Shopping feed titles: keyword-stuffed or short product names?

Say you've got a store with around 400 apparel SKUs and feed titles like "Women's Black Cotton Relaxed Fit Crew Neck Short Sleeve Summer Tee", and someone on the team wants to cut them to brand plus product type and push color, fit and material into custom attributes.

I think the long titles mostly hurt. Google matches on the whole feed, not just the title, so the extra words rarely add reach. They also make the ad harder to scan in the Shopping tab, where people are comparing prices fast. I'd keep titles around 60 to 70 characters, lead with the product type, and add color or size only when people actually search for it. Has anyone split a feed on this?

I'm not sure the reach argument holds. Shopping matching still leans heavily on the title, so a shopper searching "black cotton relaxed tee" is more likely to match when those words are actually in the title. Custom attributes help with bidding and reporting, but they don't do much for query matching.

I agree the 60 to 70 character titles read better in the Shopping tab. I'd still test them against the long titles on a subset of SKUs before cutting all 400. Pull the search terms report first and see how many apparel queries include color or fabric, because that tells you how much those words are worth in the title.

Testing a subset first makes sense. For apparel, I'd look at query length before anything else. Long-tail shoppers tend to type color plus fabric plus fit, and those are exactly the terms a short title is most likely to miss, so the search terms report will show the gap faster than anything else.

Query length is a handy filter, but a simpler rule works: if color or fabric shows up often in the search terms for a given product type, put it in the title. If it doesn't, keep it in the custom attribute. Color on a tee probably earns its place because shoppers search and filter on it. Fabric is less clear. People rarely type "cotton" for a tee, but they do for towels or denim. So run the check per product type, not across the whole feed, because the average will hide the cases where those words matter.

Splitting by product type makes sense. Before you decide on color, though, check whether it's already in its own feed attribute. Google reads the color attribute for Shopping filters and variant grouping whether or not it's in the title, so the title is really about what the shopper sees in the grid. If a tee comes in six colors and the title drops color, all six look identical side by side. That alone can justify keeping color in the title, even when search volume for it is modest.