Shopify Google ads agency

Google Ads run on a Shopify store: the sales channel used properly, metafields mapped to Google's attributes, markets matched to feed targets.

Running Google Ads on Shopify is mostly a question of what you let Shopify do for you and what you take over by hand. The Google & YouTube sales channel will build the feed, keep it in sync with your catalogue and add conversion tracking, which removes a whole category of problems that stores on other platforms spend money solving. What it will not do is decide which of your fields belong in which Google attribute, and that is where the performance sits.

The work we do here is Shopify specific. Product data lives in Shopify fields and metafields, so the attributes Google needs, colour, size, age group, gender, material and the Google product category, have to be mapped rather than written into a separate feed layer. Prices are affected by markets, compare-at pricing and automatic discounts, all of which can put the feed and the page out of step. Conversion tracking can be installed in three places at once and count every order three times.

So we work inside the store, in your own Google Ads and Merchant Center accounts, and fix the data at the source rather than patching it downstream.

Native on Shopify

The Google & YouTube sales channel, which syncs products to Merchant Center and installs conversion tracking
Shopify product fields and metafields mapped onto Google's required attributes
Shopify Markets for country pricing, currency and market-specific catalogues
Compare-at price, which maps to the sale price attribute when it is used correctly
Inventory policy and availability states that push straight through to the feed
Customer events and the web pixel sandbox for tracking that survives theme changes

Settings that matter

Map the metafields before trusting the automatic feed

Left alone, the sales channel guesses at attributes it cannot find. That produces items approved but poorly matched, showing for searches that do not describe them. We create the metafield definitions Google expects, populate them across the catalogue in bulk rather than product by product, and check the mapping in the channel afterwards. Once the definitions exist, new products inherit the structure instead of arriving incomplete.

Match Shopify Markets to Merchant Center targets

Markets can change price, currency and even which products are published per country. Merchant Center needs a feed target with the same currency, language, shipping and tax settings, or the crawler sees a price that does not match the feed. We line the two up market by market, keep a separate campaign per market so budgets and targets are set locally, and check the market-specific catalogue actually contains what the ads are advertising.

Count each purchase once

A typical Shopify store ends up with conversion tracking from the sales channel, a tag added to the theme by a previous agency, and an analytics import, all reporting the same order. Bidding then optimises toward inflated numbers. We audit every tag firing on the order confirmation, keep one primary conversion action, mark the others as secondary or remove them, and confirm the count against the orders list in the admin.

Watch compare-at pricing and automatic discounts

Merchant Center compares the feed price against what its crawler sees on the page. Automatic discounts applied in the cart, market-level price adjustments and compare-at values used as a permanent decoration all create a gap. We set a rule for how sale pricing is entered in Shopify, keep cart-level promotions out of the products being advertised where possible, and check price mismatch warnings weekly rather than monthly.

What we avoid

Adding a second feed tool on top of the sales channel when the Shopify field can carry the data itself
Leaving old conversion tags in the theme after installing the sales channel, which double counts every order
Publishing every market into one campaign, where a weak country quietly spends the budget of a strong one

Questions

Start with the channel. It keeps product data, prices and stock in sync with Shopify automatically, which is the part most feed problems come from. A separate tool earns its place when you need title patterns per category, supplemental data Shopify cannot hold, or outputs for several channels at once. On a straightforward catalogue it adds a moving part without adding accuracy.

Usually because the discount is applied somewhere the crawler cannot see. A discount code, an automatic cart discount or a market price adjustment changes the total at checkout while the product page still shows the original figure. Google reads the page. Sale pricing that needs to appear in ads has to be set on the product or variant, so the page and the feed show the same number.

Each market becomes its own feed target and generally its own campaign. Budgets, targets and negative keywords differ by country, shipping costs differ, and a market with cheap traffic will absorb spend from a market with better margin if they share a campaign. We also check which products are actually published to each market, because advertising an unpublished product sends people to a page that will not sell to them.

Partly, and it is worth doing. If your cost per item is filled in Shopify, order-level profit can be calculated and passed back as a conversion value, so bidding optimises toward margin rather than revenue. It needs the cost field maintained, which is the part that usually stops it. Where that is not realistic, we get most of the benefit by splitting campaigns by margin band instead.

Send your Shopify store.

The plan is written for your store on the platform it runs on.