Feed First
Titles rewritten for how people search rather than how the catalogue is organised. It is the highest-leverage change available in Shopping.
Ecommerce PPC
Ecommerce PPC Management That Optimises for Margin, Not Just ROAS
In ecommerce advertising the product feed does more work than the ad copy. Titles, attributes and availability decide which queries a product appears for at all. Ecommerce PPC starts there, then optimises at product level rather than campaign level — because a strong overall return can easily hide a catalogue where the profitable items are subsidising the rest.
We Treat the Feed as the Campaign
Shopping campaigns have no keywords. What the feed says is what decides where products appear, and most feeds are whatever the platform exported.
Product-Level View
Account-level return hides everything. The useful question is which products earn and which quietly consume the budget.
Margin, Not Revenue
A return target set on revenue optimises toward volume. Where margins vary across the catalogue, that is optimising toward the wrong products.
Search and Shopping Together
They compete for the same queries. Managed separately, they bid against each other with your money.
Seasonality Planned
Ecommerce demand is not flat, and budgets set once in January are wrong by October.
Ecommerce PPC, Explained
Why Does a Good ROAS Still Lose Money?
Four causes, and they compound.
Review My Account →- 1
Revenue Is Not Margin
A 5x return on a product with a 15% margin loses money. Optimising on revenue targets the products that sell, not the products that pay.
- 2
The Feed Is the Export
Product titles written for a catalogue page — "SKU-4471 Blue" — match almost nothing anyone searches.
- 3
A Few Products Take Everything
Spend concentrates on whatever converts most, which is often a low-margin bestseller, while the rest of the catalogue never gets impressions.
- 4
Out-of-Stock Still Spending
Availability not syncing, so budget goes to products nobody can buy.
What Ecommerce PPC Management Covers
Feed, structure, measurement and the weekly work — with the catalogue treated as the variable it is.
Paid and organic overlap heavily on product and category terms — see ecommerce SEO.
How We Run Ecommerce Campaigns
The feed is fixed before the bidding is touched. Bidding on a bad feed optimises the wrong thing faster.
Feed Audit
Every product checked for title quality, attribute completeness, category accuracy and availability sync.
Fix Measurement
Conversion values verified, and margin data passed where the store can provide it.
Restructure
Products segmented by performance and margin so budget can be steered.
Optimise Weekly
Product-level performance reviewed, negatives added, budget moved.
Plan for Season
Budgets and bids adjusted ahead of the demand curve rather than during it.
Feed Quality
Why the Product Feed Decides Shopping Performance
Shopping campaigns have no keywords. Google matches queries to products using what the feed says, which makes the feed the closest thing to keyword targeting you have.
What makes a good product title?
The words someone would actually type, in roughly the order they would type them. Brand, product type, and the attributes that distinguish it — size, colour, material, model — rather than an internal SKU and a catalogue label.
Titles are truncated in the ad, so the important words belong at the front. "Waterproof Hiking Boots — Mens, Size 10, Brown" outperforms "Product 4471 — Brown, Waterproof, Mens Hiking Boots Size 10" for no reason other than word order.
This is unglamorous work and it is usually the single largest available improvement in a Shopping account.
Why optimise on margin instead of revenue?
A return-on-ad-spend target treats every pound of revenue as equivalent. If your catalogue has products at 60% margin and products at 12%, it does not — and the bidding will happily push spend toward whichever converts most easily.
Where the store can pass margin or profit as the conversion value instead of revenue, the automated bidding optimises toward what actually pays. Where it cannot, segmenting campaigns by margin band achieves a rougher version of the same thing.
Either way, the account stops rewarding the products that sell well and start rewarding the products worth selling.
Questions,answered.
Ecommerce PPC is paid search for online stores, run mostly through Shopping campaigns where the product feed rather than a keyword list determines which queries a product can appear for.
Shopping campaigns have no keywords. Google decides which searches a product is relevant to using the feed — its title, description, attributes and category. A feed exported straight from the store usually describes products the way the catalogue does, not the way people search.
Usually both, coordinated. Shopping covers product searches with images and prices; Search covers category and brand queries and lets you control messaging. Run independently they bid against each other, which is why they belong in one plan.
There is no universal figure — it depends entirely on your margins. A store with 60% margins can sustain a far lower return than one at 15%. Anyone quoting a target ROAS without asking about your margins is quoting a number, not advice.
They should stop being advertised, which requires availability syncing correctly between the store and Merchant Center. Broken sync is a common and entirely avoidable way to spend budget on products nobody can buy.
Still deciding if ecommerce ppc is right for you?
Talk to UsThe Catalogue Is Not Uniformly Worth Advertising
Most ecommerce accounts are managed as though every product deserves the same treatment. Budget is set at campaign level, performance is read at account level, and the conclusion is that the account is doing well or badly.
Underneath that number, catalogues are almost always uneven. A minority of products generate most of the profitable revenue, a larger group breaks roughly even, and a tail consumes budget while returning little. All three are averaged into the same figure.
Reading performance at product level tends to change what people want to do next. It is the same account and the same data — just disaggregated enough to act on.
Free Feed and Account Review
See Which Products Are Earning and Which Are Not
Give us read-only access to your Google Ads and Merchant Center. We will audit the feed, check availability sync, and show you performance broken out by product rather than by campaign.
Claim Your Free Marketing Audit
Enhance Your Brand Potential At No Cost!
- Expect a response within 24 hours
- NDA available upon request
- Dedicated product specialists