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.
Charlotte, NC
Google Ads Management in Charlotte, NC
Demand capture for Charlotte catalogues, run through the Merchant Center feed rather than the campaign builder.
Delivered remotely for brands across Charlotte and North Carolina.
Grow · Charlotte
Why Charlotte brands come to us for this
- MPN and GTIN coverage closed across aftermarket and house-brand catalogues so Shopping can match the query at all
- Off-road and competition-only items excluded from the feed by attribute, protecting the Merchant Center account
- Superseded part numbers redirected and remapped so paid clicks never land on a discontinued product page
- Freight and dimensional attributes carried into the feed for furniture, so shipping estimates match the LTL reality
- Brand held separate from non-brand, so a well-known local race shop or brewery name stops flattering the whole account
Google is where the decision has already been made. Somebody types a part number, a model, a fabric grade, a brewery's name plus 'shipping', and the only open question is who sells it to them. That makes a Charlotte account a distribution problem far more than a bidding one, and on Shopify the distribution runs through Merchant Center. Which is why we spend the first weeks inside the feed and not in the campaign builder.
In this metro the feed work has a particular shape. Aftermarket and MRO catalogues are full of manufacturer part numbers that were never mapped to the MPN attribute, GTIN gaps on house-brand items, and titles that lead with an internal SKU instead of the words a buyer types. Furniture feeds carry dimensional and freight attributes that never made it across, so shipping estimates in the listing are wrong and the click is wasted. Mill and apparel feeds have colour and size variants collapsed into one item, so Shopping shows a product that is out of stock in the size the buyer wanted. Every one of those is a disapproval, a mispriced impression or a wasted click, and none of them are fixed by changing a bid strategy.
Structure comes second. Brand separated from non-brand so a strong local name — a race shop everyone in Mooresville knows, a brewery with a decade of taproom loyalty — does not quietly subsidise the campaigns you cannot otherwise judge. Shopping and Performance Max carrying the catalogue, with product-type and custom-label segmentation driven by contribution margin and weeks of cover rather than the collection tree. Search covering the specific queries a feed cannot reach, informed by query mining rather than a keyword tool. Bids come last, once the feed and the structure are right.
Local context
Feed attributes decide what a Charlotte catalogue can even sell
Three feed problems recur across this metro and each one caps the account before spend is a factor. First, compliance flags on competition-only and off-road parts have to be carried into the feed as exclusions, because a listing that ignores a not-street-legal restriction costs you the item and can cost you the account. Second, supersession: aftermarket catalogues carry replaced part numbers that still get typed, and a feed that lists the discontinued number sends a paid click to a dead page. Third, freight. A Hickory-built sofa with no shipping attribute in the feed shows a default estimate that has nothing to do with an LTL delivery, and the buyer discovers the truth at checkout. We also watch the local demand calendar with more care than most accounts get: query volume around the aftermarket spikes into the winter build season and around race weekends at the Speedway, furnishings demand moves with the post-market delivery cycle, and holding budget flat across those swings leaves capture on the table in one month and wastes it in another.
Scope
What Google Ads includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Charlotte 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 Charlotte store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Charlotte 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 Charlotte — your questions
Not stuck, but you have to do it properly. Items you manufacture can be submitted with an accurate MPN and brand and the identifier-exists attribute set correctly, and Google will serve them. What kills these catalogues is the halfway state — some items with invented barcodes, some with blanks, brands entered inconsistently — because matching degrades across the whole feed. We normalise brand and MPN across every item before touching campaigns.
By pushing application context into the feed rather than hoping the campaign sorts it out. Titles lead with the words a buyer types, including the platform or model where it belongs; product type and custom labels group by application family so bidding can differ between a high-volume platform and a niche one; and the landing page confirms fit immediately. A generic title on a fitment part matches broadly, drives unqualified clicks and looks like a bidding problem when it is a data problem.
It does, provided you keep control of what it can spend on. We use asset groups and listing filters to hold seasonal or low-stock lines out rather than letting the campaign discover them at the worst moment, and we keep a separate structure for lines with real margin. The risk with PMax on a seasonal catalogue is not that it performs badly — it is that it performs well on the wrong thing while the reporting stays opaque.
Yes, but the restrictions have to be expressed in the account rather than in a note on your website. Alcohol advertising carries its own certification and country-level rules, shipping-eligible states are handled with geographic targeting and feed-level shipping settings, and age-gated landing pages have to be reachable by the crawler. We set that up before spend starts, because a suspension on an alcohol account is slow and unpleasant to reverse.
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 Charlotte 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.