The Product Feed Checklist for Meta and Google Ads in Kuwait

A product feed optimisation checklist covers eight things: stable IDs, titles, descriptions, images, price and availability, variants and identifiers, custom labels, and language versions, followed by a routine for disapprovals and sync. Work through them in that order, because the early checks decide whether a product can show at all. A product feed is the file or live connection that lists every product you sell, with its attributes, so Meta and Google can build ads from it.

Check: one ID per product, everywhere. The id is the key that ties a feed row to your pixel and your reports. Meta's catalog reference says each id should appear once per catalog and match the content ID your Meta pixel sends, which is how catalog ads know which product someone viewed. Google's product data specification caps the id at 50 characters and asks you to keep it unchanged across updates. Use the SKU where you can, and never recycle an old ID for a new product.

Check: titles follow a formula per category. Google allows 150 characters, but its title guidance says shoppers usually notice only the first 70 or so, so the words that decide the click go first. Meta allows 200 and recommends about 65. For an abaya: brand, product type, fabric, colour, size. For oud and perfume: brand, scent, concentration, volume in ml. For electronics: brand, model, key spec, colour. Kuwait stores that began on Instagram often reuse captions as titles; fix those rows first.

Check: nothing in the title that belongs elsewhere. Google's guidance rules out promotional text such as prices or shipping offers, all caps, gimmicky symbols and extra spaces. Delivery across Kuwait in 24 hours, KNET accepted and 20 percent off each have their own home: shipping settings, your landing page and the sale price attribute. For variants, put the distinguishing detail, such as colour or size, in the title as well as in its own attribute, so two sizes of the same dishdasha do not look like duplicates.

Check: the description is plain, specific and true to the page. Google's specification allows up to 5,000 characters and asks that the description match the landing page, with no promotional text or competitor mentions. Meta's reference allows up to 9,999 characters, asks for plain text rather than HTML, and warns against all caps and links. Lead with what a shopper in Kuwait would ask on WhatsApp before buying: fabric, fit, size guide, volume, warranty, and whether it ships from Kuwait or abroad.

Check: images meet both platforms' minimums. As of September 2026, Google's Merchant Center help says images must be at least 500 by 500 pixels for all products from 31 January 2027, and recommends 1,500 by 1,500 or larger for the best performance in every listing format. Meta's catalog reference asks for JPEG or PNG files of at least 500 by 500 pixels and up to 8 MB. Shooting to 1,500 pixels square satisfies both. The trouble is usually what gets added afterwards.

Check: no text, logos or borders on the main image. Google's image rules exclude watermarks, promotional text, calls to action, borders, price information and placeholder images. This is where Instagram-first Kuwait stores get caught: the picture that carried KD 9.900, free delivery or a Ramadan offer in Arabic on the grid is not acceptable as a feed image. Keep a clean master of every product photo, and put the offer in the ad itself, where each platform's own advertising rules apply instead.

Check: a changed image gets a new URL. Meta's catalog reference notes that a changed image needs a new URL before it is recognised, so overwriting a file at the same address can leave an old photo running in your ads. After any reshoot, open a few products in Commerce Manager and make sure the new photo is the one showing. This matters most before Eid or National Day, when stores swap in seasonal photos and expect the ads to follow the same day.

Check: price is in KWD and formatted the way each platform reads it. Google's supported languages and currencies page lists the Kuwaiti Dinar as the currency for Kuwait. Meta's catalog reference wants a number, a space and the ISO currency code, with a full stop for decimals, so 12.500 KWD. The Central Bank of Kuwait divides the dinar into 1,000 fils, which means three decimal places, so compare a few feed rows with your product pages and make sure nothing has been rounded to a different amount.

Check: the sale price sits beside the full price, never instead of it. Google's sale price guidance says to keep submitting the full price when you add a sale price, to match the sale price shown on the landing page and at checkout, and to show both prices on the page. Its sale price effective date attribute sets when an offer starts and stops. Meta's reference requires the sale price to be lower than the full price. White Friday and Ramadan offers are when these rules tend to break.

Check: availability is honest and updated quickly. Google accepts in stock, out of stock, preorder and backorder, asks for an availability date on the last two, and expects the value to match the landing page and checkout. Meta accepts in stock and out of stock, and its reference says out-of-stock items do not appear in ads. Stores sharing stock between a mall branch and the website are most exposed: when the shop sells the last piece, the feed can keep advertising it until the next sync.

Here is an illustration. Say an abaya is priced at KD 24.500 and drops to KD 19.600 for White Friday, a 20 percent discount. If the sale ends at midnight on Saturday but your feed refreshes on Sunday afternoon, your ads can spend most of a day showing KD 19.600 against a page that says KD 24.500, the kind of price mismatch Merchant Center flags. Set effective dates in the feed, or schedule the price change and the feed refresh together, and check the first hour after every switch.

