Google Shopping Ads | Feed · Merchant Center · Performance Max
Google matches a Shopping or Performance Max ad against the data sitting in your Merchant Center feed, not a keyword list you wrote. So the feed is the targeting. We correct it first, then build the campaign structure and the bidding on top of something that can actually compete.
Feed diagnostic · Merchant Center review · yours to keep either way
Feed › Merchant Center › Eligibility › Auction › Product pageEvery stage is a place a product can quietly stop showing.
What we fix
Six areas account for most of the performance a Shopping account is leaving on the table. They are related: a title problem becomes a matching problem, a disapproval becomes a coverage problem, and an availability mismatch spends budget on a product that cannot be bought. We work through them in the order the dependencies run.
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None of this replaces having products people want, and we do not present it as one. It is what makes those products eligible, matched and correctly priced in the auction. A product that is disapproved, mistitled or out of sync with your stock levels can be the best item in your catalogue and never register. Fix the feed and the budget you already spend starts reaching the products that earn.
Why we're different
Most Shopping engagements report on the feed and manage the bids. The report is usually accurate. The feed errors then go to whoever owns the store export, get sized against product and development priorities, and wait. Meanwhile the bidding is being tuned against a catalogue where a slice of the products cannot serve at all.
We work inside a business that has been building and maintaining production eCommerce sites for over a decade, so the engineers who ship code every day are the ones correcting your feed export, rewriting your title logic and wiring your item level conversion values. Nothing is lost in a handoff, because there is no handoff between finding the problem and fixing it.
Same finding. Different ending.
Scope of work
The complete scope, grouped the way the dependencies run rather than alphabetically. Not every account needs every item, and the audit says which ones yours does.
The account layer that decides whether a product is allowed into the auction in the first place.
Getting the right values into the feed, and keeping them right without manual upkeep.
The fields a shopper actually judges, and the ones the matching engine reads first.
Deciding which campaign type carries which products, and giving each one room to be measured.
Target setting treated as a margin question with a number behind it, not a dial to nudge.
Confirming the numbers the bidding optimises against are the numbers your finance team recognises.
Tooling
Not a performance claim, just the software behind the work, so you know what is running against your account. Findings from any of these are cross-checked against your own Merchant Center diagnostics and revenue data before they reach the fix list.
Feed anatomy
This is the level the work happens at. Every row below is a reason a product either competes or sits quietly ineligible, and every one of them is checkable against your own feed this afternoon.
Eight fields. Most underperforming catalogues fail on three of them.
Shopping vs Performance Max
Performance Max did not replace Shopping, and treating it as the newer option is how accounts lose product-level visibility they were relying on. Both read the same feed. What differs is where the ads serve, how much you can see afterwards, and how much control you keep.
In practice most accounts run both, and the useful question is not which one wins but which products belong in each. Standalone Shopping is also the cleaner place to start while a feed is still being corrected, because it shows plainly which products are eligible and which are not. Whichever way it is split, the feed underneath is the same feed.
Our process
Five stages, run in that order. The order carries the work: optimising bids before the feed is corrected tunes a campaign against a catalogue that is only partly in the auction, and the numbers it produces are not the numbers you will keep.
Every item in the feed checked against Merchant Center diagnostics, every disapproval and warning quantified by how much of the catalogue it removes, and the existing campaign structure mapped against what the feed can support. Conversion tracking and revenue values are verified in the same pass, because a bidding problem is often a measurement problem wearing a different label.
Titles, categories, identifiers, images and attributes corrected at the source of the export or through feed rules, so the fix holds the next time the catalogue changes. Custom labels are set up here for the segmentation the campaigns will need in stage three, which is far cheaper than retrofitting it later.
Products allocated between standalone Shopping and Performance Max on reporting needs and margin rather than on which is newer. Listing groups are split so bidding can treat product lines differently, asset groups are written per product family, and audience signals are supplied from your own customer data instead of left at defaults.
Target ROAS set from margin, item-level conversion values passed through so bidding optimises to profit rather than to revenue, and targets moved in increments the algorithm can absorb without restarting learning. Title and image variants are tested through feed rules at catalogue scale rather than on a handful of products.
Feed health does not stay fixed. A theme update changes a title template, a supplier feed drops a GTIN column, a stock sync lags and price parity breaks over a weekend. Scheduled feed checks and alerts on disapprovals, availability and target ROAS surface it in days rather than at the next monthly review.
Want to see what a full feed audit turns up on your catalogue?
The audit and the prioritised fix list are yours to keep, whether you implement them with us, with your own team, or on your own schedule.
