Google Ads for ecommerce stores, starting with the product feed

How a store’s ads differ from everyone else’s

A plumber picks keywords. A store mostly does not. Google’s help page says Shopping ads use your Merchant Center product data, not keywords, to decide how and where to show your ads (about Shopping ads). The product title, category and identifiers you send are what Google matches against a search.

So a store has two kinds of campaign. Shopping ads, with a photo and a price, answer product searches. Text ads on the search results answer category searches such as “office chairs for tall people”, where you choose the words and the landing page. The ecommerce and retail marketing page explains why both should be priced on margin. This page covers what each one needs before it can work.

What Merchant Center requires

Merchant Center is the Google account that holds your product list, called the feed. Its specification names the data every product must carry (Merchant Center product data specification).

On the last row, Google says products with a missing or incorrect GTIN may have limited visibility. A GTIN is the barcode number, such as a UPC.

Policy sits on top of data. Google’s Shopping ads policies list misrepresentation among prohibited practices, and say Google may disapprove listings and suspend accounts for repeat or egregious violations (Shopping ads policies).

Where store ad accounts lose money

• The feed is wrong and the bids are blamed. A title that says “KT-200 BLU” will not match “blue electric kettle”.
• The sale being counted is not a sale. An add-to-cart or a page view is recorded as a purchase.
• Brand searches flatter the total. People who typed your store name were coming anyway.
• Every product gets the same target. A low-margin accessory and a high-margin machine are bid on alike.
• Returns and shipping are left out. The report shows revenue that the business never kept.

One real account, with its limits

In one retail Google Ads account we worked on, the conversion action was counting page views instead of orders. Every decision in the account was being made on that number. The tracking was fixed in week one, before anything else was touched.

The screenshot we publish shows £31.4K in conversion value from £4.66K of spend, at £15.87 per conversion. That is a return of 6.74 times. The window is 7 to 14 February 2024, eight days, so read it as a snapshot and not a sustained figure.

Conversion value is revenue, not profit. Whether 6.74 times is good depends on that store’s gross margin, which the screenshot does not show. The full record is in the retail Google Ads case study.

The first 90 days

Week one. Order tracking is tested with a real purchase. The value sent to Google must equal the order total you see in the store. Our conversion tracking guide lists what to test.

Weeks two to four. The feed is repaired: titles rewritten in shopper language, disapprovals cleared, identifiers added. Products are grouped by margin band, using figures you supply.

Month two. Shopping campaigns run per margin band, each with its own target. Brand searches are moved to their own campaign. Search campaigns start on the category terms with a real landing page behind them.

Month three. You get spend, revenue and estimated margin by product group. Products that take clicks and never sell are excluded or fixed on the page.

What clicks cost

LocaliQ’s 2026 benchmarks report these averages for search campaigns (LocaliQ search advertising benchmarks):

• Shopping, Collectibles and Gifts: $4.14 per click, and $49.40 per lead.
• Apparel, Fashion and Jewelry: $4.44 per click, and $97.51 per lead.
• Furniture: $3.97 per click, and $106.70 per lead.

Two cautions. These are text ads on search, so they say little about Shopping ad clicks. And the report counts leads, where a store counts orders. Use them for scale only.

Google charges Shopping campaigns per click, when someone clicks through to your product page (about Shopping ads). Your own ceiling comes from margin. If a product leaves $30 after cost and shipping, that is the most an order from ads can cost before you lose money on it. The Google Ads return calculator runs that sum.

Mavix gives no management price here. We quote after a free review of the account and the feed. See the ads pricing page for how the fee is set.

What the report shows a store owner

• Revenue and spend by product group, with brand searches apart.
• Return after margin, using the margin bands you gave us.
• New customers against returning customers, where the platform reports it.
• Disapproved products, by reason, and how many were cleared.
• The search terms that spent the most without an order.

When Google Ads is the wrong first move

Our rule of thumb: under a few dozen orders a month, automated bidding has little to learn from. Start narrow, with your best sellers.

If margin after shipping is thin, paid clicks may never pay. Work on repeat orders first, through email marketing for ecommerce.

If category pages are empty, text ads will land on a bare grid. Fix those pages under ecommerce SEO services and both paid and organic visitors benefit.

Already spending and unsure the numbers are real? Give us read access. We will review the Google Ads account and check the order tracking first. The Google Ads audit checklist shows what we look at.