Why is so much of the work in the feed rather than the campaign?

Because Shopping ads are not built from keywords. Google decides which product to show for which search by reading your feed, so the title, image, category, price and identifiers are the targeting. An account with a clean feed and a plain campaign will beat a clever campaign sitting on a feed full of internal product codes, every time. The feed is where the available improvement lives, and it is also the part that gets quietly skipped, because it looks like data entry rather than advertising.

My PMax campaign shows a ROAS of 8. Is that real?

Probably not all of it. Left unrestricted, Performance Max buys searches for your own brand name — people who already knew you and were coming anyway — and then takes the credit. The test is simple. Add an account-level brand exclusion list, run brand terms in their own Search campaign, and watch what PMax reports afterwards. It will fall. That lower number is the one that tells you whether the campaign is actually finding you new customers.

What makes a good product title?

Brand, then product type, then the attributes people actually search with — colour, size, material, model. No promotional language and no price. Keep it under 150 characters because that is the limit, but aim under about 70 so it is not truncated on mobile. Where a title is missing basic information such as size or material, we flag it rather than invent it, because that detail has to come from you.

We have twelve thousand products. Is that a different job?

Yes, and it is priced differently. A fifty-product feed can be rewritten by hand. A catalogue in the thousands needs rules, supplemental feeds and a feed management tool, plus a decision about which products deserve to be advertised at all — many catalogues have a long tail that will never repay the spend and is better excluded than optimised.

Do you need access to our Shopify or WooCommerce store?

For the feed side, yes, or at minimum access to the feed app and Merchant Center. Much of what breaks a Shopping account — variants submitted as separate products, missing identifiers, shipping settings that disagree with the listing — is fixed in the store rather than in the ad account. If store access is not possible we can still run the campaigns and hand you an exact list of feed changes, and we will say up front which improvements are then out of reach.

Paid Media & Performance

Google Shopping and Performance Max

Most of this job is the product feed, not the ad account — titles rewritten, disapprovals cleared, and PMax stopped from claiming credit for your own brand searches.

From: $400–$3,000/mo
Typical time: ongoing
Usually bought by: E-commerce

What this actually solves

An e-commerce owner usually arrives here having noticed one of two things. Either Shopping is quietly the cheapest channel they have and they suspect it could be much bigger, or they launched a Performance Max campaign, saw an impressive return on ad spend, and cannot reconcile it with what is happening in the bank account. Both problems have the same root, and it is not in the ad account.

Shopping ads are not built from keywords. They are built from your product feed — the structured list of everything you sell, in Google's format, with a title, image, price, availability, brand and identifier for each item. Google chooses which of your products to show for which search by reading that file. Which means the feed is the targeting. A store whose titles read "Model 4471-B" is invisible for the searches that would have bought it, and no amount of bid strategy repairs that. This is the part that surprises people, and it is why this service is priced by catalogue rather than by ad budget.

Performance Max sits on top of the same feed and takes the decisions further away from you. You supply the objective, the budget, the feed and the creative assets, and Google decides where, when and to whom — Search, Shopping, YouTube, Gmail, Maps and Display together. Run well it is genuinely effective. Left unrestricted it behaves like a salesman told to sell however he likes, who then sells to the customers who were already walking in and claims the commission. That is the reported ROAS of 8 that does not show up in revenue.

What we do, and in what order

Merchant Center set up properly and the store verified. Account created or repaired, website and domain claimed, shipping and tax settings made to agree with what the store actually charges, and the existing diagnostics read in full. Disapprovals are usually already sitting there unnoticed. One to two days.
Connect and clean the feed. Through the Shopify or WooCommerce app where one exists, or by scheduled CSV where it does not. Then the triage — disapproved products, missing GTINs, wrong Google product categories, variants submitted as though they were separate products, and items still advertised while out of stock. Two to three days for a small catalogue, longer for thousands.
Rewrite the product titles. This is the highest-return work in the whole engagement. Brand, product type, then the attributes people search with, under 150 characters and ideally under 70 so mobile does not cut them off. Products missing the basics — size, colour, material — get flagged back to you rather than guessed at. Two to five days, depending on how many products are worth advertising.
Build the campaigns with the guardrails in place first. Asset groups per product line rather than one group holding everything, an account-level brand exclusion list so PMax cannot harvest your own name, a separate Search campaign for brand terms, and feed labels so products can be grouped by margin instead of being treated as equally profitable. Two to three days.
Weekly operations, monthly report. Which products are actually selling, what has gone out of stock, what has come back, which disapprovals appeared this week, and where the budget should move. Ongoing.

