How to Set Up and Optimise Google Shopping Ads

Google Shopping ads are the product listings that appear at the top of Google search results with an image, price, store name, and sometimes a rating. Unlike text-based search ads, you don’t bid on keywords directly. Instead, Google matches your products to relevant searches based on your product feed data. That distinction changes everything about how you set up, manage, and optimise these campaigns.

At Gorilla Marketing, we run Shopping campaigns for e-commerce clients across verticals from fashion to industrial supply. The setup process has a few moving parts that trip people up, particularly around Merchant Center configuration and feed quality. This guide walks through the full process, from account setup to ongoing optimisation, based on what we see working across live campaigns.

How Do Google Shopping Ads Actually Work?

Google Shopping ads pull product information directly from a data feed you submit through Google Merchant Center. When someone searches for a product, Google’s algorithm decides which listings to show based on the relevance of your product data, your bid, and the quality of your landing page.

The key difference from standard Google Ads search campaigns is the absence of keyword targeting. You don’t choose which searches trigger your ads. Google reads your product titles, descriptions, categories, and other feed attributes, then matches them to queries it considers relevant. This makes your product feed the single most important factor in Shopping campaign performance. Poor feed data means poor matching, which means wasted spend on irrelevant searches or, worse, no impressions at all.

Shopping ads appear in several places: the main search results page (usually at the top or right side), the dedicated Shopping tab, Google Images, and across the Google Display Network if you’re running Performance Max. Each placement has different intent signals, but the core mechanism is the same. Your feed data determines visibility.

Google Shopping Ads vs Search Ads: What’s the Difference?

Shopping ads tend to generate higher conversion rates for product searches because the user sees the product image and price before clicking. They’ve already qualified themselves. With search ads, someone clicking “buy running shoes” might not like what they find on your landing page. With Shopping, they’ve already seen the shoe and the price.

Search ads give you more control, though. You pick the keywords, write the ad copy, and choose the landing page. For most e-commerce PPC strategies, running both formats simultaneously captures demand at different stages of the buying journey.

Setting Up Google Merchant Center

Merchant Center is the foundation. Without it, you can’t run Shopping ads. Here’s the setup process.

Creating your account

Go to merchants.google.com and sign in with your Google account

Enter your business name, country (United Kingdom), and time zone

Add your website URL and verify ownership (usually through Google Search Console, a meta tag, or Google Analytics)

Accept the terms of service

Configuring business settings

Once your account is active, there are a few settings that matter more than they look.

Shipping settings need to reflect your actual shipping costs and delivery times. Google can show estimated delivery dates in your Shopping ads, and inaccurate shipping information is one of the most common reasons for Merchant Center suspensions. If you offer free shipping over a certain threshold, set that up properly. UK shoppers expect VAT-inclusive pricing, so make sure your prices include VAT.

Tax settings are simpler for UK merchants than for US ones. Prices should always include VAT. For UK-only campaigns, VAT-inclusive pricing in your feed is the standard.

Return policy is now a factor Google considers. Adding your returns information to Merchant Center can improve ad eligibility and occasionally unlock additional features.

Linking Merchant Center to Google Ads

This step connects your product data to your advertising account.

In Merchant Center, go to Settings then Linked accounts

Click Google Ads and enter your Google Ads customer ID

Send the link request

In your Google Ads account, accept the link request under Tools & Settings then Linked accounts

The link must be active before you can create a Shopping campaign. It typically takes a few minutes, but occasionally needs up to 24 hours.

Building a Product Feed That Actually Performs

Your product feed is a structured data file containing every product you want to advertise. It’s submitted to Merchant Center and updated regularly. Feed quality directly determines how well your products match to searches and how often they show.

Required attributes

Every product in your feed needs these at minimum:

id – unique identifier for each product

title – product name (up to 150 characters, but the first 70 are most visible)

description – detailed product description

link – URL of the product landing page

image_link – URL of the main product image

availability – in_stock, out_of_stock, or preorder

price – including currency (GBP for UK)

brand – the product’s brand name

gtin – Global Trade Item Number (EAN/UPC). Required for most products from known brands

condition – new, refurbished, or used

Attributes that make the difference

The required fields get you into the game. These recommended attributes determine how well you play it.

product_type – your own categorisation of the product. Use a hierarchical format like “Clothing > Women’s > Dresses > Summer Dresses”. This doesn’t affect how Google categorises your product, but it gives you more granular control over bidding in your campaigns.

google_product_category – the Google taxonomy category. Getting this right helps Google understand what you’re selling. If you sell “trainers”, Google needs to know whether that’s footwear or fitness equipment.

custom_labels (0-4) – these are your secret weapon for campaign structure. You can tag products by margin, seasonality, bestseller status, price range, or anything else relevant to your bidding strategy. More on this in the optimisation section.

sale_price – if you’re running a promotion, submitting both the regular price and sale price lets Google show the strikethrough pricing in your ads. That visual cue significantly improves click-through rates.

