Product title best practices for ecommerce: build titles from the data, not by hand

What a good product title is made of

A supplier spreadsheet arrives with a Title column, and that column is where the shouting is. One row reads “1700X700 SE BATH WHT 0TH”, another “SINGLE END BATH 1700 NEW!!”. Both are single ended baths, and neither says so in words a shopper would type.

Product title best practices for ecommerce come down to one idea: a title is assembled, not written. It is built from values already on the same row, in a fixed order: the brand where shoppers search for it, the product type, then the attributes they choose by, to each channel’s limit. Every value in it must agree with the specifications beside it. Built that way, the bath becomes “Single ended bath, 1700 × 700 mm, white, no tap holes”.

Google’s own tools allow for it: Merchant Center feed rules can replace a title with “a combination of important attribute values”.³

What Google requires of a title

Of the channels compared here, Google publishes the most detailed title rules, so they are the ones to build to. Every product needs a title, sent as title or structured_title, of 1 to 150 characters. Go over and “Google will truncate it to fit”, with a warning in your account.¹

The page’s minimum requirements, which a product must meet or be disapproved, read like a description of a supplier title.¹

• No “gimmicky ways of drawing attention such as all caps, symbols, HTML tags and promotional text”. Capitals still belong in abbreviations, countries and currencies: UK and USD are Google’s examples.¹
• “Don’t add information such as price, sale price, sale dates, delivery, delivery date, other time-related information or your company’s name.”¹
• No extra white space.¹
• A description of the product on the landing page. It need not match word for word, but the two “should refer to the same product”.¹
• For variants, “the distinguishing details of each variant” in the title, and in the colour, size or age group attributes too.¹

Google’s best practices then pull two ways. One is to use all 150 characters: “Your title will be used to match your product to a customer’s search.” The other is to put the most important details first: “Users will usually notice only the first 70 or fewer characters of your title, depending on screen size.”¹ So the whole title does the matching, and the start of it does the selling.

Why supplier titles fail

A supplier’s title column was written for a warehouse, where the shorthand is understood and nobody searches by colour. The same faults come back file after file.

• Shouting. “WATER FILTER SAMSUNG 2PK” is clear enough on a picking list. On Google, all caps is one of the gimmicks a title must avoid, and capitalised text, the page says, “is common in spam and untrustworthy ads”.¹
• Padding. Stock codes and sales talk, such as NEW!!, BEST PRICE or SKU FF-2231, spend the characters a shopper notices first on promotional text Google rules out, or on codes nobody searches for.¹
• Missing the attribute shoppers choose by. “Bath 1700” gives a length and nothing else. The type, width, colour and tap holes sit in other columns, or nowhere, and a search for a white single ended bath is matched against a title that mentions none of them.
• Inconsistency across the range. SE, Single End and Single Ended name one bath type three ways, and no rule can build titles until they agree. On one of our jobs, for a bathroom retailer with 329 baths, one column held twelve spellings covering eight actual bath types: Single Ended and Single End Bath, Corner and Corner Bath, Freestanding and Freestanding Baths. Shoppers got twelve filter options for eight real things, and titles built from that column would have inherited all twelve.
• Disagreement with the row. The title says 1700 and the length column 1600; the title says black and the colour column graphite. One of each pair is wrong, and Google’s tips warn that a colour name differing from the landing page may get an account disapproved: “don’t change a colour like ‘Midnight sky’ into ‘Dark blue’”.²
• Identical variants. A crash cymbal in 14, 16 and 18 inch sizes arrives as three rows sharing one title. That breaks the variant requirement above, and Google’s tip to use a unique title for every product.²

The fourth fault is fixed by normalising attribute values, before any title is built.

Three titles before and after

Three products as suppliers sent them, and the titles built from their own rows. Nothing in the after column is absent from the data.

The cable lost its sales talk and capitals, and its shorthand was spelt out: BLK to black, M-F to male to female, 3M to 3 m, with a space so the length cannot be read as a brand. The bath gained everything a shopper searches for. The filter kept its brand, because shoppers search for it, lost the stock code, and 2PK became 2 pack.

None of the three is long. The bath title is 53 characters, inside the first 70, with room for material or thickness if the columns hold them. Google’s own example for a dress, “Sleeveless polka dot skater dress, small, black”, has the same shape: what the product is, then the details that tell one variant from another.¹

The limits side by side

Each channel publishes its own limit and its own idea of what a title should carry.

