# The Shopping Feed Fields Nobody Checks

> Missing brands, cut-off descriptions and duplicate titles in a Google Shopping feed cost visibility long before any product gets rejected.

Canonical: https://thegrowthproject.com/blog/shopping-feed-fields-nobody-checks/

## Results

- **18% → 97%** of Shopping listings carrying a brand, before and after
- **1 in 4** product titles were duplicates
- **0** errors when the fixed feed was resent

_One ecommerce store._

**Field note from an ecommerce store.** Merchant Center said most of the products were approved, so the feed looked fine. Approved isn't the same as competitive.

## What we saw

- **The brand was missing on most products.** The store kept brands in its own categories, and the feed plugin never sent them. Shoppers often search by brand, so those products were invisible to some of the searches most likely to buy.
- **Descriptions were sent as raw HTML and cut off mid-sentence.** The useful detail, size, colour and specification, was buried in a table near the end and never made it into the feed.
- **Hundreds of titles were duplicates.** Variants of the same product shared one title, so Google had nothing to tell them apart.
- **Some products were advertised with the wrong delivery rules.** Pickup-only items showed delivery rates in ads.

## What we did

- Mapped brand from the store's own brand categories into the feed.
- Sent plain-text descriptions that lead with the key details, and passed colour and size as their own fields.
- Added custom labels so campaigns can split products by margin, price band and best sellers.
- Gave pickup-only products their own shipping label.

## What changed

Brand coverage across the feed went from a small minority of products to nearly all of them, with no errors on the resync. Products now match brand and specification searches they were missing, and campaigns can bid differently on high and low-margin lines.

Your feed is your product data, and the same data drives your product pages in normal search. We check it in both our [Google Ads audit](/growth/google-ads-audit/) and our [SEO audit](/growth/seo-audit/).