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A disappointing Google Shopping campaign is rarely a budget problem. More often, Google shows the wrong products, on the wrong searches, at a price that does not hold up against the competitors displayed right next to them. And because the ad does not rest on hand-picked keywords, many teams do not know where to look when it is not working.
This guide is for ecommerce teams that already fund Shopping ads, or are about to. It assumes a store whose feed is in place; if that is not yet the case, start with preparing your store for Google Shopping and marketplaces.
How does Google decide to show your products?
This is the starting point, and it changes everything. Google Ads’ help page on Shopping ads puts it this way:
We use the product data in your Merchant Center account (instead of keywords).
In other words, your product feed plays the role of your keywords. The title, description, category, brand and barcode decide which searches a product can appear on. A Shopping campaign is therefore tuned in the data first, and in Google Ads second.
Where a Shopping campaign is decided
- The product feed
What Google knows about each item.
- The match
The searches Google connects it to.
- The bid
What you are willing to pay, depending on your strategy.
- The product page
What turns the click into a sale.
What lifts a campaign
An accurate and complete feed
Merchant Center’s product data specification lists the required attributes: ID, title, description, link, image link, availability and price. Without them, the product cannot be shown at all. The same page requires price and availability to match those on the landing page and the checkout page: a mismatch means a disapproval.
Titles written with buyers’ words
The title is limited to 150 characters. It is the field that weighs most in matching searches, and often the most neglected: an internal model name matches no query. A good title says what the product is, its brand, and the characteristic buyers specify when they search (size, material, colour). If those characteristics are missing from your data, they have to be gathered from suppliers or measured, never guessed.
A price that holds up against the market
In Shopping, your product appears next to competitors’ products, prices included. The Pricing tab in Merchant Center shows whether your prices are above, at or below the market benchmark, calculated from the merchants selling the same GTIN. One more reason to provide a valid GTIN when the manufacturer has assigned one.
Useless queries excluded
Shopping campaigns do not target by keyword, but they do accept negative keywords. The search terms report shows the queries that actually triggered your ads: every week, terms unrelated to what you sell are added to the exclusions. Google’s help points out that variants (singular, plural, synonyms) are not covered automatically: you have to add them.
What sinks a campaign
What lifts it
Prices and stock identical between the feed and the site
Titles that use buyers’ words
Budget directed at products that have margin
Search terms reread every week
What sinks it
Disapproved products nobody watches
An internal model name used as a title
Budget absorbed by items sold at zero margin
A campaign left to itself for months
The most expensive trap is the third. A campaign that optimises revenue without knowing the margin can push precisely the products that earn nothing. Split your products into groups by margin, and track margin after acquisition as one of the five numbers to track every week.
Watch out
A disapproved product warns nobody
Merchant Center flags disapproved products in its diagnostics, but the campaign keeps running with the ones left. If your best sellers drop out of the feed after a badly synchronised price or stock change, the budget goes to the rest, with no alert. A weekly check of the number of active products is enough to avoid it.
The click is only half the work
Google can bring the right buyer to the right page; if they find neither the delivery costs, nor the returns policy, nor the photo that answers their question, they leave. What they look for is covered in our article on the product page that converts. And some of those who add to cart without paying can be reminded, under the rules described in our guide to abandoned cart reminders.
What we do before touching bids
On an online plush toy store that we are putting back on its feet, the work started with the data, not with advertising: 653 products reviewed, 26 fields defined, then 481 product pages enriched and reviewed. Size, the first criterion that comes to mind, was readable for only 41% of products: precise titles were impossible without first filling that gap. We publish no advertising results for this store until there is a before and after measurement.
The platform matters too: a feed generated by yet another app has its own cost, which our article on Shopify apps helps you weigh, and the choice between Shopify or Medusa decides how the feed is produced. To measure the sales actually signed, including offline, see how to send CRM sales back to Google Ads.
If you want to rework your feed and catalogue before raising the budget, our ecommerce service starts with a review of your product data.
Frequently asked questions
Do you need keywords for a Google Shopping campaign?
No. Google matches your products to searches using the data in your Merchant Center account: title, description, category, brand, barcode. You do not choose positive keywords, but you can exclude queries. The work is therefore done first in the product feed, then in the list of negative keywords, reviewed every week.
Why are my products disapproved in Merchant Center?
The most common causes are a missing required attribute, a price or availability that does not match the product page, or a non-compliant image. Merchant Center diagnostics give the reason product by product. Fix the data source rather than the feed by hand, otherwise the error will come back at the next synchronisation.
Do you need a GTIN to sell on Google Shopping?
When the manufacturer has assigned a GTIN to the product, you must provide it, and it also lets you compare your prices with the market in Merchant Center. When none exists, as with a handmade product or your own brand without a code, you do not invent one: Google provides attributes to say so.
How long before a Shopping campaign delivers results?
Give the campaign time to gather enough clicks and sales for automated bidding to learn, then judge over several weeks rather than a few days. Even before that, check disapproved products and search terms every week: they are what tell you whether the campaign is heading in the right direction.
Sources
- Google Merchant Center Help, product data specification (new tab)support.google.com
- Google Merchant Center Help, Pricing tab (new tab)support.google.com
- Google Ads Help, negative keywords in a Shopping campaign (new tab)support.google.com
Google Ads Help, negative keywords in a Shopping campaign
Read on support.google.com(new tab)Jim · founder of Brain Plus AI
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