Google Shopping campaigns live and die by the quality of the product feed. A well-optimized feed gets your products in front of the right searches. A poorly optimized feed means you are paying for impressions from people searching for something different. This guide covers the feed attributes that matter most for Japanese e-commerce businesses.
Product titles are your most important attribute ¶
Google uses your product title to match your listing to search queries. For Japanese e-commerce, the title should include the product category in Japanese, the brand name, the key specification, and the size or variant if relevant. A title like 'コットン Tシャツ メンズ ネイビー Lサイズ' will match more relevant queries than 'メンズTシャツ'. Keep titles under 150 characters and front-load the most important terms.
GTIN and product identifiers ¶
Products with valid GTINs (JAN codes in Japan) receive higher impression share in Shopping auctions than products without them. If your products have JAN codes, include them in the feed. If you manufacture your own products and do not have GTINs, set identifier_exists to false. Leaving the field blank causes Merchant Center warnings that can suppress your listings.
Custom labels for bid segmentation ¶
Custom labels let you segment your Shopping campaign by criteria that matter to your business, not just by category. We use custom labels to tag products by margin tier (high, medium, low), by seasonality (summer, winter, year-round), and by stock level (in stock, low stock). This lets us set higher bids for high-margin, in-season products and lower bids for everything else.
Common Merchant Center errors in Japan ¶
The most common Merchant Center errors we see in Japanese accounts are mismatched prices between the feed and the landing page, missing shipping information for domestic Japan delivery, and disapproved images due to promotional text overlaid on the product photo. All three are fixable within a day. The Merchant Center diagnostics tab shows the exact products affected and the reason for disapproval.
Feed refresh frequency ¶
Google recommends refreshing your feed at least every 30 days, but for e-commerce businesses with changing inventory and prices, daily or weekly refreshes are better. Use the Merchant Center scheduled fetch feature to pull your feed automatically from your server. For Shopify stores, the Google and YouTube app handles this automatically, but the default feed quality is often poor and benefits from manual attribute overrides.
A well-maintained feed is the foundation of a profitable Shopping campaign. If you are not sure whether your feed is optimized, the free audit includes a Merchant Center review for e-commerce accounts.