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.
Houston, TX
Google Ads Management in Houston
A buyer standing in a Pasadena yard types a manufacturer part number into their phone. Either your Merchant Center feed can match that string or the distributor down the road collects the click.
Delivered remotely for brands across Houston and Texas.
Grow · Houston
Why Houston brands come to us for this
- Merchant Center diagnostics worked weekly, including the hazardous-goods and claims flags that quietly disable half a Houston MRO catalogue
- GTIN-exempt industrial SKUs handled through brand and MPN so parts stay eligible instead of silently dropping out of Shopping
- A shared negative library built for this metro: jobs, salary, apprenticeship, training and certification queries stripped out of non-brand
- Brand isolated into its own campaign so an established Ship Channel name stops flattering the acquisition numbers
- Local inventory ads for will-call counters, so a buyer in Stafford or Baytown sees in-stock today rather than a shipping estimate
Google is the channel where Houston demand already exists and someone else is currently taking it. A maintenance planner needs a seal kit by Thursday. A clinic coordinator needs the same gloves they bought in April. A homeowner in Kingwood has just watched a forecast and typed 'portable generator near me'. Nobody in that list needs persuading — they need to find you before they find the counter down the road.
Which means the account is won or lost in Merchant Center, not in the bidding tab. Houston catalogues arrive with problems Google punishes quietly: industrial SKUs that have never had a GTIN and need brand and MPN handled properly instead of a blank field, titles that read as an internal stock code rather than the phrase a buyer types, aerosols and lubricants and chemical products flagged under hazardous-goods policy, and pressure or medical items disapproved for claims nobody has read the diagnostics on in a year. We clear that at source before anything else happens.
Then structure. Brand gets separated from non-brand so a distributor with forty years of name recognition on the Ship Channel stops mistaking loyalty for acquisition. Shopping and Performance Max carry the catalogue, split by margin band rather than one asset group over 12,000 parts. And Search covers what a feed cannot reach — the cross-reference lookups, the 'equivalent to' queries, the application-level searches from a buyer who knows the job but not the part number.
Local context
Houston's search terms report has a problem no other metro has
This is the largest energy employment market in the world, and it shows up in your negative keyword list before it shows up anywhere else. Queries like welder, technician, apprentice, salary, training, certification and hiring attach themselves to industrial product terms constantly, and an untended account in Houston bleeds a meaningful share of non-brand budget to people applying for jobs and studying for certifications rather than buying anything. Sitting next to it is a training-and-education layer from San Jacinto College and the community college trade programmes, and a heavy DIY overlap in tools and parts. That is the first thing we mine. The second is the calendar: Offshore Technology Conference week at NRG Park in May reliably lifts commercial intent around instrumentation and safety gear, and June through November a Gulf system produces a search spike in generators, pumps, tarps and water storage inside hours — Shopping is where that spike lands, so the feed labels and campaigns are built in April and left paused, not written while the cone is on the news.
Scope
What Google Ads includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Houston 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 Houston store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Houston 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 Houston — your questions
Yes. Manufactured parts, custom assemblies and made-to-order items are legitimately exempt, and the fix is supplying brand plus MPN correctly and setting the identifier-exists flag honestly rather than leaving fields empty. Most Houston distributor feeds we audit are losing eligibility on a chunk of the catalogue purely because nobody knew that path existed.
Both, doing different jobs. Shopping serves the exact part when the feed title carries the number in the form buyers type it — with and without dashes, with and without the manufacturer prefix. Search catches the cross-reference and 'equivalent to' variants a feed cannot match. Splitting them is also how you find out which competitor is bidding on the parts you stock.
By treating it as a standing job rather than a one-off cleanup, because in Houston the job-search vocabulary overlaps industrial product vocabulary permanently. A maintained shared negative list across every non-brand campaign, weekly review of the search terms and PMax category reports, and a check on whether your own product pages are ranking for employment intent and pulling the wrong audience in.
In a 600-square-mile metro with no single centre, yes — it is often the strongest differentiator you have. Local inventory ads and a pickup-today signal convert well against a buyer in Katy or Deer Park who does not want freight on something twenty minutes away. It requires accurate per-location stock feeding Merchant Center, so we scope the inventory sync before promising the format.
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 Houston 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.