Title optimisation

Product titles are the single highest-impact feed attribute for Shopping performance. Google weighs them heavily when matching products to search queries.

A few principles that consistently improve results:

Front-load the most important information. “Nike Air Max 90 Men’s Running Shoes – Black/White – Size 10” beats “Running Shoes for Men by Nike”

Include the brand name. Branded searches convert at higher rates, and brand presence in the title helps matching

Add key product attributes. Colour, size, material, and model number all help Google match your products to specific long-tail queries

Mirror how people actually search. If your customers search “women’s waterproof walking boots”, your title should include those terms, not just “ladies’ outdoor footwear”

Avoid keyword stuffing. A title crammed with every possible search term reads poorly and can trigger Merchant Center warnings.

Image requirements

Google has specific image requirements: minimum 100×100 pixels (250×250 for apparel), no watermarks or promotional overlays, white or transparent background preferred, and the product filling at least 75% of the frame. No placeholder images.

Poor images don’t just look bad. They can get your products disapproved. Clean, high-quality product photography pays for itself in click-through rate.

Creating Your First Shopping Campaign

With Merchant Center set up and your feed submitted, you can build the actual campaign in Google Ads.

Standard Shopping vs Performance Max

You have two main options, and the choice matters.

Standard Shopping campaigns give you direct control over bidding, search term visibility, product group segmentation, and where your ads appear. You can see exactly which search queries triggered your products, add negative keywords, and adjust bids at the product group level. For advertisers who want granular control over their Shopping performance, Standard Shopping is the clearer choice.

Performance Max campaigns use Google’s machine learning to serve your products across Search, Shopping, Display, YouTube, Gmail, and Discover from a single campaign. You provide “asset groups” (images, text, videos, product feeds) and Google handles targeting, bidding, and placement. The trade-off is transparency. Search term data is limited, you can’t add negative keywords through the standard interface, and it’s harder to diagnose what’s working versus what’s wasting money.

For most advertisers running Shopping for the first time, Standard Shopping is the safer starting point. You’ll learn which products convert, which queries drive revenue, and where your budget goes. That data becomes invaluable if you later transition to Performance Max, because you’ll know what “good” looks like.

Campaign setup steps (Standard Shopping)

In Google Ads, click New campaign and choose Sales as the objective

Select Shopping as the campaign type

Choose your linked Merchant Center account and target country (United Kingdom)

Select Standard Shopping campaign

Set your daily budget, bidding strategy, location targeting, and ad scheduling

Structuring product groups

Once your campaign is live, it starts with a single product group containing everything in your feed. That’s too broad. Break it down.

You can subdivide product groups by brand, category, product type, custom label, item ID, condition, or channel. The goal is creating groups of products with similar performance characteristics so you can bid appropriately.

A common structure:

Campaign 1: Bestsellers – high-margin, proven converters. Higher bids, close monitoring

Campaign 2: Mid-range – decent volume, moderate margins. Standard bids

Campaign 3: Long-tail/Testing – new products, lower volume items. Lower bids, data gathering

Custom labels are how you make this work. Tag products in your feed with labels like “high_margin”, “seasonal_q4”, or “bestseller”, then use those labels to segment your campaign structure.

Bidding Strategies: Manual vs Automated

Choosing the right bidding strategy depends on your data maturity, budget, and how much time you can dedicate to campaign management.

Manual CPC

You set the maximum cost-per-click for each product group. Full control, but time-intensive and requires regular adjustment.

Best for: New campaigns where you’re still gathering conversion data. Accounts where you want to understand baseline CPCs before handing control to automation. Advertisers who prefer granular control.

Enhanced CPC (eCPC)

A middle ground. You set base bids, and Google adjusts them up or down based on the likelihood of conversion. Google can increase your bid by any amount if it thinks a click is likely to convert, but will lower bids when conversion probability is low.

Best for: Accounts with some conversion history that want to keep a level of manual control while benefiting from Google’s signals.

Target ROAS (tROAS)

You set a target return on ad spend, and Google automatically adjusts bids to hit that target. This requires enough historical conversion data for Google’s algorithm to work effectively. Google generally recommends at least 15 conversions over 30 days, though more data usually means better performance.

Best for: Established accounts with consistent conversion tracking and clear revenue data. Works particularly well for e-commerce where revenue values vary by product.

Maximise Clicks

Google automatically sets bids to get the most clicks within your budget. No conversion optimisation. Best for brand new campaigns where you need data quickly, not a long-term revenue strategy.

