Worked example, not a client
An online furniture shop's twelve checks before the first pound is spent on Shopping and Performance Max
A three-hundred-product furniture shop with a healthy organic trade wants Shopping ads before Christmas. Before a pound is spent we run twelve checks, each with a pass or a fail and the fix, because a Shopping campaign built on a broken feed spends its first month teaching Google the wrong catalogue. This is the checklist as it would come back for a shop like this one. The shop is a composite.
Written by Daniel Stoychev. The shop is a composite and the pass and fail results are illustrative. The twelve checks are the real pre-launch list we run on every shop account.
Worked example. The shop is invented to show the checklist in use. The checks are real and are run in this order on every e-commerce account before launch; the results shown are the ones a shop of this kind usually returns.
The twelve checks
Pass or fail, and the fix before launch
| # | Check | Result | Fix before launch |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Merchant Center feed approved, no item-level disapprovals | Fail: 41 products disapproved for missing identifiers | Add the manufacturer identifiers where they exist and mark the handmade lines as having none |
| 2 | Price and availability in the feed match the page | Fail: 18 sale prices out of date | Feed refresh set to daily, sale prices pulled from the shop not typed |
| 3 | Shipping and returns set in Merchant Center and matching the site | Pass | |
| 4 | Purchase conversion with value, firing once per order | Fail: fires on the thank-you page refresh | Transaction identifier added so an order counts once |
| 5 | Enhanced conversions on, consent mode in place | Pass | |
| 6 | Product pages usable on a phone in under three seconds | Fail on 60 pages: a 4 MB hero image | Images resized and served in a modern format |
| 7 | Product titles lead with what people search | Fail: titles lead with the brand's range names | Titles rewritten as type, material, size, colour, then the range |
| 8 | Custom labels in the feed for margin and bestseller tiers | Fail: none | Two labels added, so bids can follow margin |
| 9 | Brand exclusions for Performance Max, own brand included | Fail: not set | Set, so the brand searches stay with the cheaper Shopping campaign |
| 10 | Negative list for Shopping: free, DIY, plans, second hand, rental | Fail: none | Shared list created and applied |
| 11 | Free listings claimed in Merchant Center | Pass | |
| 12 | A returns and delivery page a buyer can find from a product page | Pass |
The split, and why Shopping first
Standard Shopping for a month before Performance Max gets a budget
Standard Shopping shows the catalogue on product searches and lets the account see every search term and set every bid, which is how the first month teaches us which product types sell from an ad. Performance Max is added in month two with the brand excluded and the bestseller label as its asset group, so it spends on the products Shopping has already proved and not on the ones it has not. A shop that starts with Performance Max alone cannot see what it bought, and a Christmas budget deserves to be seen.
What the first report will say
Four lines, nothing else
- Spend, orders and revenue from the counted purchase action, with the share of orders that were brand searches shown separately.
- The product types that sold from an ad, and the ones that did not, from the product report.
- The search terms excluded in the month, with the three most expensive named.
- What is declined: a Performance Max budget before the first month is read, broad text ads for the category names, and any bid on the competitors' brand names.
Where this leads
The pages that do this work
Tell us what you spend. We reply with a fixed fee and the first three changes.
Your monthly spend, what a lead is worth to you and the address of the page your ads land on. Daniel Stoychev replies within one working day with the tier, the fee, what he would change first, and whether your sector and area are still free.