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.
Detroit, MI
Google Ads Management in Detroit, MI
Google Ads for Detroit catalogs, where the feed is the campaign and identifier gaps cost more than any bid mistake.
Delivered remotely for brands across Detroit and Michigan.
Grow · Detroit
Why Detroit brands come to us for this
- GTIN, MPN and manufacturer-brand gaps closed at source, since aftermarket feeds fail on identifiers more than anything else
- Product titles rewritten to lead with vehicle, application and searched terms instead of internal SKUs
- Brand isolated from non-brand so OEM-adjacent demand does not flatter the account's blended return
- Custom labels for margin, stock cover and salt-season demand driving pacing instead of a flat monthly budget
- Query mining that surfaces the part numbers buyers type and your catalog does not currently answer
The demand in this metro announces itself precisely — someone types a part number, a symptom, a tool spec or a vehicle plus a component, and the auction decides who answers. Which makes Merchant Center, not the campaign builder, the highest-leverage surface in the account. Accounts we inherit here almost always lose more revenue to disapproved and unindexed products than to anything a bid adjustment could fix.
The feed work is specific to catalogs like yours. Missing or invalid GTIN and MPN values on aftermarket and industrial products, brand fields populated with your own name where the manufacturer belongs, titles that lead with an internal SKU instead of the words a buyer types, and thousands of variants competing against each other because product type and item group were never set. We close identifier gaps at source, rewrite titles to lead with searched terms, and add custom labels for margin band, stock cover and seasonality so the structure can actually be steered.
Campaign structure then follows the money. Branded demand gets isolated into its own campaign and budget so non-brand performance becomes visible instead of hidden inside a blended number. Shopping and Performance Max asset groups split by margin band and product type rather than a single catch-all, with listing-group bids, exclusions and brand controls applied wherever PMax still permits them. And search terms get mined continuously, because in a parts account the query report is a live map of the numbers people are typing that your catalog does not answer.
Local context
Weather is the demand signal, and OEM trademarks set the rules
Detroit paid search moves with the road. A hard freeze, the first heavy salt application, a January cold snap that kills batteries across the metro — these produce sharp, forecastable spikes in replacement, rust and cold-weather queries, and a flat monthly budget spreads spend evenly across a demand curve that is anything but even. We build seasonal custom labels and pacing rules around that, hold budget for the weeks that actually deliver, and treat the spring performance and detailing lift as a separate curve with its own structure. The second local constraint is trademark. A metro built around three automakers means your queries are dense with OEM brand names and part numbers you do not own, and manufacturers here are more active about enforcement than in most categories. We keep compatible-part terms in campaigns where the ad copy and landing page are defensible, separate genuine-parts inventory from aftermarket equivalents in the feed, and avoid the copy patterns that get accounts into trademark disputes rather than discovering them later.
Scope
What Google Ads includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Detroit 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 Detroit store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Detroit 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 Detroit — your questions
Yes. GTIN is not universally required, but when it is absent the MPN and brand pair has to be correct and consistent, and the product data has to be strong enough that Google can classify the item without it. Where a genuine identifier exists we source it properly rather than inventing values, because fabricated identifiers cause account-level problems that are far more expensive than the disapprovals they were meant to hide.
Bidding on them is generally possible; using them in ad copy or implying an affiliation is where accounts get into trouble, and the manufacturers in this market do enforce. We keep those campaigns structured so compatibility is expressed in a defensible way, point them at landing pages that genuinely serve the query, and keep genuine and aftermarket inventory clearly separated in the feed.
Not as one asset group. A single catch-all lets the campaign spend where conversion is easiest, which in a parts account usually means your existing branded and repeat demand. We split asset groups by margin band and product type, exclude what should not be automated, and keep enough manual Shopping and Search running to see what PMax is actually taking credit for.
By getting them into the account as conversions. Call tracking on the number, offline conversion imports for quoted and counter-completed orders, and a value assigned that reflects real order size rather than a flat placeholder. Without that, campaigns optimise toward the smaller online orders and starve the queries that generate your most valuable calls — which is a common and very costly blind spot in this market.
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 Detroit 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.