Google Shopping.

Google Shopping & Ecommerce PPC

We manage Google Shopping and ecommerce PPC for retailers in Lincolnshire and across the UK. Some clients come to us with a store that sells well organically and no paid presence at all. Others arrive with a Performance Max campaign quietly burning money against products they can’t sell profitably. Either way the first job is the same: work out what the catalogue can actually support.

Why the Feed Decides Everything

Google builds your Shopping listing from your product data. The title is the biggest single factor in which searches you show for, and most store platforms export titles written for humans browsing a category page rather than someone typing into Google. “Blue Cotton Shirt” and “Mens Blue Cotton Oxford Shirt Long Sleeve” perform very differently, and only one of them was written with search in mind.

Then there’s everything that stops products appearing at all. Missing GTINs, price mismatches between feed and site, images with promotional text burned into them, no returns policy on the site. We regularly open a Merchant Centre account and find a meaningful chunk of the catalogue disapproved, with nobody aware of it.

Shopping and Search Work Differently

Search ads catch someone describing a problem. Shopping catches someone who already knows what they want and is comparing options on price and appearance. That changes what a good campaign looks like. For most retailers both belong in the account, with Shopping taking the product searches and search campaigns taking the broader research queries and brand terms.

Performance Max, Honestly

Performance Max is Google’s automated retail campaign and it does often produce results. It also takes away control, blends channels together in the reporting, and will happily spend on your worst margin products if that’s what generates the most revenue on paper. We use it, but we set it up with proper asset groups and exclusions, and we usually keep standard Shopping running so there’s a clear view of what’s really driving sales.

If the Store Is the Problem

Sometimes the ads aren’t the issue. If the product pages load slowly, the checkout drops people, or the site doesn’t work properly on a phone, paid traffic just makes an existing problem more expensive. We build ecommerce sites in-house, so we can tell you honestly whether the money is better spent on the store than on the ad account. Sometimes it is.

What We Won’t Do

We won’t push budget at a catalogue whose margins can’t carry it. We won’t hand everything to Performance Max and call it a strategy. We won’t report a healthy return on ad spend while ignoring that it’s coming almost entirely from people searching your brand name, who were going to buy anyway.