Merchant Center & Feed Rebuild
Disapprovals cleared at source, GTIN, MPN and attribute gaps closed, and titles rewritten to lead with searched terms. Custom labels for margin, stock cover and seasonality.
Amsterdam
Google Ads Management in Amsterdam
Shopping, Performance Max and Search for Amsterdam brands, run from the feed outward and read one market at a time.
Delivered remotely for brands across Amsterdam and Netherlands.
Grow · Amsterdam
Why Amsterdam brands come to us for this
- Separate Merchant Center feeds per market, with Dutch and German titles written natively rather than machine-translated
- Metric dimensions, fitment and compatibility written into feed titles for bike parts, interiors and anything sold by measurement
- Brand and non-brand split per country, so strong Dutch branded search stops hiding what German non-brand actually costs
- Consent Mode v2 verified before performance is judged, since EEA consent gaps degrade conversion signal and remarketing
- Comparison Shopping Service options assessed on the numbers, a lever that only exists in the European Shopping auction
Google is demand capture. The Dutch buyer typing a product name into google.nl has already decided what they want, and the only open question is who supplies it. That turns the account into a distribution problem, and for a Shopify store distribution is decided inside Merchant Center, not the campaign builder. In a cross-border account it runs through several Merchant Center feeds, one per market, each of which can fail in its own quiet way.
So the work starts in the feed and it starts in the right language. A Dutch feed with English product titles is eligible for the wrong queries and invisible to the right ones, because Shopping never sees your keywords, only your attributes. Titles rewritten to lead with the words a Dutch buyer types, metric dimensions in the title where the category demands it, identifier gaps closed on GTIN and MPN, and product types and custom labels shaped around margin and weeks of cover. Then the German feed as a genuinely separate artefact, not a machine translation of the Dutch one, because a mistranslated attribute is a disapproval and a mistranslated title is wasted spend.
Structure comes next. Brand pulled apart from non-brand so neither can subsidise the other, which matters more for a brand with a strong home market than almost anywhere: your Dutch branded ROAS will carry the whole account and hide the fact that German non-brand is losing money. Campaigns segmented by market so budget cannot drift across borders on its own. Shopping and Performance Max carrying the catalogue with asset groups split by margin band. Search covering the questions a product feed simply cannot answer. Bids move last of all, and every target is derived from contribution margin per product group, after returns, which in apparel is the difference between a profitable account and a busy one.
Local context
One feed per market, and a comparison-shopping layer that only exists in Europe
Two structural things make a Dutch Google account different from a US one. The first is the European comparison-shopping arrangement: because of the EU ruling, Shopping ads in Europe are served through Comparison Shopping Services, and a merchant can run through Google's own CSS or through a third-party partner, which changes the cost basis of Shopping clicks. It is not free money and it is not right for every account, but it is a lever that exists here and does not exist in the United States, and any Dutch account of size should have had the conversation. The second is consent. Consent Mode v2 is required for ad personalisation and remarketing signals in the EEA, so a badly implemented banner does not just cost you analytics, it degrades conversion measurement and audience building in the ads account itself. We check the consent implementation before we judge the account's numbers, because half the underperforming European accounts we audit are not underperforming, they are under-measured.
Scope
What Google Ads includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Amsterdam brand’s realities.
Full service detailBrand, Non-Brand & Conquesting
Branded demand isolated into its own campaign, budget and target so non-brand performance becomes visible. Competitor conquesting runs as a separate line, judged separately.
Shopping & Performance Max Structure
Asset groups split by margin band and product type instead of one catch-all, with listing-group bids, product exclusions and brand-term controls applied wherever PMax still allows them.
Query Mining & Negative Hygiene
A weekly pass over search terms and PMax category reports, with a maintained shared negative library so budget stops leaking into research, DIY and job-seeker queries.
Promotions & Merchant Programs
Merchant promotions, sale price annotations, shipping and returns policy setup, product ratings, and local inventory ads where you have stores worth feeding.
tROAS Bidding to Contribution Margin
Targets set from margin per product group rather than a platform default, moved in controlled increments, with a written reason attached to every bid and budget change.
Scoped and quoted for your Amsterdam store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Amsterdam engagement starts with a fixed statement of work — named deliverables, named dates, one number — written after we have looked at your store, not before. If a smaller first step would serve you better, we will say so.
Get this scopedHow it runs
From kickoff to results
Feed & Account Audit
Merchant Center diagnostics, attribute coverage, campaign overlap and wasted spend scored against ninety days of search terms. You get the findings whether you hire us or not.
Fix the Feed
Titles, attributes, product types and custom labels rebuilt before any campaign work. A perfectly structured account on a bad feed still shows the wrong products to the wrong queries.
Restructure
Brand, non-brand, Shopping, PMax and Search rebuilt with hard budget boundaries and a shared negative library, so each line answers a different commercial question.
Bid to Margin
tROAS targets derived from contribution margin by product group and applied gradually, so the account keeps its learning instead of resetting it every Monday.
