Required attributes, feed quality, Merchant Center setup, and why a poorly structured product feed is the root cause of most Shopping campaign underperformance.
Every Shopping campaign lives or dies by the quality of its product feed. I've taken over Shopping accounts where campaigns were running fine on the surface — impressions, clicks — but conversion rates were terrible because the feed had mismatched titles, missing GTINs, and outdated prices. The exam tests product feed setup thoroughly because without a clean feed, everything built on top of it is compromised. Here's what you need to know.
Correct answer: B. A platform where retailers upload and manage their product data feed, which Google uses to match products to relevant Shopping queries and serve Shopping ads
Google Merchant Center is the bridge between your product catalogue and Google Ads. You upload your product data here — titles, prices, images, availability — and link it to your Google Ads account. Google then uses that data to decide when and where to show your Shopping ads. A healthy Merchant Center account with clean, complete, and up-to-date data is the single most important foundation for Shopping performance. I check Merchant Center diagnostics before touching any Shopping campaign settings.
Correct answer: B. ID, title, description, link, image link, price, and availability
These seven attributes are the minimum required for every product in a Shopping feed. Missing or incorrect values in any of these fields can cause individual products to be disapproved or limit their eligibility to show. In practice, I also prioritise GTIN (barcode), brand, and google_product_category even though they're technically optional for some product types — they significantly improve how Google matches your products to relevant searches and tend to increase impression share.
Correct answer: A. Because Google uses the product title as the primary signal to match products to relevant search queries, and it is the most visible text element in the Shopping ad
Unlike Search campaigns where you control keywords, Shopping campaigns use your product data — primarily the title — to match against search queries. A vague title like "Blue Shoes" will match fewer relevant queries than "Nike Air Max 270 Men's Running Shoes Blue Size 10." I always front-load the most important keywords in the title: brand + product type + key attributes. It's the highest-leverage optimisation in any Shopping feed and takes no budget to implement.
Correct answer: B. The price submitted in the product feed does not match the price shown on the product's landing page — update the feed or landing page so they match exactly
Google crawls your landing pages to verify that the price in your feed matches what's actually shown to users. If there's a discrepancy — even a minor one from a sale that wasn't updated in the feed, or a currency display issue — Google disapproves the product to protect users from misleading ads. I set up automated feed updates or scheduled fetches to keep prices in sync, especially for clients running frequent promotions where prices change regularly.
Correct answer: B. Updates are recommended at least every 30 days; feeds expire after 30 days if not refreshed
Google requires feeds to be refreshed at least every 30 days or products begin to expire and become ineligible to serve. For most ecommerce clients I recommend daily or at minimum weekly feed updates — prices change, stock levels fluctuate, and a product that's out of stock but still showing in Shopping ads wastes budget and frustrates users. I set up automated scheduled fetches in Merchant Center so the feed pulls fresh data from the website automatically without manual intervention.
Shopping campaigns underperforming despite a decent budget? Nine times out of ten the root cause is in the product feed, not the campaign settings. Let me take a look.
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