Check: variants are grouped and described. Both platforms use an item group ID to tie the sizes and colours of one product together, with each variant carrying its own id, colour and size. Google's specification makes item group ID mandatory for variants only in a short list of countries that does not include Kuwait, but grouping still stops a dishdasha sold in twelve sizes from looking like twelve unrelated products. Where the colour changes, give the variant its own image so the ad shows the colour it names.

Check: brand, GTIN and MPN are real or declared absent. A GTIN is the global barcode number a manufacturer assigns. Google recommends one wherever it exists, warns that missing or wrong GTINs can limit visibility, and asks for an MPN when there is none. It requires a brand for all new products except films, books and music, and rules out N/A. Handmade abayas and own-label oud usually have no GTIN or MPN, so set identifier exists to no rather than inventing numbers, and use your own brand name.

Check: custom labels carry the decisions you want to bid on. Custom labels are five spare fields, numbered 0 to 4, that shoppers never see and you use to group products in campaigns. Google's help says they filter products in Performance Max, Shopping and Demand Gen campaigns, and Meta's product set rules can filter on the same five fields. A workable scheme: margin band in label 0, bestseller status in 1, season such as Ramadan, Eid or National Day in 2, price band in 3 and clearance in 4.

Margin is the label that changes budgets. Break-even ROAS is the price divided by what is left after product and delivery costs. As an illustration, take two products that both sell for KD 12. One costs KD 5 landed and KD 2 to deliver, leaving KD 5, so it breaks even at a ROAS of 2.4. The other costs KD 9 plus the same KD 2, leaving KD 1, and needs a ROAS of 12. Labels like these are what make product-level ad spend decisions possible.

Check: Arabic and English each get their own feed. As of September 2026, Google's supported languages and currencies page lists both Arabic and English, and says a data source in any supported language can show products in any country where Shopping ads and free listings run. Kuwait is on the same page's list of supported countries, so a bilingual store can use both. Merchant Center sets the language when a data source is created and it cannot change later, so the Arabic version needs its own data source.

Check: every Arabic row links to an Arabic page. Google flags products whose feed language differs from the language of the landing page and checkout, and its fix includes switching off automatic language changes based on a visitor's IP address. So Arabic rows should point at your Arabic URLs, and the Arabic checkout should actually be in Arabic. If your store's Arabic version is patchy, fix that before building the feed; our guide to setting up an Arabic RTL Shopify store covers the translation and layout side.

Check: Meta gets a language feed, not a second catalog. Meta's localised catalogs add language and country feeds on top of the main feed. A language feed overrides text such as title and description, while price, sale price and availability can only come from a country feed. Every row needs an id that matches the main feed and an override column naming the language. Meta then shows the version matching the viewer's languages and home country, so an Arabic speaker in Kuwait sees the Arabic title.

Check: Arabic titles are written, not machine-translated. Google's title guidance says to use the target language's alphabet, allowing well-understood foreign terms such as brand names. Kuwaiti shoppers mix both, typing abaya in Arabic script in one search and a brand in Latin letters in the next, so keep brand names as brands write them and product words as people here say them. One Shopify catch: its Google channel help says product options and variants must be in English to sync, so keep base option names in English.

Check: Merchant Center's Needs attention tab, every week. In Merchant Center, open Products and select Needs attention. Google shows three summary cards for the issues with the biggest impact, then every affected product, and a prioritised-fixes toggle hides low-impact issues until you switch it off. Once a fix is live, mark it as fixed and request a review; if you think Google is wrong, say you disagree and request a review instead. Any view can be downloaded, which makes a handy weekly sheet, especially in the fortnight before White Friday.

Check: Meta's catalog issues and Shopify's own flags. In Commerce Manager, select your catalog, open the Catalog tab and go to Issues, which lists items that failed to upload or have problems. Shopify's Facebook and Instagram channel shows product status as well, with an Issues column in the bulk editor explaining what each product lacks. For Kuwait stores, the usual culprits match the checks above: price mismatches after a sale, stale stock shared with a mall branch, text on images, and Arabic rows pointing at English pages.

Check: you know how each sync behaves. Shopify's help says its Google and YouTube channel syncs every product available to your online store, that Google reviews new products within 3 to 5 business days, and that the channel refreshes data automatically because Google expires product data after 30 days. Its Facebook and Instagram channel syncs product changes within a few minutes, but collections sync to Facebook only for stores in the United States, so a Kuwait store builds its product sets in Commerce Manager, ideally from the custom labels above.

Put the full list on a monthly calendar, and run the price and stock checks before and after every sale. When catalog ads start losing efficiency, the feed is one of the first places to look, as covered in why Meta catalog ads lose ROAS in Kuwait, and a clean feed is what makes Google Shopping in Kuwait workable at all. If you are still choosing a platform, you can start a free Shopify trial and test both sales channels before committing.