In short: in Shopping you don't choose keywords: Google decides when to show your product by reading your feed. That makes the feed (titles, images, prices, availability) the main lever, and Merchant Center the piece you must keep healthy before spending a single euro.
If you sell physical products online, Shopping is probably your most important campaign: those listings with a photo, a price and a shop name that appear above the search results and in the Shopping tab. It works on a different logic from everything before it: there are no keywords. Google decides when to show each product by reading your catalogue.
What do you need to run Shopping?
- Google Merchant Center is a separate (free) tool where you upload your catalogue and Google reviews it: data, policies, prices matching the website. It links to Google Ads.
- The feed is the catalogue itself: a file (or a direct connection from Shopify, WooCommerce, PrestaShop...) with one row per product and its attributes.
The minimum attributes, and the ones that really decide when you show:
| Attribute | What it is | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
id, link, image_link |
Identifier, URL, photo | Compulsory; the photo does the selling |
title |
Product title | This is your "keyword": Google matches searches against titles |
description |
Description | Second source of matching |
price, availability |
Price and stock | They must match the website or Google disapproves the product |
brand, gtin, mpn |
Brand and codes | They identify the product; without a GTIN you lose visibility |
google_product_category, product_type |
Categories | Classification and campaign organisation |
custom_label_0..4 |
Your own labels | For grouping by margin, season, best-sellers |
A title like "Trainer model X" will not show for «blue women's running shoes»; "Women's Running Shoes Brand X Blue Size 38" will. Shopping work is, to a large extent, feed work.
How is a Shopping campaign organised?
In a standard Shopping campaign you organise the catalogue into product groups (by category, brand, custom label...) and give each group a bid (manual or automated). That way you can bid more for what has the best margin or stock, and exclude what you do not want to advertise.
Where Search has negatives, so does Shopping: negative keywords work the same way and are the only way to control which searches you do not want to show for (you cannot choose the positive ones).
Standard Shopping or Performance Max?
Since 2022 the old "Smart Shopping" has been part of Performance Max (next lesson): the same feed, but Google decides bids and products and also shows on Display, YouTube, Gmail... The summary for beginners:
- Standard: control by product group, clear reports, Shopping only. Ideal for learning and for catalogues with very different margins.
- PMax with a feed: more reach and automation, less control and less visibility. For when your value measurement is clean and the feed is good.
Which mistakes are made when starting Shopping?
- A poor feed: short titles, no brand, no GTIN, bad photos. You fix it in the feed, not in the campaign.
- Disapproved products in Merchant Center that nobody looks at (a price that does not match, a policy issue, an image with text). Check the Merchant Center diagnostics every week.
- The whole catalogue in a single group with the same bid: the cheap, low-margin product eats the budget. Group by margin using custom labels.
- No negatives: Shopping shows for irrelevant searches too. Same search terms routine as in Search.
- Measuring revenue without margin: a ROAS of 4 on a 20% margin is a loss. Shopping demands that you know each product's margin.
💡 Ninja trick: Shopping is managed product by product, and a catalogue of 3,000 SKUs cannot be reviewed by hand. Our Shopping Ninja analyses every product (spend, real sales, margin, POAS), suggests what to exclude, what to add as a negative and which titles to improve in the feed, and carries it out from a checkbox. The deep Shopping and feeds module is at Intermediate level.
What you should remember
- Shopping = the feed, not keywords: the product title is your keyword.
- Merchant Center reviews and approves the catalogue; watch its diagnostics.
- Organise by product groups (margin, brand); negatives to control searches.
- Standard to learn and control; PMax when measurement and feed are clean.
- A ROAS without margin tells you nothing.