Product titles that match
There are no keywords in Shopping. The title is what Google matches a query against, which makes it the highest-leverage field in the feed. It is also why so many catalogues lose auctions with a title that reads like a warehouse label.
What a title has to do
Two jobs at once, and they pull in different directions. It has to contain the words a buyer would type, so Google can match it. And it has to read as a product to a human scanning a grid, because it is also the ad’s headline. A title stuffed for the first job loses the second.
The order that works
Front-load. Titles are truncated in the interface, often around 70 characters depending on the surface, and the words at the front carry the most matching weight. A workable default order:
| Category | Order that works |
|---|---|
| Apparel | Brand + Gender + Product type + Attributes + Colour + Size |
| Consumer electronics | Brand + Model + Product type + Key spec + Colour |
| Consumables | Brand + Product type + Variant + Weight or count |
| Hard goods | Brand + Product type + Key attribute + Size or capacity |
| Books and media | Title + Format + Author or artist |
What to leave out
- Promotional language. "Best", "sale", "free shipping" and exclamation marks are either disallowed or wasted, and some of them get the item disapproved.
- Your own SKU, unless buyers actually search for it.
- Internal category names nobody outside the company uses.
- ALL CAPS, which reads as shouting and is against the specification.
- Repeated words. Repetition does not increase matching weight and it costs characters.
The test that settles most arguments: would somebody type this? If a phrase in the title is one nobody would ever search for and nobody would recognise in a grid, it is doing neither job.
Length
The limit is 150 characters and the visible portion is far shorter. Use the length, because a longer title carries more matching surface for long-tail queries, but front-load it so the truncated version still reads as a product.
Doing it at catalogue scale
Rewriting titles by hand does not scale past a few hundred products, and template-only approaches produce titles that are structurally correct and wrong in detail. The workable approach is a template per category, filled from attributes, which is the argument for enriching the attributes first. A title template is only as good as the fields it draws on.