Your product feed is doing the targeting now

In Shopping and Performance Max there are no keywords. Google decides which searches your products match by reading the feed. So the feed is not a data requirement sitting behind the campaign. It is the targeting.

That reframing changes where you spend your time. When a Shopping campaign underperforms, the instinct is to adjust the bid strategy or restructure the asset groups. The cause is almost always in the feed.

The fields that decide what you match

Title. The highest-leverage field in the whole feed, and the one most often left as whatever the manufacturer supplied. Google reads the title to understand the product, and the first 70 characters carry the most weight. Structure it the way people search: brand, product type, key attribute, size or variant. A title reading Premium Series 4 Elite tells Google nothing. Stainless Steel Handrail Bracket 42mm Wall Mount tells it everything.

Description. Read for matching, not just display. Write the attributes a buyer would search for, in plain sentences. Copying the marketing brochure produces a description full of adjectives and no attributes.

Google product category. Use the taxonomy properly and go as deep as it allows. A shallow category puts you in a broad competitive pool.

Product type. Your own taxonomy, and it is a separate field for a reason. Use it to mirror your site's category structure, which gives you a clean way to segment campaigns.

GTIN and MPN. Missing identifiers reduce eligibility on some surfaces and remove you from product comparison entirely. If you manufacture your own goods, set the identifier exists flag correctly rather than leaving it blank.

Availability and price. Wrong values here are worse than missing ones. Google checks your landing page against the feed, and a mismatch triggers disapproval.

Image. White background, product filling the frame, no text or watermark overlays. Overlays are a policy violation and a common silent cause of disapprovals.

Custom labels are the only structural lever left

Performance Max removed most of the ways you used to structure a Shopping account. What remains is custom labels, and they are underused.

You get five. Use them for the dimensions you actually make decisions on:

• Margin band. So you can run a separate campaign at a higher target return for the products that can carry one.
• Stock depth. So slow-moving inventory can be pushed and thin stock protected.
• Seasonality. So you can push a range without splitting your whole account.
• Price band. Cheap and expensive products behave completely differently in the auction and averaging them hides both.
• Best seller status. Your proven converters deserve their own budget rather than competing with your long tail.

Set them from your own business data, refresh them on a schedule, and structure campaigns around them. That is what structure looks like now.

The silent killers

Disapprovals nobody reads. A product that gets disapproved simply stops serving. There is no alert on your dashboard saying revenue fell because 340 items dropped out. Check your feed diagnostics weekly, not when something looks wrong.

Feed staleness. If your feed updates nightly and your stock moves hourly, you will advertise things you cannot sell. Use a supplemental feed or the content API for availability if your catalogue moves fast.

Landing page mismatch. Price, availability and currency on the page must match the feed. A discount applied at checkout rather than on the page causes this constantly.

Variant sprawl. Fifty colourways of one product as fifty separate items splits your performance data fifty ways and none of them accumulate enough signal to be useful.

A two-week audit that pays for itself

1. 1.Export the full feed. Sort by impressions. Find every product with meaningful stock and near-zero impressions.
2. 2.Read twenty of those titles out loud. If they do not contain the words a customer would type, that is your answer.
3. 3.Rewrite titles for the top 200 products by margin. Not all of them. The ones that matter.
4. 4.Fix every disapproval and every warning, including the ones flagged as informational.
5. 5.Build custom labels for margin band and best seller status, then split one campaign along them.
6. 6.Wait three weeks and measure impression share on the rewritten products.

The honest part

Feed work is slow, unglamorous and difficult to make look impressive in a monthly report. It also produces larger and more durable gains than anything you can do in the campaign settings, because it changes what you are eligible to appear for rather than how much you pay when you do.

The bid strategy is Google's job now. The feed is yours.