Google Shopping ads

How Google Shopping ads work

Google Shopping ads don't use keywords the way Search does. Instead, Google reads your product feed, the list of products with titles, descriptions, prices, images and availability, and decides which searches each product matches. That's why the feed is the real campaign. Bids and budgets matter, but a product with a vague title and a grey photo will lose to a clearer listing almost every time.

Ads show in the main search results, the Shopping tab, Google Images and some partner placements. The shopper sees your product photo, the price and your store name before clicking, so the clicks you pay for are usually from people already comparing to buy.

Merchant Center: the setup most stores rush

Every Shopping campaign starts in Google Merchant Center. I create it in your name or tidy up the one you have: business information, a verified website, shipping rates and delivery times for Canada, and a returns policy. Google checks these against your site, and mismatches lead to warnings or suspended products.

Common Canadian details:

• Prices in CAD on both the site and the feed, with the same amount the customer sees at checkout.
• Shipping settings by province if costs differ, especially for the territories and remote areas.
• If you sell into Quebec, French-language rules apply to product data; I run Shopping in English only, so French feeds and ads are outside my work.

Feed optimization that moves sales

I rewrite titles so the most important words come first: product type, brand, key attribute, size or colour. Then I fix categories, add GTINs where they exist, and use custom labels to tag products by margin, price range, season or bestseller status. Those labels let me split campaigns so high-margin products get more budget and slow movers get less.

Campaign structure and bidding

A typical small store starts with two or three campaigns: bestsellers with proven demand, everything else at a lower bid, and sometimes a seasonal campaign for holiday or winter items. Each week I check search terms, add negatives for irrelevant queries, and look at products that take clicks without selling. Once purchases are tracked with real values, I test target return on ad spend bidding.

Example: a small store selling handmade goods

Imagine a ceramics studio with 120 products. A good first move is to tag the 20 items that sell best, give them their own campaign, and keep the rest at a low bid until data shows what else sells. Titles like “Handmade ceramic coffee mug, 350 ml, speckled white” beat “Morning Mug”. Before the holidays, gift sets get a seasonal label and extra budget; in January it goes back.

Mistakes I see in store accounts

The same issues come up in almost every store account I open. Purchase tracking fires twice, so the reported return looks double what the bank account shows. Out-of-stock products keep spending because the feed updates once a week. Sale prices are set on the website but not in the feed, which leads to price mismatch warnings. And the search terms report has never been opened, so the store pays for queries like “free”, “used” or a different brand entirely. Each of these is cheap to fix, and together they often free up a noticeable part of the budget for products that actually sell.

What happens after the click

Shopping traffic lands on product pages, so those pages carry the sale. Clear shipping costs, delivery time, a visible returns policy and quick mobile checkout matter more than any bid strategy. If your store is the bottleneck, I build online stores from $4,800. When Shopping is stable, Performance Max can extend reach to YouTube and Display.

Setup costs $650 and management starts from $750 a month. For a full picture of channels for stores, see marketing for online stores or the main Google Ads services page.