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.
Columbus, OH
Google Ads Management in Columbus, OH
Demand capture built on a Merchant Center feed that carries size, colour and identifiers correctly before anyone touches a bid.
Delivered remotely for brands across Columbus and Ohio.
Grow · Columbus
Why Columbus brands come to us for this
- Apparel feed attributes completed and validated — age group, gender, size, size type, size system, colour, material — before any bidding change
- Titles rewritten in buyer grammar from query data, replacing internal style names that mean nothing outside your planning meeting
- Custom labels for margin band, stock cover, season and size-run completeness, so bids follow what you can actually ship
- Brand isolated from non-brand, with negatives protecting you from traffic aimed at the large retailers your name overlaps with
- Shipping speed and returns annotations configured to make central Ohio ground transit times a visible reason to click
Google is where someone who has already decided goes to choose a seller, so the account is a distribution problem and on Shopify the distribution runs through Merchant Center. For apparel and footwear that means the feed requirements are stricter than most merchants realise: age group, gender, size, size type, size system, colour and material are not optional attributes, they are the fields that decide whether your products are eligible for the surfaces that convert. Half the accounts we inherit here are running a fraction of the catalogue because a size system was never set and nobody read the diagnostics.
Titles come next, and apparel titles have a specific grammar. Buyers type brand, product type, attribute, size — so the title leads with the searched words rather than with an internal style name that means something only to your planner. We rewrite from the query data outward, close GTIN and MPN gaps, and build custom labels around the things that should actually drive bidding: margin band, stock cover, season, and whether a size run is still complete. A style whose two most popular sizes sold out last week should not be bid on like it is fully stocked.
Structure then does the boring, valuable work. Brand isolated into its own campaign and budget so it stops flattering non-brand performance — which in this city has a wrinkle worth naming, because plenty of independent brands here share words with much larger retailers headquartered a few miles away, and an unsegmented account happily buys traffic that was never looking for you. Shopping and Performance Max carry the catalogue, asset groups split by margin band and product type rather than one catch-all, Search covers what a feed cannot reach, and bidding to contribution margin comes last.
Local context
Fast ground shipping is a competitive claim you should be making
There is a genuine structural advantage in shipping from central Ohio and most accounts here never put it in the auction. Roughly half the US population sits within a one-day truck drive, Rickenbacker gives the region unusual freight capacity, and if your 3PL is local your ground transit times to the eastern half of the country beat most competitors bidding against you. That belongs in the feed and in the ads: accurate shipping speed attributes in Merchant Center, free-shipping and returns policy annotations configured properly, and delivery-estimate claims in ad copy that your fulfilment can actually keep. It is one of the few places where an operational fact turns directly into click-through rate. The calendar matters too — strength and equipment queries climb hard into the Arnold Sports Festival in March and again in the January resolution window, collegiate and fan merchandise runs from late July, and budget schedules should anticipate those rather than react a fortnight late.
Scope
What Google Ads includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Columbus 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 Columbus store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Columbus 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 Columbus — your questions
Nine times out of ten it is missing or invalid apparel attributes rather than a bidding problem. Google requires age group, gender, size, size system and colour for apparel in most target countries, and a catalogue exported straight from Shopify without those mapped will have a large share of items disapproved or limited. We fix it at the source data in Shopify so it survives the next catalogue update, rather than patching it in a feed rule.
First by separating brand from non-brand so the waste is visible at all, then with a deliberately maintained negative set built from search terms rather than guesswork. It also usually means tightening match types on the overlapping terms and, where the collision is severe, leaning on Shopping and PMax with product-type controls rather than broad Search, since a product image does more disambiguating work than a text ad.
Not at full weight. A complete size run is the difference between a click that converts and a click that becomes a bounce, so we build stock cover and size-run completeness into custom labels and step bids down or exclude when the run breaks. It is one of the highest-return feed jobs in apparel and almost nobody does it, because it requires the feed to know something the campaign builder never asks about.
If you sell equipment, supplements, apparel or anything adjacent to strength, yes — search interest builds for weeks beforehand and stays elevated through the event. The mistake is reacting to it. Budgets should be raised before the curve starts, negatives should anticipate the event-information queries that will flood in, and any promotion needs feed annotations live in advance rather than approved halfway through the week that mattered.
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 Columbus 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.