Mine & Expand
Weekly query mining, monthly feed reviews, then expansion into the categories the search data says you can profitably win. Nothing scales before the query set is clean.
Proof
Google Ads results
Anonymised under NDA. Figures pulled from the client’s own analytics.
Performance Apparel (DTC)
~$6M/yr DTC, 900+ SKUs across size and colour variants, US · Shopify Plus
Returns ran at 31% and refund cost consumed the entire paid media margin. One size chart image served 40 different fits, and 62% of add-to-carts started on a collection page that never showed variant availability. The named constraint: no new product photography budget, so every fix had to come out of the existing asset library and the review corpus.
+29%sitewide conversion rate1.71% to 2.21%, five-month average
+14%average order value$84 to $96 once the threshold bar and cross-sell shipped
31% → 22%return ratenine-point drop, roughly $310k/yr in recovered margin
1.9x → 2.4xblended MERwith paid spend held flat throughout
Consumer Electronics & Accessories
~$9M/yr, 210 SKUs, US + AU · Shopify Plus (migrated from BigCommerce)
Meta ROAS had slid from 3.6x to 1.9x in a year and the team had spent twelve months buying new creative to fix it. The real cause was measurement: the BigCommerce checkout dropped 22% of purchase events and the Conversions API had never been installed, so both ad platforms were optimising on incomplete data. The named constraint: peak season was 14 weeks out, and the replatform had to be live and stable well before Black Friday traffic arrived.
1.9x → 3.4xMeta ROAS, once the 22% event gap closed60 days after server-side tracking went live, spend up 18%. Most of that is signal we recovered, not performance we invented — the honest number is the blended CAC below, which is measured against Shopify orders
-32%customer acquisition cost$44 to $30 blended across Meta and Google
4.1s → 1.7smobile LCPdesktop went 2.9s to 1.2s over the same window
+47%peak-season revenueBlack Friday through Cyber Monday, year over year
In their words
Clients on this work
Non-brand search revenue ~2x at flat spend
“Six thousand products and a Shopping feed nobody had touched since it was first generated — a third of it was disapproved and we had no idea. They rebuilt the feed off our real product data, fixed the GTIN and size attributes, and split brand off from non-brand so I could finally see what we were actually paying to acquire. They also cut the broad 'baby clothes' terms that were eating a quarter of the budget on people who were nowhere near buying. Spend is roughly flat and non-brand search revenue has close to doubled.”
Director of OperationsKids & baby brand, ~$5M/yr · Atlanta, GA
Verified via Shopify Partner referralFAQ
Google Ads in Amsterdam — your questions
It is worth pricing rather than assuming. Running Shopping through a Comparison Shopping Service is a European-only arrangement and the economics depend on your click volume, your margins and the partner's fee structure. For accounts with meaningful Shopping spend across several EU markets it can be a real saving; for a small account it is administrative overhead for very little. We will model it against your actual numbers and tell you if the answer is no.
Split, in almost every case. Different countries have different competitive intensity, different CPCs, different payment expectations and different returns rates, and a combined campaign lets the algorithm spend your budget where conversions are cheapest rather than where they are most profitable. That usually means the Netherlands quietly absorbs the budget you meant to spend proving out Germany. Separate campaigns, separate budgets and separate targets keep the expansion decision yours.
It works if the feed carries the compatibility in structured form and in the title. For bike parts and similar fitment-driven categories, the buyer types a very specific query with a model, a standard or a measurement in it, and eligibility is decided entirely by what your attributes say. We build product types and custom labels around fitment groups, put the defining specification in the title where it belongs, and mine search terms for the exact model names people use rather than the ones on your spec sheet.
They change the target itself. A tROAS derived from gross revenue is a fiction in a category where a meaningful share of orders come back under the withdrawal right, and it is worst on the exact products that convert most easily. We build targets from contribution margin net of returns per product group, which usually means bidding harder on categories with low return rates and pulling back on the apparel lines that looked like your best performers on the platform's own reporting.
Yes, once the feed and the exclusions are right. PMax on a clean feed with margin-segmented asset groups and brand controls is the strongest Shopping vehicle Google has shipped. PMax on a neglected feed is an expensive way to sell bestsellers to people who were buying anyway.
Because Shopping never sees your keywords, only your feed. Title, product type, GTIN and attributes decide which queries you are even eligible for. We routinely find a quarter of a catalogue disapproved or serving on the wrong terms, and fixing that moves revenue before a single bid changes.
Usually yes, but as a separate campaign with its own target and its own conversation. Branded clicks are cheap and convert well, which is exactly why blending them into non-brand hides whether the rest of the account works. Where the spend is material we run a holdout to see what is genuinely incremental.
Next step
Google Ads for your Amsterdam brand.
Thirty minutes with the strategist who would actually run your account. We screen-share your store, read your data live, and tell you the three highest-value things we can see from the outside.
Shopify or Shopify Plus stores doing $150k/mo or moreFounder, CEO or eCommerce lead on the callNo deck and no pitch — we open your store instead
Prefer to write it out? [email protected] gets a real reply the same business day, Mon-Fri, 9am-6pm MT.