Your product feed is the most under-managed asset you own

For most retailers the feed decides what the platforms can sell, and almost nobody owns it. It is usually the cheapest performance gain available.

Why it matters more than the campaign

Shopping and Performance Max do not read your website. They read your feed. Titles, attributes, availability, imagery and pricing are what the auction actually matches against, which means a good campaign on a poor feed is a good campaign that cannot see.

What is normally wrong

Titles written for humans browsing a category page rather than for someone searching a specific part. Missing attributes that silently exclude you from filters. Stale availability. And a long tail of disapprovals nobody reads, quietly removing products from the auction.

Fix it at source

Patching in the merchant platform works until someone republishes the catalogue. The fix belongs in the system that generates the feed, which is a software job as much as a marketing one. That is exactly the kind of problem that falls between two suppliers and never gets done.

I check these against the original source before publishing, and I will send you the source if you want to see it. I do not quote a number I have not read myself.