E-commerce Growth

Merchant Center is where Shopping quietly breaks

Google Shopping and Performance Max do not really run on your campaigns. They run on your product feed, served through Google Merchant Center — and a campaign can be built perfectly and still fail because the feed underneath it is wrong. Feed optimisation is the least visible work in e-commerce paid media and routinely the highest-return.

What I check, roughly in this order:

• Disapprovals and warnings. Items rejected on policy, missing GTINs, price or availability mismatches between the feed and the landing page. Disapproved products do not advertise at all, and stores often carry hundreds without knowing it.
• Title structure. The highest-leverage field in the feed. Titles need the words people actually search — brand, product type, the attribute that matters in that category — near the front, because that is what Shopping matches against.
• Attribute completeness. Product type, Google product category, brand, condition, colour, size, material. Sparse attributes mean the algorithm cannot tell your products apart, so it shows the wrong ones.
• Supplemental feeds. The practical way to add margin bands, custom labels or corrected titles without waiting on a platform export or a developer.
• Inventory and availability. Stock states syncing accurately, so budget stops flowing to items nobody can actually buy.
• Free listings and the Shopping tab. The same feed earns unpaid placement. A clean feed picks that up for nothing; most stores never claim it.

None of it is glamorous and all of it compounds, because the feed decides which of your products get shown in the first place. It is usually where I find the largest gap between what a store is paying for and what it is getting.

The numbers I manage against

Platform ROAS is a steering signal inside a channel, not a measure of the business. These are the four figures I actually report on and optimise toward, because they are the ones that decide whether a month was worth having.

• Contribution margin after ad spend — the number that decides whether growth is worth having
• Break-even ROAS by margin band — calculated, not guessed at
• New customer acquisition cost — separated from repeat revenue
• Blended ROAS vs platform-reported ROAS — the gap between them is usually the most interesting number in the account

Who I work with

Direct-to-consumer brands on Shopify and WooCommerce, typically in apparel, home and lifestyle, spending enough that segmenting the catalogue properly changes the outcome. Recent work includes premium swimwear and resort wear, made-to-measure blinds and home furnishings, and custom home decor — see the case studies.

Which platforms do you work with?

Shopify and Shopify Plus most often, WooCommerce regularly, and Magento or Adobe Commerce where the client already runs it. The feed and campaign work is broadly platform-agnostic; the tracking implementation is not.

Is Performance Max worth running?

Usually yes, but rarely on its own and never without controls. Left unmanaged it absorbs your brand traffic and reports it as new revenue. With a proper brand exclusion list, sensible asset groups and clean product segmentation it does real work — the problem is almost always the setup, not the campaign type.