Google Ads
for online stores.

Shopping ads have no keywords. Google reads your product feed and decides which searches each product matches. So the feed does the job keywords do in a search campaign, and a vague feed shows for vague searches.

Titles matter most. Google says shoppers usually notice only the first 70 or fewer characters of a title, out of 150 allowed, so put the words people search first. 'Linen Sheet Set Queen White, Stonewashed French Flax' beats 'The Coastal Collection, Queen'.

Prices must match the product page, and in Australia the price should include GST. A mismatch gets products disapproved, often right when a sale starts.

• Most-searched words first in every title: product type, then brand, size, colour, material
• A GTIN (barcode number) for every product that has one
• Clean images: the product on a plain background, no text or badges
• Sale prices in the sale price field, not the title
• Shipping costs and returns set up in Merchant Center

Standard Shopping shows your products in Shopping results only, with the most control: bids by product group, a full search terms report and negative keywords. Performance Max uses the same feed but also shows across YouTube, Display, Gmail, Discover and Maps, with Google deciding where the money goes. During 2025 it gained a search terms report and campaign-level negative keywords, so the gap is smaller than it was, but Standard Shopping still gives finer control.

Until late 2024, Performance Max won whenever both campaigns covered the same product. Google changed that in October 2024: now the campaign with the higher Ad Rank serves. Running both on the same products just makes them compete, so split products between them instead.

Answer the questions below for a starting set-up.

ROAS (return on ad spend) is revenue divided by ad cost. It ignores what the products cost you. A 400% ROAS on a product with a 20% margin loses money on every sale, before shipping and returns even come out.

Work out break-even first: 1 divided by your margin. At a 40% margin, break-even ROAS is 2.5, so a target of 2.5 only covers the ads. The e-commerce hub has a calculator for it, with shipping and returns included.

People who already know you search your store name, and Google will happily charge you for those clicks and count the sale. It makes any campaign that includes brand searches look better than it is.

Report brand and non-brand results separately, and if you can, new and returning customers. Then you can see what the ads found, not just what they touched. Cause testing goes a step further and measures what would have happened without the ads.

Click Frenzy, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas cut-off dates, Boxing Day and the end of financial year all change how people search and how much clicks cost. Automated bidding learns from the past, so tell it what's coming: raise targets before the peak, not during.

Get the feed ready a fortnight early. Sale prices, stock levels and shipping cut-offs that are wrong in peak week cost the most. The hub's retail calendar has the dates.