Senior Google Ads operator with 8+ years of experience, spent the last years almost entirely inside DTC
eCommerce accounts. Small number of accounts, no juniors, no handoffs.
Google AdseCommercePPC Audits
September 17, 2026, 9 min read
IN SHORT
•Shopping ads are feed-driven, not keyword-driven.
•Nine fields block approval entirely if they are wrong.
•Google reads your business info against your site. Mismatches trigger suspension.
•Six real failure patterns below, with screenshots.
Most guides to Google Shopping explain the auction. They skip the part that decides whether you
show up at all, which is the feed.
So this covers both. First how Shopping really works. Then the six things that quietly break real accounts,
with screenshots from accounts I have worked in, anonymized.
None of these are exotic. That is the point. They are boring, they are common, and they are expensive.
Shopping ads vs Search ads, side by side
Unlike a Search ad, which you write yourself, a Shopping ad is assembled entirely by Google from your feed
data, mainly the title and the image. There is no ad copy to write for Shopping the way there is for Search.
Search ad
Text ad you write yourself
Text ad you write yourself. Headline, description, URL. Your words, your copy.
Shopping ad
Assembled from your feed
Image, price, store name, assembled from your feed. You never write a line of ad copy.
The buyer already decided before clicking. That is why Shopping traffic tends to convert differently than
Search.
How Google Shopping works
With Search ads you bid on keywords. Shopping does not work that way. Your ads are built from a product feed
you upload to Google Merchant Center, a file that lists every product with its price, image, availability
and a few dozen other fields.
Every time somebody searches, Google runs a fast auction between all the sellers with a matching product and
picks who gets shown. Your feed decides whether you are even in the running, and for which searches. Get it
wrong and you are not losing the auction. You are not in it.
If you want the auction mechanics behind Search ads too, bidding, Ad Rank and Quality Score, start with
how Google Ads work.
The three tiers of feed attributes
Not every field carries the same weight. They fall into three tiers.
Blocks approval
Blocks approval entirely.
Title, description, link, image, price, availability, brand, condition. Nine fields. Miss one, or get
one wrong, and the product simply does not show.
Auction
Decides your place in the auction.
GTIN and barcodes, product categories, variant linking (same shirt, different colours or sizes). These
tell Google exactly what you sell, so you show up on the right searches instead of any search.
Difference
Separates you from competitors in the same tier.
Custom labels for margin and season segmentation, sale price, bullet-point highlights. This is where you
pull ahead of the sellers who stopped after tier one.
For a deeper look at writing titles that perform, and the image rules that decide whether a product
serves at all, see
this breakdown of product listing ads.
If you want to work through all of it in order rather than guessing, I keep the full
checklist of every setup step in one place, 97
items, the same sequence I run on a new account.
Where to focus depending on your volume
The right move depends almost entirely on how many orders a day you already get.
Under 30 sales / day
Four campaigns. MaxClicks on everything.
Brand Search10%MaxClicks
Brand Shopping10%MaxClicks
Non-Brand Search30%MaxClicks + cap
Non-Brand Shopping50%MaxClicks
At this volume there is no conversion history yet, and Target ROAS needs history before it works.
MaxClicks simply means Google spends the budget to get as many clicks as possible. It is not the
cautious option. At this volume it is the only correct one. No Performance Max yet.
30 to 100 sales / day
Target ROAS arrives. PMax joins as a test.
Brand Search10%Manual CPC
Brand Shopping10%Target ROAS
Non-Brand Search25%Target ROAS
Non-Brand Shopping25%Target ROAS
PMax (parallel test)30%Target ROAS
By now there is enough conversion history for Target ROAS, which means you tell Google the return you
need and it bids toward it. Performance Max gets added as a parallel test, with brand exclusions in
place from day one. Standard Shopping keeps running. This is an addition, not a swap.
100+ sales / day
Segment by margin. Every product earns its budget.
Brand Search5%Manual CPC
Brand Shopping5%Target ROAS
Non-Brand Search10%Target ROAS
Non-Brand Shopping10%Target ROAS
PMax Heroes40%Target ROAS
PMax Zombies20%Target ROAS
PMax Villains5%Target ROAS
Demand Gen5%MaxClicks
Products get split into their own campaigns: Heroes (the winners), Zombies (the ones that coast) and
Villains (the ones that spend without ever paying back). No more budget going to campaigns just because
they are running.
CHECK IT YOURSELF
Before you launch a new Shopping campaign
☐Feed is live and approved in Merchant Center with zero disapprovals
☐Brand campaign is separated from non-brand
☐Target ROAS is based on your actual breakeven math, not a guess
☐Negative keywords are in place before adding PMax alongside Standard Shopping
Six real accounts, six real screenshots
Here's what goes wrong when none of the above gets done. Six real accounts, six real screenshots,
numbers from real (anonymized) clients, so you know exactly what to avoid.
GMC recovery, sporting goods
Feed issues nobody diagnosed for months.
After the fixes: €873,000 in revenue and 4.32x
ROAS on 202,000 EUR of spend. Nothing
clever was added. Broken things were repaired.
Review sync
1,119 reviews on the site. 193 in Merchant Center.
A broken update cycle was quietly suppressing a ranking signal nobody thought to check. The fix was
trivial once found. Nobody looked, because everything appeared normal.
Misrepresentation, multiple causes
No single cause, just accumulated small errors.
A recurring suspension flag traced back to several small mismatches at once: a wrong email address in
the policy pages, an address that did not match the site, contact details that differed between pages.
Each one harmless alone. Together, a suspension that kept coming back.
Product ratings never activated
The stars were never switched on.
The client assumed star ratings were showing on their Shopping ads. The Product Ratings program had
never been submitted. Competitors had stars, they did not, and it cost them click-through every single
day without anyone noticing.
Landing page not working, 329 products
The site worked fine for humans.
Google flagged 329 products as linking to a broken page. The server was auto-blocking Google's crawler
as a suspected attack, so Google saw 404s and shut off half the catalogue. From a browser, everything
loaded perfectly. That is why nobody caught it.
Mismatched product price
Best sellers falling quietly out of the auction.
The feed price and the site price disagreed, usually because feed updates lag behind site changes or
sales are not synced. Google reads that as deceiving the buyer and disapproves the product. The client
thought campaigns had "slowed down."
Google increasingly uses these same attributes for AI-driven shopping recommendations. A feed that is
"good enough" today is either the entry ticket for those recommendations tomorrow, or it is not.
THE PART EVERYONE MISSES
The account almost never starts with the campaign. It starts with whether Google trusts the account and
the feed enough to show the product at all. People optimize titles and images before they even know
whether Google trusts them as a business.
Reading about this is one thing. Running it is another. From here there are two honest paths. You do it
yourself, with the checklist right below. Or you have someone else go through the account and the feed and
hand you the findings in writing, which is what a
written audit is.
JUST GETTING STARTED?
Don't repeat the six mistakes above. Work from a checklist instead.
97 items, the exact sequence I run on every new account, feed setup through bid strategy. One-time,
lifetime access.
Senior Google Ads operator with 8+ years of experience, spent the last years almost entirely inside DTC
eCommerce accounts. Small number of accounts, no juniors, no handoffs.