The progression for most advertisers: start with Manual CPC to understand the market, move to eCPC once you have conversion data, then shift to Target ROAS once you’ve accumulated enough conversions. Jumping straight to automated bidding without conversion history is a common mistake. The algorithm needs data to learn from.

Negative Keywords: The Budget Saver Most Advertisers Ignore

Since you can’t choose which keywords trigger your Shopping ads, negative keywords are your only lever for filtering out irrelevant traffic. And most advertisers don’t use them aggressively enough.

Check your search terms report weekly during the first few months of a new campaign. You’ll find queries that trigger your products but have zero purchase intent. Common patterns:

“Free” queries – people searching for free versions of your product

“DIY” or “how to” queries – informational intent, not buying intent

Competitor brand names – unless you specifically want to show for competitor searches

Wrong product variations – size, colour, or material you don’t stock

Review or comparison queries – sometimes worth keeping, but often low-converting

Build negative keyword lists at the campaign level and the account level. Campaign-level negatives let you route traffic between campaigns (for example, blocking branded queries from your generic campaign so they only trigger in your branded campaign). Account-level negatives block universally irrelevant terms.

This is one of the most impactful optimisation activities you can do for Shopping. We routinely see advertisers reduce wasted spend by 15-25% just by building proper negative keyword lists in the first month.

Product Ratings and Reviews

Product ratings can appear alongside your Shopping ads as star ratings and review counts. They draw attention and improve click-through rates.

To enable product ratings:

You need a minimum of 50 reviews across your products (Google’s threshold, not per product)

Submit a product ratings interest form through Google

Reviews can come from your own site or from third-party review aggregators like Trustpilot, Reviews.io, or Google Customer Reviews

For UK merchants, Trustpilot is widely used and integrates well with Merchant Center. The rating stars in Shopping ads are one of the easiest wins available. If you have good reviews and aren’t showing them, you’re leaving clicks on the table.

Tracking Performance: The Metrics That Matter

Not all metrics deserve equal attention. Here’s where to focus.

Impression share tells you how often your products show versus how often they could show. Low impression share means either your bids are too low, your budget is capped, or your feed quality needs work.

Click-through rate (CTR) reveals how compelling your listings are. If impressions are high but CTR is low, your titles, images, or prices aren’t competitive. Compare CTR across product groups to identify which products attract attention and which don’t.

Conversion rate separates the products that drive revenue from the ones that just drive clicks. A product with high CTR but poor conversion rate usually has a landing page problem or a pricing disconnect between the ad and the checkout.

Return on ad spend (ROAS) is the bottom line. Total revenue divided by total ad spend. For most UK e-commerce accounts, a healthy Shopping ROAS sits somewhere between 4:1 and 8:1, though this varies enormously by margin structure and average order value. A jewellery retailer and a stationery supplier will have very different benchmarks.

Cost per conversion matters more than CPC in isolation. A higher CPC that drives a higher conversion rate often delivers better overall returns than a cheap click that bounces.

Set up conversion tracking properly before you launch. Import transactions from Google Analytics 4 or use the Google Ads conversion tag directly. Without accurate revenue data, you’re optimising blind.

Common Feed Errors and How to Fix Them

Merchant Center will flag issues in your Diagnostics tab. Some are warnings, some are disapprovals. Here are the errors we see most often.

Missing GTIN – Google increasingly requires GTINs for products from recognised brands. If your manufacturer provides an EAN or UPC, include it. For custom or handmade products without a GTIN, set the `identifier_exists` attribute to `false`.

Price mismatch – the price in your feed must exactly match the price on your landing page, including currency. If your site shows prices with and without VAT, make sure the feed matches whichever price the landing page displays by default. Automatic price crawling by Google will flag any discrepancies.

Shipping misconfiguration – if Google can’t calculate shipping costs from your Merchant Center settings, products get disapproved. Set up shipping rates for every delivery method you offer. Include free shipping thresholds if applicable.

Image issues – promotional overlays, watermarks, or images that don’t meet the minimum size requirements. Particularly common when retailers pull images from supplier feeds without checking quality.

Landing page crawl errors – if Googlebot can’t access your product pages (blocked by robots.txt, slow to load, or returning errors), products get disapproved. Check that your product URLs are crawlable and return 200 status codes.

Automatic item disapprovals – Google periodically crawls your landing pages and compares them to your feed data. Mismatches in price, availability, or product details trigger disapprovals without warning. Daily feed updates minimise this risk.

Advanced Features Worth Using

Promotions

Merchant Center promotions let you display special offers directly in your Shopping ads. “15% off”, “Free shipping”, “Buy one get one free” – these show as an additional line beneath your ad, making it more eye-catching.

