Onboarding guide for Shopping ads

Shopping ads display a photo of your product, plus a title, price, store name, and more. These ads give a strong sense of the product you're selling before users click the ad, which gives you more qualified leads.

Learn more About Shopping ads.

Prepare your Shopping ads for success

To set up your Shopping ads, you’ll need to:

Add your products to Google Merchant Center so that they can appear organically across Google. When you're ready, you can promote your products to reach more customers and drive sales. Learn how to get started with Merchant Center.
Create a campaign in Google Ads to advertise your added products. Learn more from Your guide to Google Ads.
Link your Google Ads account to Merchant Center.

By using Google Merchant Center and Google Ads together, you’ll be able to promote your products by providing customers detailed information about what you're selling before they even click your ad, reach a wider audience of potential customers, and track the performance of your products over time by using retail-centric reporting tools.

This infographic is a guide through the steps to set up your Shopping ads.

The steps are: create Merchant Center account, verify your store's website, upload product data, create Google Ads account, link Merchant Center to Google Ads, set up conversion tracking, create a campaign, and manage and optimize campaign.

Note:

If you already use Google Merchant Center but are not yet familiar with Google Ads, it’s best to create your campaign in Merchant Center instead.
In countries that participate in the Comparison Shopping Service (CSS) program, you can participate in Shopping ads through one or several CSSs of your choice. Some CSSs manage your product data and campaigns on your behalf, while others provide tools that allow you to manage your setup yourself. Learn more About advertising with Comparison Shopping Services.

Set up your Shopping ads

Shopping ads can be served by both Performance Max and Shopping campaigns. Performance Max campaigns are the best way to maximize your online sales as they reach a wider audience by serving your products across all Google Ads inventory from a single campaign.

Learn more about the differences between Performance Max and Standard Shopping campaigns, how to create a Performance Max campaign, and how to create a Standard Shopping campaign.

Consider following the tips below while setting up your Shopping ads for the best results:

Tips for setup

Review the Shopping ads requirements before you create your campaign. If you have any issues, refer to Policy Issues.
Set up conversion tracking for your website. If conversion tracking is not active, Google Ads may limit your campaign spend. If you run into issues, refer to this article for help.

Tip: If you are an advanced advertiser, consider setting up conversions with cart data, which is an extension to conversion tracking on your website. You can provide the details of the products that are sold for each transaction using this feature. By providing this additional information, you can understand your ads’ performance and drive further optimizations.

Set up your data segments to re-engage with your customers by adding your website and app visitors. You can also use dynamic remarketing to show ads to your past site visitors and customize those ads based on the section of your site that people visited the most.

Note: After you’ve created your campaign, it takes 1 to 2 days for newly created campaigns to be reviewed to ensure that they meet all policy requirements.

Shopping ads measurement

Monitor your ad performance

Measuring the success of a campaign is essential to ensure that your marketing efforts are effective and that you are getting a return on your investment. There are many ways to measure the result of your campaigns. If you have conversions with cart data set up, you can review reports to understand the revenue and profit generated by your campaigns. Alternatively, if you have conversion tracking, here are metrics to review success.

Learn more about how to Monitor and optimize your Shopping campaigns.

Note: Your campaign may require up to 2 weeks to learn. Campaign performance may fluctuate during this time due to the learning period, as your bid strategy is still learning. Learn more about Duration of the learning period for campaigns and what affects it.

Shopping Ads troubleshooting

Why your products may not be showing on Google

There might be a few reasons why your products might not be shown on Google. Check your campaign using how to fix Google Ads Performance Max campaign not running or low traffic or how to fix Google Ads Shopping campaign not running or low traffic. To identify what's stopping your products from showing, visit the product diagnostics page in Google Ads. Learn more About product diagnostics.

Frequently asked questions

Google Ads setup

Can I simultaneously run Standard Shopping campaigns and Performance Max campaigns for the same products?

It’s possible to have both a Standard Shopping campaign as well as a Performance Max campaign targeting the same products. However, if both campaigns are targeting the same products, as well as same locations, languages, hours of the day and other overlapping targeting settings, then Performance Max will always take precedence over the Standard Shopping campaign. This means that only Performance Max ads will show until the campaign’s budget is fully exhausted for the day. But, if the bid target of your Performance Max campaign is set too high, conversions may not be found for them, and in this case, your Standard Shopping campaign would serve instead.

If you’d like to compare how a Standard Shopping campaign performs against a Performance Max campaign for the same set of products, use our A/B experiments tool. Learn how to Set up Performance Max experiments in the Experiments page.

How do I add negative keywords to my campaigns?

Negative keywords allow you to opt out of showing your ads alongside content that may not be appropriate for your brand or serve your advertising goals. It’s important to note that negative keywords aren’t available at campaign-level for Performance Max campaigns. However, you can create account-level negative keywords for Performance Max campaigns. For Standard Shopping campaigns, you can create campaign-level negative keywords by referring to this article.

How do I create ads for specific regions or countries?

For instruction on how to create regions in Google Merchant Center and target Shopping ads to specific geographical locations, refer to this article.

What is the waiting period after linking a Merchant Center account with a Google Ads account?

There’s no waiting period after linking a Google Ads account with a Merchant Center account. You can start using your Google Ads account immediately after linking the 2 accounts. However, it may take some time for your products to show up in your Google Ads account. This is because Google Ads needs to crawl your Merchant Center account and index your products. The crawl and indexing process can take a few hours or even a few days.

Optimization

Why do changes in budget, targeting, or bid strategy affect the performance of my campaign?

Campaigns’ performance can fluctuate for many reasons. You can use Performance Max campaign performance fluctuations and Standard Shopping campaign performance fluctuations to track and understand changes. Note that frequent changes to your Google Ads account can make it difficult to track the performance of your campaigns.

If you need to make changes to your account, it's best to make them gradually and in small increments. This’ll give Google Ads time to adjust your bids and collect data, and it’ll make it easier to troubleshoot problems if they occur. Learn more about Duration of the learning period for campaigns and what affects it.

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