Track record
The team behind Wegile DGTL has worked together for over a decade, running the complete marketing engine at its parent company, a software development company, and delivering campaigns for its clients before that. The results below were earned by this team across those years, on accounts where the feed work and the campaign work were run together.
Digital Products & eCommerce · Paid Social Launch
Books sold
Time to sell out the run
A digital recipe book with hundreds of high-protein recipes built for weight-loss and GLP-1 audiences. Our team ran the paid social strategy behind the launch, testing hooks and formats against a cold audience, selling 2,000 copies in under three months.
"I've been working with them for nearly 10 years, and they've been an incredible partner every step of the way. From developing my fitness app and nonprofit app, to helping maintain and grow my website, their team has consistently delivered with professionalism and precision. They're responsive, reliable, and deeply knowledgeable, always guiding projects with care and expertise. I trust them fully and plan to continue working with them for years to come."★★★★★ 5.0 · Chris Powell, Deliciously Fit
Shopping ads questions
The questions store owners, eCommerce managers and in-house paid teams ask before handing over a Shopping account, answered plainly and in full.
Product titles, descriptions, images, categorisation and the full set of attributes in your Merchant Center feed, plus the feed rules and supplemental feeds that keep them accurate as your catalogue changes. Google matches a Shopping or Performance Max ad against the feed data itself rather than a keyword list, so the feed is the targeting layer.
Work also covers the feed fetch schedule, GTIN, MPN and brand identifiers, custom labels used for segmentation, and the availability and price values that have to agree with the product page. Those last two are where a lot of quiet budget waste lives.
A Merchant Center audit and cleanup, feed optimisation and feed rules, campaign and listing group architecture across standalone Shopping and Performance Max, asset group builds, audience signal setup, and Smart Bidding configured against ROAS targets derived from margin.
Alongside that: conversion tracking and value reporting, inventory and availability sync, and weekly management of feed health, bids and product-level performance. The reporting is at product level, because an account average tells you the campaign is fine while individual lines are losing money.
Standalone Shopping runs on the Shopping tab and Search results and reports at the product level, so you can see which items earn and which drain the budget. Performance Max takes the same feed and places it across Search, Shopping, Display, YouTube, Gmail and Discover using asset groups and audience signals, and reports in aggregate.
Performance Max did not replace Shopping. They are separate tools with different reporting and different control, and many accounts are better served running both with the catalogue split between them.
When product-level control and reporting matter more than reach, when the catalogue is small enough that automation has little to optimise against, or when margins vary enough across products that a single blended target would hide the losses inside a healthy-looking average.
It is also the cleaner starting point while a feed is still being corrected, because it shows plainly which products are eligible and earning. And if a Performance Max campaign is absorbing brand traffic that would have converted anyway, splitting it out is usually the fastest way to find out what the campaign is genuinely contributing.
An asset group is the set of images, videos, logos, headlines and descriptions Performance Max combines to build ads across every placement it serves. Because the campaign chooses the combination, the ceiling is set by what you supply.
Thin or generic asset groups are one of the most common reasons a Performance Max campaign underperforms, and a single asset group covering an entire catalogue prevents the campaign from matching creative to product type. Listing groups then split the feed so each asset group serves the products it was actually written for.
The common causes are missing or invalid GTIN, MPN or brand values, a price or availability value that disagrees with the product page, missing shipping or tax configuration, image quality and promotional overlay rules, and policy restrictions on specific categories.
Most are corrected in the feed or through feed rules and clear on the next fetch, typically within a day. Account level and policy issues take longer because they need review. A disapproved product is not bidding at all, which is why this is the first thing worth checking in any underperforming account.
Shopping campaigns usually show usable signal within two to three weeks, because the feed is already the targeting and there is little for the campaign to learn. Performance Max needs more conversion data before its automation settles, generally four to six weeks of consistent spend, and it should not be judged in the first fortnight.
Feed corrections behave differently again and often show within days, since a product that was disapproved or ineligible starts competing as soon as the next fetch clears it.
Yes, and access is set up in your accounts rather than ours, so ownership stays with you. We need Merchant Center and Google Ads access to audit the feed and campaign structure, analytics access to verify conversion and revenue values, and store or feed app access wherever the feed is generated.
Feed changes are made at the source or through feed rules and documented as we go, so the corrections survive after the engagement rather than living in a spreadsheet only we know how to run.
One last thing
A full pass over your Merchant Center feed and campaign structure, the findings that matter ranked against the ones that do not, and an honest view of how much of your current Shopping ceiling is feed quality rather than budget. Implement it with us, hand it to your own team, or keep it on file. The document is yours regardless.
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