Your shopping feed is your keyword strategy
Shopping campaigns have no keywords. Matching happens against your product data, which means the feed is not a technical prerequisite — it is the targeting.
Treat it as plumbing and you have delegated your entire keyword strategy to whoever exported the CSV.
The title is the most important field by far
Product titles determine which queries you match. The pattern that works is roughly:
Brand + Product Type + Key Attribute + Size/Colour + Model
So: Bosch Serie 6 Integrated Dishwasher 60cm Stainless Steel SMV6ZCX01G
Not: SMV6ZCX01G and not Dishwasher - Bosch.
The order matters because titles truncate in the interface and because the first words carry the most matching weight. Front-load what people search.
The fields that quietly disqualify you
GTIN. Missing or wrong and you lose eligibility for a range of placements, and match quality falls sharply.
Google product category. Wrong category means competing in the wrong auctions entirely.
Availability and price. These must match the landing page exactly. Mismatches cause disapprovals, and mismatches that are not caught cause a slow attrition of disapproved items nobody notices.
Image. The single biggest driver of click-through rate in Shopping. White background, product filling the frame, no promotional overlay — overlays are against policy and get items disapproved.
The report to actually read
Search terms for Shopping, sorted by cost. You will find queries matching products you would never have targeted, because the title implied something you did not intend.
Negatives work in Shopping campaigns and are the main tool for controlling this.
Custom labels
Underused and genuinely valuable. Label products by margin, by seasonality, by clearance status, by whatever divides your catalogue commercially. Then bid on those groups differently.
Without labels you are bidding uniformly across products with wildly different profitability, which is the most common structural problem in Shopping accounts.
The maintenance question
When did the feed last update, and what happens when a product goes out of stock? A feed refreshing daily on a catalogue that changes hourly produces disapprovals and wasted clicks on unavailable items, continuously, at a low level nobody investigates.