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Most ecommerce Google Ads accounts are run on Shopping and Performance Max alone, with a feed nobody owns and a PMax campaign nobody understands. We run the full funnel: Shopping, PMax, non-brand Search to product and category landing pages, brand protection, Display, remarketing, YouTube where it earns its keep. All measured per Rand spent, with margin context, not just ROAS.
What it unlocks
Built for Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, and custom-built stores that have outgrown Shopping-only campaigns and want senior eyes on feed, structure, tracking, and landing pages.
Capabilities
Engagement rhythm
Free audit
Feed and tracking foundations
Test, scale, prune
Quarterly strategic review
What we do
Merchant Centre feed audited, taxonomy aligned, disapprovals cleared, GTINs and brand attributes populated. PMax with deliberate asset groups and audience signals, not as a black-box autopilot. Performance Max often hides which audience or asset group is doing the work; we surface it and budget accordingly.
Non-brand Search targeted at product and collection landing pages, not the homepage. Brand campaigns to stop competitors poaching trademarked traffic. The Search side often gets ignored for ecommerce accounts because Shopping does the visible heavy lifting, but Search captures intent Shopping can't, and brand protection is non-negotiable once a competitor outbids you on your own name.
Remarketing segmented by cart abandonment, product view, category browse, and past-purchase recency, not 'all visitors last 30 days' with the same banner on repeat. Customer Match for VIP and lapsed-buyer segments fed back in from your CRM or Shopify customer list. Display tested as a top-of-funnel discovery channel for new-to-brand audiences, killed if it does not pay back.
Placement-led video campaigns built around product demos, founder stories, and use-case content. Optimised to view-through conversions and assisted revenue, not raw view counts. YouTube where it earns its keep, off where it does not. Most accounts under R150k monthly media should not be running YouTube; we will be honest about that.
Ecommerce data layer wired up cleanly. Enhanced Conversions with hashed customer data passed back to Google. Server-side GTM where it earns its keep. Offline import for refunds and high-LTV repeat purchase events. The numbers in Google Ads need to reconcile with the numbers in your Shopify or WooCommerce admin, or every other decision is built on bad data.
Most ecommerce accounts leak in the PDP, not the ad. We test PDP variants, collection layouts, and dedicated paid-traffic landing pages versus your live PDPs. The ad and the page are one experience. A R30 click that lands on a slow PDP, vague hero, or thin product description is the same as a R30 click no one made.
How an engagement runs
Full review of Merchant Centre feed, Shopping and PMax structure, Search and brand setup, GA4 ecommerce events, attribution, and landing pages. We tell you what's leaking spend, what's missing, and whether Google Ads is even the right next channel for your store. No commitment past the call.
Merchant Centre feed cleaned (disapprovals, missing attributes, taxonomy, image quality). Enhanced Conversions deployed. GA4 ecommerce data layer audited. Account restructured around your actual catalogue and margin tiers. Brand protection campaign launched if you have not got one. Baseline reporting tied to revenue and margin context.
Controlled tests across PDP variants, ad copy, audience signals, and PMax asset groups. Winners scale into dedicated structures. Losers come out fast. Weekly waste sweeps on Search queries. Monthly experiment cadence on Shopping feed optimisation (custom labels, exclusion rules, product groupings).
Every 90 days: which categories pay back, where PMax has drifted, which products are leaking margin, where the next quarter's spend should sit. Real strategy from a real human, not a templated deck.
The lay of the land
Ecommerce accounts we inherit fall into the same three patterns. Either the entire budget is in Performance Max and the agency tells you 'PMax does it all', or the budget is split across Shopping and PMax with no Search support so the funnel only captures bottom-of-stack intent, or the account looks structurally fine but the Merchant Centre feed is full of disapprovals, missing GTINs, broken images, and category misclassifications that quietly cap your reach.
Feed work is the first 30 days. PMax cleanup and proper asset groups are the next 30. Search and brand protection get rebuilt in parallel. PDP and collection CRO starts in month two and runs continuously. None of this is glamorous, but it is where the lift comes from. Most accounts find 20 to 40 percent recoverable spend in the first quarter, before we even think about scaling.
We optimise for margin context, not gross ROAS. A 5.0 ROAS on low-margin clearance product is worse than a 3.5 ROAS on full-margin core range. We bid accordingly, we structure custom labels accordingly, and we report accordingly. If your accountant cares about gross profit and your ROAS report does not, we have a problem we can fix.
FAQ
The mechanics are the same; the focus is ecommerce-specific. Merchant Centre feed work, Shopping and PMax structure, ecommerce data layer in GA4, PDP CRO, margin-aware reporting. If you also run service or B2B alongside an ecommerce arm, the main Google Ads page is the better fit. If you are pure ecommerce, this is the right page.
Around R20,000 per month in media for ecommerce. Below that, PMax and Smart Bidding cannot exit learning consistently, Shopping does not have enough impression share to compound, and you would see better returns from organic SEO or one tightly scoped Meta campaign first. Above R20k, the work starts to compound.
Maybe. The dedicated Google Ads for Shopify page covers Shopify-specific integrations (Shopify Google Ads channel, native Merchant Centre app, customer-list sync). If you want Shopify-native depth, start there. If you run Shopify alongside another platform or you want broader ecommerce coverage, this page is fine.
Run on our Facebook Ads Management service in parallel, with shared conversion definitions and shared audience strategy. Most ecommerce accounts in the R30k-R150k monthly media bracket benefit from running both, with Google capturing demand and Meta creating it. The two services coordinate by default if you take both.
Disapprovals get triaged in week 1. Critical disapprovals (whole-account suspension risk) get same-day attention. Routine attribute fixes (missing GTINs, taxonomy gaps, image issues) get worked through in weeks 1 to 3 as part of foundations. Feed work is a continuous discipline, not a one-time fix; we do a weekly sweep ongoing.
We share audience definitions with Klaviyo, Mailchimp, or your platform of choice so Customer Match audiences (VIPs, lapsed buyers, high-LTV segments) stay in sync with your email lifecycle. Actual email and SMS execution is not part of this service; if you want lifecycle email run as well, see our digital marketing agency service.
Margin where you can give us margin data per product or per category. Custom labels in the feed get used to split high-margin and low-margin product groups so we can bid accordingly. Where margin data is not available we run blended ROAS as a proxy with target adjustments for known margin variance. ROAS alone hides where the profit is.