Google shopping ads agency

The search terms report tells us what people typed when your products showed, which products they clicked and which clicks became orders. Before we change anything we read it for the past three months and sort it three ways: terms that bought, terms that cost money and never bought, and terms that should have shown your products and did not. That last group is where the feed is failing. The first two become negative keyword lists and bid decisions. If the account is new we build from the feed and come back to this step after the first month of data.

Shopping has no keywords. Google matches the search to your product title, description, category and attributes, so the feed is the targeting. We rewrite titles so the words shoppers use come first, fill in brand, GTIN, colour, size and material where they are missing, set the Google product category to the deepest node that fits, and make sure the price and stock in the feed match the page to the cent. Where the platform cannot express something, we add it with feed rules. This is done before spend goes up, because a better feed lowers the cost of every click that follows.

One campaign for the whole catalogue lets the expensive, popular products take the budget. We split by margin band first, so products that can afford a high cost per order are not sharing a target with products that cannot. Then we split by intent, using campaign priority and negative keywords to send brand searches, generic searches and specific product searches to different campaigns with different bids. The structure is as simple as the catalogue allows. A store with one margin band and one kind of search might need two campaigns, not twelve.

Inside each campaign we build product groups from the feed's custom labels and categories, and set bids or targets at the level where performance actually differs. A bestseller with reviews and a new product with none should not carry the same bid. Where automated bidding is on, the target return is set per campaign from the margin of the products in it. Where it is off, bids are set by hand from the cost per order each product group can afford. Either way the number comes from your margin, not from a default.

Every week we add negative keywords from the new search terms, pause products that are out of stock or losing money, and check that nothing has been disapproved in Merchant Center. Once a month we look at the bigger picture: which campaigns have room to spend more at the same return, which need a lower target, and which products should move between campaigns. Budgets go up when the data supports it and the store can fulfil the orders, not on a schedule. You get a short written note each month saying what changed and why.