Paid Advertising
Google Shopping Ads
There are no keywords in Shopping. Your product titles are the keywords, which is why the feed is the campaign.
Google Shopping shows your products with a price and an image against a search. The Nexclick works on the Merchant Center feed before touching bids, because Shopping has no keywords — the feed decides which searches you appear for, and most underperformance starts there.
Is this you?
What usually prompts the call
- Products are disapproved in Merchant Center and nobody has looked at why.
- Your bestsellers barely show while your slowest products take the budget.
- Product titles are whatever the supplier happened to call them.
- Return on ad spend looks acceptable overall and you cannot see it per product.
What we do
The actual deliverables
Things that appear on an invoice, not adjectives.
- Fix the feed before anything else
- Titles, descriptions, product types, GTINs, brand and attributes. Shopping matches on feed content, so a title reading "SKU-4471 Black" will never appear against how a customer actually searches.
- Write titles for search, not for the warehouse
- Brand, product, key attribute, size and colour, in the order people type them. Reliably the highest-return work in a Shopping account and reliably the least glamorous.
- Resolve disapprovals and account-level issues
- Missing GTINs, price mismatches, and the shipping and returns policy requirements. A disapproved product earns nothing, and frequently nobody has noticed it happened.
- Segment campaigns by margin
- Products at 60% margin and products at 8% should not share a bid strategy. Segmenting by profitability rather than by supplier category is where the return actually comes from.
- Custom labels for how you really trade
- Seasonality, stock depth, clearance, bestseller. Bidding differently on a product with four units left is basic commercial sense and is almost never configured.
- Negative keywords, because Shopping does have them
- You cannot choose which searches you appear for, but you can exclude them. A research-intent negative list saves a substantial share of a typical Shopping budget.
- Report at product level against margin
- Return on ad spend per product and per label. An account-level figure hides that a handful of products are quietly subsidising the rest of the catalogue.
- Free listings and merchant promotions
- Surfaces available at no media cost that most accounts have never switched on. Small work, no ongoing spend, and routinely overlooked entirely.
Checklist
The feed audit that decides your Shopping performance
Open Merchant Center and work through this. Shopping has no keywords — the feed is the targeting — so nearly every performance problem in a Shopping account is visible somewhere on this list.
- 01How many products are currently disapproved, and since when?
- 02Do titles start with the brand and product, or with an internal SKU?
- 03Do titles include the attributes people search — size, colour, capacity, material?
- 04Are titles under 150 characters with the important words inside the first 70?
- 05Is GTIN populated wherever the manufacturer provides one?
- 06Is the product category set specifically rather than at a broad top level?
- 07Do images meet requirements and show the product without promotional overlays?
- 08Does the feed price match the page price, including any active discount?
- 09Are shipping and returns policies configured in Merchant Center?
- 10Is availability accurate, so out-of-stock products stop being advertised?
- 11Are custom labels used for margin, season, stock depth or clearance?
- 12Are product highlights and additional images supplied?
- 13Is the feed refreshed often enough for a fast-moving catalogue?
- 14Are free product listings enabled alongside the paid ones?
- 15Are feed changes made in a feed tool rather than in your store data?
How it works
Step by step, with timeframes
Timeframes are typical rather than guaranteed, and they assume we get account access and approvals when we ask.
- 01Week 1–2
Feed and Merchant Center audit
Every disapproval, missing attribute and weak title catalogued. Usually the single largest opportunity anywhere in the account.
- 02Week 2–4
Feed optimisation
Titles rewritten, attributes populated and custom labels applied through a feed tool, so your source store data is never edited directly.
- 03Week 4–5
Campaign structure
Segmented by margin and priority, with negative lists and a bid strategy appropriate to the conversion volume actually available.
- 04Ongoing, monthly
Manage and report
Product-level performance, continuous feed health monitoring, and negatives maintained weekly rather than at review points.
What you get
Reporting and ownership
- A Merchant Center account with disapprovals resolved and monitoring in place.
- Product titles written for how customers search, not how a supplier catalogued them.
- Campaigns segmented by margin, with custom labels reflecting how you actually trade.
- Return on ad spend reported per product against real margin, not one account-level figure.
- Feed rules applied inside a feed tool, so your source store data stays untouched.
Tools and platforms
- Google Merchant Center
- A feed management tool such as Channable or DataFeedWatch
- Google Ads shopping campaigns
- Product-level margin data
- Competitive pricing monitoring
Timeline
How long this actually takes
Four to five weeks, of which the first three are feed work. That order surprises clients who expected to be discussing bidding in week one. The uncomfortable truth about Shopping is that a well-optimised feed on mediocre bidding beats a superb bid strategy on a poor feed, every time. Two further honest points. If your prices sit materially above the market, Shopping displays that to every customer next to a competitor and no campaign structure hides it — the fix is pricing or positioning, not advertising. And if your margins are thin, run the arithmetic before scaling, because Shopping can generate impressive revenue at a loss extremely efficiently.
Pricing model
Monthly retainer
Monthly management, usually preceded by a feed optimisation project where the feed needs substantial work. Ad spend stays on your own billing account.
Questions
Google Shopping Ads questions
Why do our best products barely show in Shopping?
Almost always the feed. If the title does not contain the words people search, the product will not enter those auctions however well it sells on your site. Check whether your bestseller’s title reads like a search or like a warehouse label — that single comparison explains most cases.
Do product titles really matter that much?
They are the closest thing Shopping has to keywords. Rewriting titles from supplier naming to search-led naming is the highest-impact change available in most accounts, and it costs nothing in media. It is also entirely unglamorous, which is why it so often has not been done.
Should we run standard Shopping or Performance Max?
PMax reaches more inventory and gives you less control; standard Shopping gives control and less reach. They compete if run together on the same products. For most retailers PMax with proper constraints is the pragmatic answer, with standard Shopping retained for a defined subset where control matters more.
Do we need a feed management tool?
Above a few hundred products, yes. It lets you rewrite titles and apply labels through rules without touching your store data, which matters because store titles serve customers browsing your site and feed titles serve a search engine. Those two jobs want different words.
Can we add negative keywords to Shopping?
Yes, and it is one of the few direct controls available. You cannot choose what you appear for, but you can exclude research terms, DIY intent, competitor names and second-hand queries. A well-maintained negative list is often the difference between a profitable Shopping account and a busy one.
Why are our products disapproved?
Most commonly a price mismatch between feed and landing page, a missing GTIN, or unconfigured shipping and returns policies. Occasionally a policy issue on a restricted category. All of it is visible in Merchant Center diagnostics, and all of it is costing you the entire revenue of those products meanwhile.
What return on ad spend should we target?
Whatever your margin supports, which is a different figure for every product and is why account-level targets mislead. A 4x return is excellent at a 60% margin and loss-making at 15%. Set targets against contribution, not revenue, and segment so the profitable products are not subsidising the rest.
Last reviewed 28 July 2026.
Tell us what you are trying to fix
A 20-minute call, no pitch deck. The Nexclick will tell you what we would do, roughly what it costs, and whether we are the right people for it.