ring, sterling silver, women's, size 6" maps to how people actually search: material, style, audience, size. Rewriting titles against the search terms already converting in the account is usually the single highest-return change we make to a store.
Three numbers that are never the same
Products live on your store. A smaller number are ever served by Google. A smaller number again have sold anything in the last 30 days. Most owners scale "the catalogue" while only a slice of it is visible and a smaller slice is profitable. Knowing which of the three you are talking about changes where the budget goes.
What we fix, in order
- Merchant Center health — active disapprovals and warnings first. A disapproved product earns nothing and nobody gets an email.
- Identifiers — GTIN, brand, MPN and condition. Missing identifiers are the most common cause of quiet, catalogue-wide disapprovals.
- Titles and product types — rewritten for search language, not supplier language.
- Price and stock accuracy — the feed has to agree with the live page, including sale prices and any currency app that rewrites them.
- Campaign structure — products split by what they earn, so budget follows performance instead of spreading evenly across dead weight.
Why your products are not showing.
Almost always one of these three, and all three are fixable without spending more.
You are not in the auction at all
Missing GTINs, image problems, price mismatch or a policy flag. Check Merchant Center diagnostics before blaming the bids — a disapproved product cannot lose an auction it never entered.
You are in the wrong auctions
Titles and product types that do not match buyer language. You get impressions on vague searches and lose the specific ones that convert.
You are in the right auction, losing it
Genuinely a bidding and margin question — but it is the last thing to look at, not the first, and it is where most agencies start.
Next on Shopping
Where people usually go from here.
Performance Max
The automated campaign that includes Shopping — and how to stop it eating your brand traffic.
Read more →Merchant Center suspension
When the feed problem becomes an account problem.
Read more →What a product feed is
The plain-english definition, with the fields that matter.
Read more →Send us the feed. We will tell you what Google sees.
View access to Merchant Center and Google Ads is enough for the teardown.