The short title, used for Demand Gen and visual formats such as YouTube and Discover, “will not impact your titles on Search or product listing ads”; Google suggests under 40 characters, because titles are often truncated, especially on mobile screens.⁴ The item group title is the shared name for a set of variants, kept “shorter and more generic than the titles of variant products”: one cymbal in three sizes has one item group title and three titles.⁵

Shopify’s help page states no length for the product title, the name customers see.⁸ The title has two further jobs. By default it builds the URL handle, which a CSV import matches on when it overwrites existing products.¹⁰ Two products titled Potion get the handles potion and potion-1, and once a product exists, “changing the product title doesn’t update the handle”.¹¹ A blank SEO title falls back to the product title, where Shopify suggests 60 characters or fewer.¹⁰⁹ So settle Shopify titles before the first import, not after it.

Amazon UK has the shortest limit on the product title itself. From 27 July 2026, titles in all categories except media must be 75 characters or fewer, including spaces, and detail that no longer fits can move to Item Highlights, an extra 125 characters shown below the title. Titles still over 75 “will be updated to the AI recommendation gradually”.¹³

One title cannot serve all of these. Build the long one first, from attributes in a fixed order, and make each shorter version by dropping attributes from the end. That is why order matters more than length: the first 60 characters have to stand on their own.

How to build titles from attributes, step by step

Writing product titles from attributes is a spreadsheet job, in eight steps. The first is the one most often skipped.

1. Clean the columns first. A title inherits every fault in the columns it is built from. Fold spelling variants onto one value, put one unit on every measure, clear N/A, and use the colour names the product page uses.
2. Write the order for each category. Google suggests “Brand + product type + other important attributes” for clothing, and the shape travels.³ For baths: type, length by width, colour, tap holes. For cables: type, length, connectors, colour. Keep the order at the top of each category tab.
3. Decide whether the brand leads. Google’s best practice is to add it “if it’s a differentiating factor”, and for clothing to put strong brand names first; eBay lists it first among what to include.¹³¹² If the brand column is blank or uncertain, leave it out: Google’s rule for the brand attribute, “When in doubt, don’t provide a brand”, suits the title too.⁶
4. Join the columns in that order. One TEXTJOIN formula filled down the tab, with a comma and a space as the separator and blanks skipped, builds every title. Use sentence case and spell out shorthand (BLK to black), keeping capitals only where they belong, as in UK or USD.¹
5. Keep codes out unless shoppers type them. The supplier’s stock code never goes in. A manufacturer’s part number can, after the product type, where shoppers search by it: filters, cartridges, spares. GTIN, EAN, UPC and MPN explained covers which code is which.
6. Give every variant its own title. Add the size or colour to each variant’s title, and keep one item group title without them.¹⁵
7. Count the characters. Put a LEN column beside the title. Over 150, Google truncates, and shoppers usually notice only the first 70 or fewer.¹ Make the 80-character eBay title, the 75-character Amazon title and the 60-character SEO title by dropping attributes from the end, never the front.
8. Check the title against its own row. Every value in it should come from a column of the same row; one that does not is wrong or unsupported. Keep the supplier’s original title in its own column so each change can be traced.

When the data does not settle it

Most titles build themselves once the columns are clean. A few cases need a decision, written down so the next file gets the same one.

The title and a specification disagree. Do not pick the likelier value. Go to the source page the row came from, take the value there, and fix whichever column was wrong. With no source page, flag the row rather than settle it: a title built on an unverified value carries the error to every channel at once.

Bundles and multipacks you put together. For these, Google asks the title to describe the whole bundle or multipack, and suggests a multipack’s title say how many products are sold together.¹ Quantity is an attribute like any other, usually last in the order.

A part made to fit another brand’s product. A genuine Samsung filter and a compatible one can arrive in the same words, with Samsung in the brand column for both. Only the source page tells them apart, so separate parts and spares from the products they fit before building any title.

What to do next

A usable title is one line of the product data quality checklist, and one part of what product data enrichment covers. RefynData’s product data enrichment service builds titles the same way. Spelling variants are folded onto one word per value, and the shop title, description, page title and search snippet are written from values already in the data, to enforced length limits. The review step cross-checks each title against the product’s own specifications and flags what does not add up, and every value keeps a link to the source it came from.

If the supplier file is open in front of you, start with three columns: the title as sent, the title built from the row, and its length. Sort by length and read the ten longest and ten shortest. The longest are padded, the shortest are missing an attribute, and together they show which columns need cleaning before a formula can do the rest.