Tools used — Merchant Center Next, Google Ads, the store's own feed app for Shopify or WooCommerce, Google Sheets or Excel for feed work at small scale, and DataFeedWatch or Feedonomics for large catalogues where rules beat hand-editing.

What moves the price

The engagement runs $400–$3,000/mo and is ongoing. Three factors set the level.

How many products you sell. Fifty products and twelve thousand products are not the same service. Below a few hundred, titles are rewritten individually. Above that, the work becomes rules, supplemental feeds and a judgement about which parts of the catalogue should be advertised at all.

How many countries and currencies. Multi-country feeds are a step up in every direction — separate currencies, shipping rules, tax settings and often separate landing pages, each with its own way of breaking.

How clean the store is underneath. A well-structured Shopify catalogue exports a usable feed almost immediately. A store where variants, sizes and product types have been entered inconsistently over several years has to be tidied at source before anything downstream is worth doing, and that is real work.

What usually goes wrong

Performance Max is judged by the number it reports about itself. The campaign shows a strong return, so it gets more budget, and the extra budget buys more of the same brand traffic that was already free. The correction is unglamorous — brand exclusions at account level, brand terms handled in their own Search campaign, and an acceptance that the reported ROAS will drop afterwards. It should. The lower figure is the first honest one the account has produced.

The account gets optimised while the feed stays broken. Bids are adjusted, budgets moved, asset groups reshuffled, and none of it matters because a third of the catalogue is disapproved for missing identifiers and the rest carries titles written for a warehouse system. Shopping rewards the boring work — categories, GTINs, availability, titles — and punishes cleverness applied on top of bad data.

Stock and variants are treated as somebody else's problem. Advertising a product that went out of stock on Friday spends real money sending people to a dead page all weekend. Submitting every colourway as a separate product spreads budget across variants nobody buys. Both are invisible in the ad account and obvious in the feed, which is exactly why the weekly check looks at the feed first and the campaign second.

See where the site stands before you brief anyone.

If the site is already live, start from what it scores rather than from a guess. The audit reports what it checked, what it found, and — the part most tools leave out — what it could not check, and why.

See the website audit Talk about this work

Questions people ask before they commit.

Why is so much of the work in the feed rather than the campaign?: Because Shopping ads are not built from keywords. Google decides which product to show for which search by reading your feed, so the title, image, category, price and identifiers are the targeting. An account with a clean feed and a plain campaign will beat a clever campaign sitting on a feed full of internal product codes, every time. The feed is where the available improvement lives, and it is also the part that gets quietly skipped, because it looks like data entry rather than advertising.
My PMax campaign shows a ROAS of 8. Is that real?: Probably not all of it. Left unrestricted, Performance Max buys searches for your own brand name — people who already knew you and were coming anyway — and then takes the credit. The test is simple. Add an account-level brand exclusion list, run brand terms in their own Search campaign, and watch what PMax reports afterwards. It will fall. That lower number is the one that tells you whether the campaign is actually finding you new customers.
What makes a good product title?: Brand, then product type, then the attributes people actually search with — colour, size, material, model. No promotional language and no price. Keep it under 150 characters because that is the limit, but aim under about 70 so it is not truncated on mobile. Where a title is missing basic information such as size or material, we flag it rather than invent it, because that detail has to come from you.
We have twelve thousand products. Is that a different job?: Yes, and it is priced differently. A fifty-product feed can be rewritten by hand. A catalogue in the thousands needs rules, supplemental feeds and a feed management tool, plus a decision about which products deserve to be advertised at all — many catalogues have a long tail that will never repay the spend and is better excluded than optimised.
Do you need access to our Shopify or WooCommerce store?: For the feed side, yes, or at minimum access to the feed app and Merchant Center. Much of what breaks a Shopping account — variants submitted as separate products, missing identifiers, shipping settings that disagree with the listing — is fixed in the store rather than in the ad account. If store access is not possible we can still run the campaigns and hand you an exact list of feed changes, and we will say up front which improvements are then out of reach.

Often taken together.

Start with the brief, not the invoice.

Send what you are trying to achieve. You get a written scope, a price and a date — or an honest “this is not the right service for that”.

Talk about Google Shopping / Performance Max All Paid Media & Performance services