Set up promotions through the Promotions tab in Merchant Center. You’ll need a promotion ID, the offer details, a redemption code (if applicable), and the active dates. Promotions work well for seasonal campaigns and clearance events.

Supplemental feeds

Your primary feed contains your core product data. Supplemental feeds let you add or override specific attributes without modifying the primary feed. This is useful for:

Adding custom labels for campaign segmentation without changing your main product feed

Overriding titles or descriptions for specific products (A/B testing different title formats)

Adding promotion IDs to specific products

Fixing Merchant Center errors on individual items without waiting for a full feed refresh

Supplemental feeds match to your primary feed using the product ID. They’re a practical tool for making quick adjustments, especially if your primary feed is generated automatically by your e-commerce platform.

Seasonality and Campaign Timing

Shopping performance fluctuates with the retail calendar, and your campaigns should reflect that.

Pre-season preparation is where most advertisers fall short. If you’re running a Christmas campaign, your feeds need to be updated, your budgets need to be increased, and your bids need to be adjusted before the traffic spike hits. Waiting until December to react means you’ve missed the early research phase when shoppers start browsing.

Key UK retail moments to plan around:

January sales

Valentine’s Day (February)

Easter (variable)

Bank holiday weekends (May and August)

Back to school (August/September)

Black Friday and Cyber Monday (November)

Christmas (ramp from October)

Boxing Day sales

For each, adjust bids upward 1-2 weeks before peak, increase daily budgets to avoid capping out during high-traffic periods, and refresh product titles to include seasonal terms where relevant.

Custom labels make this manageable. Tag products with seasonal labels in your feed, then adjust bids for those product groups during the relevant period. A “winter coats” label lets you increase bids in October without touching your summer range.

Multi-Channel Integration: Shopping Doesn’t Work in Isolation

The strongest e-commerce SEO and PPC strategies treat Shopping ads as one part of a broader system, not a standalone channel.

Shopping + Search – use search campaigns to capture queries that Shopping doesn’t cover well, particularly long-tail informational queries and brand terms. Search ads with sitelinks and promotion extensions complement Shopping listings and increase your total real estate on the results page.

Shopping + Remarketing – someone who clicks a Shopping ad but doesn’t convert is a warm lead. Dynamic remarketing is especially effective because it shows the exact product they viewed.

Shopping + organic – your product feed data overlaps with your organic SEO efforts. Well-optimised product titles and descriptions improve both paid Shopping visibility and organic product listings in the Shopping tab. Shopping search term reports also feed your organic keyword strategy. If a query drives profitable Shopping clicks, it’s worth targeting organically too.

Shopping ads backed by strong organic presence and targeted remarketing consistently outperform Shopping running solo.

Budget-Wasting Mistakes to Avoid

After managing Shopping campaigns across dozens of accounts, certain patterns come up repeatedly.

Running a single product group with one bid. Every product gets the same bid regardless of margin, conversion rate, or search relevance. This guarantees you’re overspending on low-value products and underspending on your winners.

Ignoring the search terms report. Your Shopping ads are showing for queries you didn’t choose. If you’re not regularly reviewing which searches trigger your products and adding negative keywords, irrelevant clicks eat your budget silently.

Submitting the bare minimum feed. The required attributes get your products approved. The optional attributes get them performing. Skipping product type, custom labels, sale prices, and detailed descriptions means you’re competing with one hand tied behind your back.

Setting and forgetting automated bidding. Target ROAS and other automated strategies still need monitoring. If your conversion tracking breaks, the algorithm optimises toward bad data. Check your bidding performance weekly and verify that conversion values are recording accurately.

Not segmenting by device. Mobile and desktop Shopping performance often differs significantly. Mobile might drive higher click volume at lower conversion rates. If you’re not adjusting bids by device, you’re treating two different audiences the same way.

Launching without conversion tracking. Without it, you have no idea which products, queries, or audiences drive revenue. You’re spending money in the dark.

Updating feeds too infrequently. If availability or pricing changes faster than your feed updates, you’ll accumulate disapprovals and show inaccurate information. Daily updates are the minimum for most stores. Hourly is better if your platform supports it.

Making Shopping Ads Work Harder for Your Business

Google Shopping ads reward the advertisers who treat their product feed as a living document, not a one-time upload. The setup process matters, but the ongoing work is where results compound. Regular feed optimisation, negative keyword management, bid adjustments based on actual performance data, and seasonal planning separate profitable Shopping campaigns from budget drains.

The fundamentals don’t change: get your Merchant Center right, build a detailed and accurate product feed, structure your campaigns around how your products actually perform, and use the data Google gives you to make better decisions over time.

If you’re running an e-commerce store and want help setting up or improving your Shopping campaigns, get in touch. We manage Shopping, Search, and Performance Max campaigns for UK retailers and can audit your existing setup or build from scratch.