February 24, 2022
We’ve always been advocates of optimising feeds and have been for yearssss! So it’s great to see Google are still producing fresh ways to optimise and adapt inline with their new ad formats to give users the best experience possible.
So what’s new?
Google Merchant Center has added a [short_title] option within feeds which is optional, but great to make use of in placements such as shopping ads and discovery campaigns. The whole point behind this is for them to show in more “browsy-type” experiences. It is key to note here, this will not be replacing the usual [title] attribute within the feed, but is a great added extra to make use of!
What’s great about this new attribute?
If you’re like us, it can be frustrating both when you’re the shopper and working on behalf of the advertiser and seeing your hard earned optimised product titles get truncated, meaning you’re often not seeing ALL of the lovely and relevant info in an ad you’ve worked hard to get in there!
Our top tips on this new attribute
Make the most of it and give it a go! Here at Ortus, we optimise our Paid Social product titles in the exact same way, where it is more appealing to show a shorter, condensed version of our product titles across our social ads and get the key points of the product across in a tiny amount of letter characters!
Google’s character limit for these are 1-150, however they state their recommended character amount being between 5-65, as typically, users only see the first 65 characters of a short title (depending on screen size).
The rest of our top tips go for both this new short title and the usual title attribute…
It’s always best practice to highlight the most important, trending parts of a product detail first in your short title, as users don’t always read the whole title. So make sure to include here what users typically search for to find each product.
If you’re a business selling multiple brands, we’d always advise including the products' brand name at the front of the title too to help them differentiate between ads.
For more requirements on this new attribute, you can read Google’s guide to using Short Titles effectively here.