As our clients will be aware Feed Manager has data quality and compliance at the heart of everything we do. We have always encouraged clients to investigate and cleanse records which we know will be unsuitable or be disapproved from listings across shopping sites and marketplaces.
Our past blogs have covered the more stringent requirements for clothing products over recent years and this topic is covered again in Google’s recent emails on hints and tips for Apparel and Accessories.
Their findings are that 63% of mobile women’s apparel shoppers find filtering products by material, product, brand, colour, or size helpful when researching women’s apparel online through images.
At Feed Manager we always ensure that any products in these categories have the Brand, Colour, Size, Gender and Age Group values included before submission to Google. Our process flags any products with missing attributes and our team optimises the data before the product can be passed to Google.
Good or high quality images and/or multiple images are also recommended – we routinely check that client’s main images comply for size (250 x 250 pixels minimum for this category) and we resize images where possible unless the original is too small and quality would be adversely affected. Remember that Google will only accept up to 10 additional images.
Images for Facebook and Bing need to be even larger – we check these as well at import and report these back to clients where they will not be suitable for any resizing.
It is interesting to note that Google has started to flag incorrect colours as a warning recently. Examples of recent warnings have included misspellings (blac, creame) and colours which Google is reporting back as non-colours such as “conker”.
These are just warnings at present but over time may join “multi” “multi-coloured” and “other” or similar values which cause products to be disapproved, so it is always worth checking that your data complies and is of the right quality.
Google also recommends that the product title –which should be no longer than 70 characters- contains key information to help the product appear following a search. If the brand is well-know it should definitely be included, together with the type of product and colour and size – room permitting. E.g. “Calvin Klein Boxer Shorts for Men in Black & White, Size Medium”.
If you have any questions or would like further help with our compliance checks, validation of products or optimisation of submissions, please contact us.
