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Berlin

Google Ads Management in Berlin

Shopping, Performance Max and Search built around a Merchant Center feed that satisfies German requirements before a single bid is touched.

Delivered remotely for brands across Berlin and Germany.

Grow · Berlin

Why Berlin brands come to us for this

  • Unit-price attributes populated in the feed for consumables, so coffee, food and cosmetics products stay eligible instead of silently dropping
  • EU energy-labelling data supplied where the category requires it, before a disapproval takes the range offline
  • Comparison Shopping Service arrangement reviewed as a deliberate cost decision, not inherited from whoever set the account up
  • Brand isolated from non-brand, which matters more when the brand name is also an ordinary German noun
  • Separate campaigns and feeds for the Swiss franc market, so CHF margins are never bid against a euro target

The Berlin buyer has already decided they want a 1000-watt cargo bike or a specific desktop synth; the only question left is who supplies it. On Shopify that contest is decided in Merchant Center, not in the campaign builder, and German feeds carry requirements that an American account never encounters. Unit-price attributes are expected wherever the price-indication rules apply, which covers most food, drink and cosmetics catalogues. Energy-labelling data is required for the electronics categories that fall under EU rules. Missing either does not produce an error your team notices — it produces products that quietly stop serving.

Structure comes second and matters more than people think, because German brand names are frequently ordinary German words. If your brand term overlaps a category noun, brand and non-brand blended into one campaign will produce an excellent ROAS that tells you nothing about whether the account works. We isolate branded demand into its own campaign with its own target, so non-brand performance becomes a number you can act on rather than an average hiding behind it.

Then the auction context. In German categories the Shopping results are frequently occupied by Amazon.de, price-comparison portals and large domestic retailers with a cost base you cannot match. The response is not a higher bid; it is a feed segmented by margin and stock cover, PMax asset groups split accordingly, and query mining aggressive enough to stop budget draining into research and comparison traffic that was never going to buy from a brand.

Feed firstattribute and disapproval work ships before any bidding change
Per-marketDE, AT and CH run as separate campaigns with their own targets
Weekly miningsearch terms and PMax category reports reviewed every week, not monthly
Local context

CSS, German feed attributes and three DACH markets in one account

Two things change materially about a Google account run out of the EEA. First, Shopping ads in Europe can be served through a Comparison Shopping Service rather than through Google Shopping directly, and which CSS your feed runs under affects what you effectively pay to appear in the same slot — it is a structural decision most Berlin accounts we audit have never consciously made. Second, the feed itself has to satisfy German and EU attribute expectations: unit pricing for consumables so a coffee or cosmetics feed is complete, energy-efficiency data where the category demands it, correct shipping and returns policy per country, and tax-inclusive pricing that matches the storefront exactly, because a mismatch between feed price and landing-page price is the single most common disapproval we clear. On top of that, the three DACH markets need separate campaigns rather than one euro-priced blur: Austria takes the euro catalogue with its own delivery reality, Switzerland needs francs, its own feed and a clear duty position, and mixing them produces bids against wildly different margins under one target. We build the account per market, per margin band, in that order.

Scope

What Google Ads includes

The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Berlin brand’s realities.

Full service detail
01

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.

02

Brand, 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.

03

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.

04

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.

05

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.

06

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 Berlin store

We do not work off a rate card. Every Berlin 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 scoped
How it runs

From kickoff to results

01

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.

02

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.

03

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.

04

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.

05

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
Engagement Conversion-led rebuild + paid mediaTimeframe 5 months

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
Engagement Paid growth audit → migration → paid media retainerTimeframe 6 months
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 referral
FAQ

Google Ads in Berlin — your questions

A Comparison Shopping Service is the intermediary your Shopping ads run through in the European Economic Area. Every EEA advertiser is using one, whether or not they chose it, and the arrangement affects the effective cost of appearing in the same Shopping slot. It is worth an explicit decision rather than a default — we review what your account is currently running under and what the alternatives would mean before recommending a change.

Unit pricing is the biggest one — consumable products without the base-measure attributes fall out of eligibility, and roasters and cosmetics brands are hit hardest. After that: price and availability mismatches between feed and landing page, missing GTINs on products that genuinely have them, and shipping and returns policies configured for Germany only while the campaign targets Austria. We audit all of them before touching campaign structure.

Only if you are prepared to accept one target across two different delivery cost structures. Austria takes the same euro catalogue, but shipping economics, competitor set and query volumes differ enough that a shared campaign lets the larger market set the bid for the smaller one. We usually start Austria as its own campaign with its own budget precisely so you can see whether it deserves more.

Carefully, and with query-level evidence rather than a keyword list. Exact-match brand campaigns plus a maintained negative library in the non-brand campaigns gets most of the way, then weekly query mining catches the overlap cases where someone typed the noun and meant the category. Where branded spend is material we also look at whether the branded clicks are genuinely incremental, because in a category where your name is also a search term, some of them are not.

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 Berlin 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.