Description – Google Shopping Feed Specification Guide

By definition, Google Shopping is a place where millions of online users search, discover and purchase products and services from the internet. The Merchant center offers a wide range of products that helps businesses promote and advertise their products (or services) easily. 

Common products that are offered by Google Merchants would be shopping for advertisements and shopping actions. The Merchant Center remains active throughout Google, and this means anyone searching on Google for products and services related to your venture would spot you. The chances of your business getting noticed are higher with the help of the Merchant Center. 

To make the most out of Google Merchant, it is important to create a Merchant account for your business. The Merchant account should be filled accurately, and it should be maintained up to date all the time. Likewise, it is important to link your merchant account to your official website without any glitches. There are a number of Google Shopping Feed Guides and Tools to help you create the right ads, and links to your products. 

In addition to linking your products to the Google shopping ads section, it is important to format the products accurately. The products must be given an appropriate description. In this Google Feed Specification Guide, you will read about how to give an apt description to all your products linked to shopping Ads. 

Requirements

First of all, you must remember that the description should be attached to all your products. When customers search through the internet for products and services, they would always need big descriptions to help them choose. When a product doesn’t have the right kind of description, it can shun customers away due to a lack of information. This is a bad sign for customers. This is why every product in the shopping ads of Google from your business should be given a description. 

Formatting Guidelines

When descriptions are attached to every product, it is important to stick to the following guidelines. This way Google Merchant will be aware of what you are submitting. As a result, it will be able to drive more traffic to your website easily. 

1. Type: The product description should have only characters. It is highly recommended for Merchant users to include only ASCII characters. The text must be of plain HTML and Unicode characters. Anything else will not be recognized by the search engine.
   
2. Length: A minimum of 1, and a maximum of 5000 characters can be written.
   
3. Repeated Fields: There should be no repeated fields in the description.
   
4. Schema: The schema property for this would be “Product. description”. And, the entire schema is supposed to be defined in the text.
   
5. HTML: It is very important to ensure that there are no HTML mistakes in the description. For instance, there shouldn’t be any unclosed tags. And, there must be no JavaScript included in the description of your products. This is because JavaScript is identified as unsafe.
   
6. File Format: The product description supports two types of files, text feeds, and XML feeds.
   

Basic Guidelines for the Product Descriptions

When the description is worded for products in shopping Ads, the following requirements should be satisfied at all costs:

1. Always focus only on a single product at a time. Details about the product should be quoted. Never deviate into compatible products or other similar kinds. Likewise, you should not talk about your business and its merits in the description. Stick to the product, its benefits, and features for the customers.
   
2. The language used in the description should be professional and accurate. There is no space for grammatical mistakes in this section. Also, ensure that the language used is customer friendly. Never use symbols, capital letters or promotional text too.
   
3. Foreign languages should be avoided in the description. If you believe that the customer will be aware of the foreign language, you can give it a try. However, it is always advised to avoid anything that is not known or understood by mass viewers. Here are a few examples to help you understand this:
   
   1. “Sushi” is a famous word inside and outside of Japan. Terms like these can be included.
      
   2. Some “Alphabetic Letters” are only understood in certain parts of the world. Try to avoid these letters.
      
   3. Never use symbols that are understood by a group of people. This will build untrustworthiness and can be treated as spam by the search engine itself.
      
4. When you want to make use of symbols, try to stick to XML entities. The symbol should be defined properly in the JSON specification too. Common entities used inside XML would be “&quot”.
   
5. Never compare your product description. It is a bad practice. As mentioned previously, focus only on your product and its offering. For instance, quoting phrases like “Our product is much better than XYZ” is not appreciated.
   
6. Never categorize the product inside the description. Remember, your customers are aware of what your product is. They have already understood which category it belongs to. Don’t stress about this aspect. If you are keen on quoting this piece of information, include it in the product_type or product_category attribute.
   
7. Never include links to other websites or ecommerce websites. The link should only redirect to your website. And, use the “Link” attribute to populate this detail.
   
8. Never capitalize on text within the description. Once again, this makes the description appear untrustworthy, and it can be classified as spam.
   
   1. Appropriate pieces of information like currency, countries, and abbreviations can be capitalized.
      
9. Never include details of sales date, delivery date, price, or shipping methods inside the description. These are promotional details that can be attached to the “shipping” or “sale_price” attribute.
   

Check out our Article on Data Feed here.

Best Practices for Product Descriptions

In addition to the requirements, there are a few best practices to be followed when you are creating product descriptions. 

1. Always be accurate and specific about what you write in the description. This way, potential customers will be able to find your products and services easily.
   
2. The most important details about your product should be mentioned within the first 160 to 500 characters. Even if your product description is 5000 characters long, the important details must be quoted in the first few lines itself. This way, users don’t need to expand the section to know more about your offerings.
   
3. The product description must have the following pieces of information:
   
   1. Size
      
   2. Materials
      
   3. Potential age group
      
   4. Additional features
      
   5. Technical details
      
   6. Shapes and patterns
      
   7. Design and texture of your product
      
   8. All possible variants of the product. The above list can be re-iterated for all the variants.
      
   9. A rich description that is well-formatted and easy for the user to understand. If possible include bullet points and italics to improve the readability of the content.
      

Examples

If you stick confused about how the product description should be, here are two interesting examples to help you:

1. Product: Dark Chocolates

Description: Dark chocolates are a variety of traditional chocolates that are high in cocoa. If the percentage of cocoa is more than 70%, then dark chocolate is meant to be healthier and extremely delicious. Dark chocolate helps in boosting memory, and mood. 

2. Product: The Notebook by Nicolas Sparks

Description: The Notebook is a novel written by Nicolas Sparks. It revolves around two characters who are strongly attracted to each other. The book goes through many moments in life, and challenges faced by the two primary roles before they get together. 

3. Product: Chocolate, dark chocolate

Description: Chocolates can be categorized into multiple types, the dark chocolates are ones with high cocoa content. 

Further readings on Google Feed 

1. How to Troubleshoot your Google Shopping feed?
   
2. What are the Requirements for the Google Shopping feed?
3. Tips to Optimize Your Google Shopping Feed
   
4. How to create the correct Feed for multiple countries?
   
5. Google Shopping Feed Guide.