Why the feed optimisation matters more than most marketing teams realise
We often see marketing teams getting frustrated with bad performance when they increase spend, but the revenue from paid ads doesn’t scale with it. ROAS becomes inconsistent, and some products perform well, while others drain the marketing budget.
If your feed isn’t aligned with how people search, your campaigns are always working at a disadvantage.
Google Shopping is different from traditional paid search, as you’re not bidding on keywords in the same way, and you’re not writing ad copy to match intent. Stay with us on this.
Instead, Google is reading all the intricate details of your product data and deciding when to show your products, who to show them to and how competitive they are in the auction.
That means your feed is doing the heavy lifting, and if it’s not structured properly, no amount of campaign optimisation will fully fix the problem.
What good feed optimisation for electricals ACTUALLY looks like
Feed optimisation is about making your product data work as a performance channel in its own right, and it doesn’t come down to tiny tweaks to your product copy. For electrical retailers, that usually means restructuring product titles so they mirror real search behaviour and include brand, model, size, and key specifications in a logical order.
It also means enriching your data, like detailed product types, accurate categorisation, and complete attributes (GTINs, compatibility, materials, specs). All of this helps Google understand your products more clearly, which improves both visibility and ranking.
Why does this matter more in electronics than in most categories?
In categories like fashion, there’s often more flexibility in feed optimisation. Broader searches mean more room for discovery, say “nice summer dress for parties”. Searches for electrical products don’t work like that, as customers know what they want, the size they’re after and exactly what they are willing to pay (the living room wall can’t fit a TV bigger than 50”, we will wait for the after-Christmas sales, and we want it to match the sofa and this will be our biggest purchase of the year!)
Customers usually know what they’re looking for. And they compare aggressively. That means that relevance is tighter, competition is stronger and small differences in data quality have a bigger impact. If your feed is even slightly behind competitors, you’ll feel it in performance.
What we’ve seen across electrical brands
Across brands like Cooks Professional, Smiths TV, and Lawnmowers Direct, the pattern is consistent. Before improving performance at scale, the product feed needed fixing. Once their product data was aligned with search intent, visibility increased, wasted spend was reduced, and campaigns became far more stable.
It’s not a quick hack. But it’s one of the most reliable ways to unlock growth.
The Takeaway
If your Google Shopping performance feels stuck, it’s worth asking a different question. Not “how do we optimise our campaigns?” but: “Is our feed actually set up to compete?”
Because in electrical ecommerce, that’s often the difference between scaling efficiently and constantly chasing performance.
