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.
Boston, MA
Google Ads Management in Boston, MA
Demand capture for Boston catalogues, starting where it actually breaks: the Merchant Center feed, not the bidding.
Delivered remotely for brands across Boston and Massachusetts.
Grow · Boston
Why Boston brands come to us for this
- Supplement and consumer health disapprovals cleared at source, including claim wording carried into feed titles
- Shipping settings and transit-time limits configured by zone so perishable ads never promise an unservable lane
- Brand isolated from non-brand so campus and gifting searches stop inflating account-level ROAS
- Weekly query mining against restaurant, recipe, medical-research and campus-information searches
- Budget shaped to the August and May pulses with storm-week pauses on affected delivery zones
Overnight oysters, a magnesium supplement, a properly warm parka: the buyer has decided, and the only open question is whose listing they click. On Shopify that contest is settled in Merchant Center long before it reaches the campaign builder, and in this market the feed fails in specific, recurring ways.
Supplement and consumer health catalogues get hit hardest. Google's healthcare and misleading-claims policies will disapprove products over wording that reads as harmless on your own PDP, and because the disapproval happens quietly at item level, a brand can lose a third of its catalogue from serving without noticing until revenue dips. Perishable catalogues fail differently: shipping settings that do not reflect transit-time limits by zone will happily advertise a two-day product into a five-day lane, and price or availability mismatches on a live-inventory item cause suspensions that take days to clear. We fix both at source in the feed rather than resubmitting and hoping.
Structure comes second. Brand and non-brand get separated so the campus-adjacent and gifting searches that carry your name stop flattering the account. Shopping and Performance Max hold the catalogue, asset groups divided by margin and stock cover instead of one catch-all. Search picks up the wording no product attribute will ever match. Then weekly query mining, which in Boston earns its keep immediately: seafood accounts bleed budget into restaurant and recipe searches, supplement accounts into medical research queries, and collegiate accounts into people looking for the university itself rather than for anything purchasable.
Local context
Budget shaped to a demand curve with two spikes and a storm season
A flat monthly budget is the wrong instrument for a Boston account. Non-brand demand for anything campus-adjacent climbs steeply from the first week of August, peaks around move-in, then falls off a cliff — and holding the same daily cap through that is either leaving the cheapest volume of your year on the table or paying peak CPCs into an empty October. We front-load the pulse, pull back into the flat stretch, and run a second smaller shape around commencement. Cold-weather catalogues get their own curve, driven by the first sustained cold snap rather than by the calendar, which some years arrives in late October and some years not until December. And during named storms we pause perishable campaigns for the affected zones instead of advertising a delivery promise the carrier will not keep, which protects both the margin and the Merchant Center account.
Scope
What Google Ads includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Boston 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 Boston store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Boston 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 Boston — your questions
Usually, and usually at the wording level. Most healthcare disapprovals we inherit trace to claim language in the title or description, missing identifiers, or an ingredient flagged under Google's policy that needs different framing rather than removal. We fix it in the product data so it stays fixed, appeal only what genuinely warrants an appeal, and monitor diagnostics weekly so the next one is caught in days.
Shipping settings carry transit-time limits by zone, so lanes you cannot serve within the safe window simply stop being advertised there. Ship-day cutoffs feed into the same logic. During a nor'easter we pause the affected regions rather than the whole account, which keeps your unaffected demand running and stops the refund wave that follows an ad that outran the carrier.
Bids and budgets need to move ahead of the demand, not with it, because Smart Bidding reacts to conversion data that arrives after the fact. We raise budget caps and loosen targets in the last days of July so the campaigns have learning room when volume arrives, then tighten as the curve breaks. Restructuring the account in the middle of August is the single most expensive thing you can do to it.
If you carry stock worth showing, yes. Local inventory ads and the store pickup annotation let people searching nearby see what is actually on the shelf, which is a different and cheaper source of demand than shipped ecommerce. It needs a reliable inventory sync per location — if your in-store counts are approximate, fix that before switching it on.
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 Boston 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.