Google Shopping for clothing: stop paying for broken sizes

A Shopping ad for a jacket gets the click. The buyer lands on the page and their size is gone. You paid for that click. Across a catalogue full of broken size runs, you pay for it over and over.

Clothing is harder than most categories in Google Shopping, because one product is really dozens of products. Most of the waste in an apparel account comes from three places.

Sizes you cannot sell

Every size and colour of a garment is its own item in your Merchant Center feed, grouped by item_group_id. Out-of-stock items stop serving, which is correct.

The problem is the product with a broken size run: two sizes left, both at the edges of the range. It keeps serving and keeps getting clicks, and it converts badly, because most of the people clicking need a size you no longer have.

• Label size-run depth. Add a custom label such as “full”, “partial” or “broken”, based on how many core sizes are still in stock. Update it from inventory automatically if your feed tool allows it.
• Bid down or exclude broken runs. In Standard Shopping, split product groups by that custom label. In Performance Max, use listing groups to leave them out.
• Land on the right variant. The link in the feed should open the product with the advertised colour and size already selected. A buyer who clicked on black should not land on grey.

Countries you cannot ship to profitably

Selling into Europe, the UK and the Gulf from one store is common for small brands. Shipping costs, duties and return rates differ sharply across those markets. Campaigns often treat them as one.

• Split by market, so you can see cost and return by country rather than as one blended number.
• Set shipping and returns per country in Merchant Center. Missing or wrong shipping information costs you disapprovals, and it costs you buyers who leave at checkout when they see the real price.
• Stop targeting countries where the landed cost makes the order unprofitable. This is easy to miss when a campaign built for one market was quietly extended to five.

Titles that hide the product

The product title in your feed is the most important field you control. Google matches searches against it. Most apparel feeds reuse the storefront title, which is often a style name. “The Marlow” tells a search engine nothing.

A stronger apparel title leads with the facts people search with, because the end of the title is cut off in most placements. Brand, product type, fit, then fabric and colour:

[Brand] Straight Leg Jeans, 14oz Selvedge Denim, Rigid, Indigo

That title can match searches for straight leg jeans, selvedge denim and rigid denim. The style name alone matches none of them. The fabric facts come from the same place as a good product page, which I covered in how to write denim product descriptions that rank.

Where to start

Pull a product report for the last 90 days and sort by cost. Take the products with spend and no conversions. Check their size runs, their titles, and the countries their clicks came from. Start with those three.

If you want the account checked by someone who knows how the product is made, that is what Google Ads for fashion brands covers.