Paid Media · Service 07
Technical SEO Audit. Google Shopping done at the feed level — where 80% of the performance lives. Crawlability, indexability, Core Web Vitals, schema, internal architecture — examined with surgical rigour, prioritised by commercial impact.
Google Shopping is won and lost in the feed.
Most retailers spend 95% of their attention on bid management
and 5% on product titles, descriptions, attributes and image quality.
The math is exactly inverted. Bid management compounds within
±15% of performance. Feed quality compounds within ±300%.
The boring work is where the money is.
Google Shopping has no headlines, no descriptions, no creative testing in the conventional sense. The campaign is the feed: product titles, attributes, images, prices, GTINs, custom labels, availability signals. Get the feed right and Smart Bidding has the inputs to perform brilliantly. Get the feed wrong and no amount of bid optimisation rescues the campaign.
Most agencies treat the feed as IT's problem and the campaign as the agency's problem. The brands that win Shopping treat them as one problem. Title optimisation, image testing, attribute completeness, custom label segmentation by margin and velocity — the unglamorous work that compounds dramatically. The campaign is downstream of feed quality.
Every audit covers four pillars. Each pillar is a deep dive — not a checklist tick.
Title structure optimisation, attribute completeness audits, image quality enforcement, GTIN strategy, feed rules for transformations. The single highest-leverage workstream in Shopping — and the one most agencies underinvest in.
Performance Max for retail, Standard Shopping for control campaigns, custom label segmentation by margin/velocity/seasonality, query-level keyword exclusions. The structure that decides whether budget goes to your highest-margin SKUs or your lowest.
Margin-weighted conversion values, profit-based smart bidding, ROAS targets calibrated by product category. The bid layer engineered for actual profit, not gross revenue — the difference between unit economics that work and those that quietly erode.
Local Inventory Ads where physical retail intersects, real-time stockout suppression, low-stock prioritisation, seasonal availability strategy. The inventory-aware execution layer that prevents wasted spend on unbuyable products.
Two-week feed audit: title quality, attribute completeness, image testing, GTIN coverage, error patterns. Most feeds we audit have 30-60% disapproval rate or quality issues invisible from Merchant Center summary view.
Build feed rules in Merchant Center, source enhancements from your CMS or PIM, implement title-template logic, custom label strategy. The feed becomes a high-quality information asset rather than a CMS export.
Restructure Shopping campaigns around custom labels (margin, velocity, seasonality), Performance Max around product profitability rather than revenue, control campaigns for query insight. Most accounts need fewer campaigns, not more.
Weekly feed audits, monthly title testing, quarterly campaign architecture review, seasonal strategy adjustments. Shopping compounds with feed-level discipline maintained over 12-24 months.
Most retailers running Google Shopping have an 80/20 distribution that's actually closer to 95/5: a small fraction of SKUs drive the overwhelming majority of spend. Those high-spend SKUs deserve individual feed attention — bespoke title optimisation, image testing, attribute enhancement. The remaining 95% of SKUs deserve template-driven feed quality at scale.
The agencies running Shopping at scale typically apply equal attention to every product or no attention to any. Neither works. Tiered feed quality — bespoke for high-spend SKUs, templated for the long tail, blocked for the unprofitable — is the structural discipline that separates Shopping programmes that compound from those that plateau.
A premium homeware retailer was running €80K monthly Shopping spend at 2.8× ROAS — the previous agency had focused entirely on bid management while ignoring the feed. We rebuilt product titles using template logic against the catalogue, added missing attributes (material, dimensions, room, style), implemented margin-weighted custom labels, and restructured Performance Max around product profitability tiers. Eight months later: 7.6× ROAS on the same monthly budget, €2.4M incremental revenue, and the inventory mix shifted toward higher-margin SKUs.
Three previous agencies had told us our Shopping ROAS was capped by category dynamics. Revolutionize spent thirty days on the feed alone — no bid changes — and the ROAS lifted by 40% before any campaign work. The lesson stayed with our team: most Shopping problems are feed problems wearing campaign clothing.
A technical audit is most powerful when followed by these complementary services.
Shopping and Search work as a coordinated programme for retailers. Search captures category-level intent; Shopping captures product-level intent. Run together, they cover the full retail buying journey.
Explore →Organic and paid retail search use the same product feed. We typically run e-commerce SEO and Google Shopping as paired programmes — same catalogue, coordinated strategy, integrated measurement.
Explore →Performance Max is the dominant Shopping campaign type for most retailers. Dedicated PMax engagements exist where the campaign type drives strategic decisions across the broader account.
Explore →Find the feed leaks
Book a 30-minute scoping call. We'll review your product feed and Merchant Center setup live, identify the feed-level leaks suppressing performance, and quote a possible engagement with no obligation.