Product titles in Shopping: what the top 10% of advertisers do differently

If you only ever fix one thing in your feed, fix titles.

Titles do more work than any other field. They tell Google which queries to match you to. They drive click-through rate. They control a chunk of how your relevance score gets calculated. And they’re the field most advertisers leave on autopilot.

A bit of context on me. I’m Kevin Wetherby. 19 years in paid search, time at Google, wrote a book on data feed optimization. I’ve rewritten thousands of product titles. I’ve seen the same patterns work over and over across categories.

Here’s what the best advertisers do differently.

The principle most people get wrong

Most people think a Shopping title is the product name. That’s how it gets treated, and that’s why it underperforms.

A Shopping title is a query-matching field. Google reads it to decide which searches your product is eligible for. If your title is “Quencher 40oz Tumbler” and someone searches “stainless steel water bottle with handle”, Google may not connect them, even though that’s exactly what your product is.

The top 10% write titles like keywords. They lead with the attributes buyers search for, in the order buyers search for them.

What “lead with what people search for” actually means

Buyers search in a predictable order. They start with the most specific identifier they know, then add modifiers. Most categories follow one of these patterns:

• Apparel: brand + product type + gender + color + size + material
• Electronics: brand + model + key spec + color
• Home goods: product type + material + size + color + brand
• Beauty: brand + product type + variant + size

If your titles match the order people search, query matching improves. If they don’t, you compete for the queries Google guesses you might match, which is a worse spot to be in.

Before and after

Real examples I’ve worked on, with details anonymized.

Before: “Quencher H2.0 FlowState Tumbler”
After: “Stanley Quencher 40oz Stainless Steel Tumbler with Straw and Handle, Charcoal”

The first version assumes the buyer knows the product line. The second version matches the buyer’s actual search vocabulary. CTR roughly doubled. Conversion rate held, so revenue per impression doubled too.

Before: “Levitate Wave 5 Sneaker”
After: “Brooks Levitate Wave 5 Men’s Running Shoes, Black, Size 10.5”

Same product, but now Google can match it to “Brooks running shoes size 10.5” and “men’s black Brooks running shoe” without having to guess. Both are higher-intent queries.

Before: “Stella Hand Lotion 8oz”
After: “Stella Hydrating Hand Lotion with Shea Butter and Vitamin E, 8oz Pump Bottle”

Every word in that title earns its space. “Hydrating” and “shea butter” pick up ingredient searches. “Pump bottle” picks up the format query. “8oz” is the size.

The title structure that actually works

Start with what’s most likely to be searched. Add modifiers in descending order of search volume. Keep it under 150 characters so nothing important gets truncated.

A workable template for most categories:

[Brand] [Product Type] [Gender/Audience if relevant] [Key Attribute 1] [Key Attribute 2] [Size/Quantity] [Color/Variant]

That order isn’t universal. Test it against the queries your products already match. If buyers in your category lead with product type, lead with product type.

What the top 10% actually do

A few moves I see consistently from advertisers who are getting outsized results from Shopping.

1. They write titles for the buyer, not the merchandiser.

The merchandising team wants the title to match the product page H1. The buyer doesn’t care. The title in the feed exists to win clicks and match queries. Push back on the “but the website says…” argument.

2. They include the attributes Google can’t infer.

Color, size, gender, and material are sometimes in dedicated attribute fields, but Google still weights them more heavily when they’re also in the title. Repeat them. Yes, it feels redundant. It works anyway.

3. They use the long-tail in the title.

If you sell “ergonomic office chair” and your title says “Office Chair Pro Model B”, you’re not eligible for the long-tail query. Rewrite to “Ergonomic Mesh Office Chair with Lumbar Support, Adjustable Headrest”. Now you are.

4. They segment titles by performance.

The top 10% don’t write one title template for all 8000 SKUs. They write 4 or 5 templates by product category and apply them with feed rules. The hero products get hand-written titles. Long-tail SKUs get templated titles. Slow movers get the minimum viable title.

5. They re-write quarterly.

Search behavior shifts. New competitors enter. New keywords trend. The top 10% re-audit titles every quarter on their hero SKUs and rewrite anything that’s losing impression share.

6. They check what their titles are actually matching to.

Search terms reports in Google Ads tell you which queries Google is matching your products to. If the queries are off, the title is wrong. If the queries are too broad, the title is too generic. The data is right there.

Common title mistakes I see almost every week

Front-loading the SKU code or model number. Buyers don’t search by SKU. The model number can go at the end, or in a separate attribute.

Including all-caps or promotional language. “BEST SELLER”, “FREE SHIPPING”, “SALE”. Merchant Center will flag or reject these, and they hurt CTR anyway.

Stuffing keywords. Repeating the same word 4 times doesn’t help, and at some point Google starts treating the title as spammy. Use each important word once.

Writing titles in the wrong sentence case. Title Case For Every Word reads worse than Sentence case for most products. For apparel and beauty, title case is fine. For electronics and home, sentence case often outperforms.

Forgetting to update titles when products change. Color got renamed. Size charts changed. New variant added. Titles need to keep up.

Leaving manufacturer titles untouched on hero products. The manufacturer wrote that title for their own catalog, not your Shopping account. Rewrite it.

When the manufacturer title is fine

I’d rather tell you the truth here. If you’re selling branded products where buyers search for the exact model name, the manufacturer title is often close to right. “iPhone 15 Pro Max 256GB Natural Titanium” is hard to improve. Same for “Sony WH-1000XM5 Wireless Noise Cancelling Headphones”.

If your category is brand-led and the buyer searches the model name, don’t overthink it. Spend your time elsewhere in the feed.

The rewrite opportunity is biggest when:

• You sell private label or generic products
• Your brand isn’t a known search term
• Your products have searchable attributes the manufacturer title doesn’t include
• You compete in a category where buyers search by feature, not by model

What to do this week

If you only have 2 hours this week, here’s the order:

1. Pull last 90 days of Shopping performance at the item ID level
2. Identify your top 50 SKUs by revenue
3. Look at each title against the query order I described above
4. Rewrite anything that doesn’t match the order buyers search
5. Re-upload or use a supplemental feed and wait 14 days

You can do this in an afternoon. Most of the lift from title work comes from the top 50 SKUs anyway.

For the rest of the feed work that compounds with better titles, the data feed optimization guide has the full picture. For the data stack behind any of this, start with GA4 and BigQuery for Google Ads.