short titles

Every now and then, I forget things that shouldn’t be forgotten. 

Like a 50 euro bill in the small pocket of my jeans.

But then, there is at least the surprise of discovering it again!

Last week, I had a similar experience, while going through some open tabs. One tab had a link to a Google support doc that I didn’t have a look at for… well, a long time.

Back in February this year, Google Merchant Center had added support to Google shopping feeds for a short title attribute. The benefit of the short title is that you can control what is included in your titles before they’re truncated on the smaller display areas of the Google ad network (i.e., mobile displays).

Google has a new help document on short titles that goes over the requirements and best practices for these. Some of them include:

– Use a relevant short title that clearly describes your product.
– Be concise. While the title [title] attribute is used to match a consumer’s search to your products, the short title [short_title] is intended to show your product more concisely in browser experiences.
– Limit your short titles to 65 or fewer characters. Users usually only see the first 65 characters of a short title, depending on their screen size.

SOURCE: https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/11551083?hl=en

We just recently started experimenting with this new attribute. Personally, I like to structure my short titles with product name + product nouns + brand. For example: “EVO 4.2 Bookshelf Speaker – Wharfedale” 

How about you? Do you already have some learnings on this topic that you can share? I’d love to learn. You can share them with me via email at nils@nilsrooijmans.com.

– Nils

PS: Here’s a track I’m currently listening to on my Wharfedale speakers -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUYboWbVe0A

Author: Nils Rooijmans

Google Ads Performance Architect with a passion for PPC Automation & AI, in particular via Google Ads Scripts.