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.
Istanbul
Google Ads Management in Istanbul
Capturing the demand that already exists for what Istanbul makes, in the countries where people are searching for it.
Delivered remotely for brands across Istanbul and Türkiye.
Grow · Istanbul
Why Istanbul brands come to us for this
- Merchant Center feeds built per destination country with shipping, tax and duty treatment matched to what you actually charge
- GTIN exemption handled properly for factory-direct and own-label products instead of living as a standing disapproval
- Product groups split by landed margin after freight and duty, not by collection, so bidding reflects what a sale actually earns
- EU campaigns weighted for the customs union tariff advantage that US-bound apparel and textiles do not enjoy
- Continuous query mining against wholesale, supplier and dropshipping searches a Turkish manufacturer's feed attracts
Google is a demand capture channel and that is unusually good news for an Istanbul exporter, because the demand for Turkish cotton, Turkish leather and Turkish home textiles is already there and being served almost entirely by resellers. Somebody in Manchester types a query with a material and a use case, and today the results are marketplaces and retailers who bought the product from a factory two districts away from yours. The account's job is to intercept that query at a price that still works after freight and duty.
Which means the feed comes first, and for factory-direct catalogues the feed is the hard part. Merchant Center wants identifiers most Turkish manufacturers have never issued, so unbranded or own-label products need GTIN exemption handled correctly rather than left as a disapproval. It wants shipping settings per destination country that match what you actually charge, tax handling that reflects whether your price is duty-inclusive, and product data with country of origin, material and size in the right attributes rather than in the title. A store with a clean feed and average campaign structure will beat a clever account with a broken one every time.
Structure then follows margin and distance. Shopping and Performance Max split by product group according to landed margin rather than by collection, non-brand search built around material, use and origin queries, and query mining run continuously because a cross-border catalogue attracts a long tail of wholesale, dropshipping and B2B searches that will burn budget cheerfully. Brand campaigns barely matter here, at least at the start, because there is no brand demand yet to defend.
Local context
Every click has a freight cost attached to it
Bidding from Istanbul into the US and Europe is a different arithmetic from bidding inside one country, because the cost of goods sold on a converted click includes express freight and, increasingly, duty. The United States closed the low-value de minimis exemption, so small parcels that used to enter duty-free no longer do, and any target return on ad spend calculated before that change is now wrong. Meanwhile the customs union between Turkiye and the EU means industrial goods including apparel and textiles enter European markets without the tariff an Asian competitor carries, which makes European campaigns structurally more efficient than American ones for those categories and should be reflected in how budget is split. We build the account with landed margin per product group per destination as the input to bidding, run separate campaigns per country rather than one lumped international campaign, and mine search terms hard for the wholesale and supplier queries that a Turkish manufacturer's feed attracts and that will never buy at retail.
Scope
What Google Ads includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Istanbul 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 Istanbul store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Istanbul 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 Istanbul — your questions
Yes. Merchant Center provides a GTIN exemption path for products that genuinely have no manufacturer-assigned identifier, which covers most own-label and factory-direct goods from Istanbul workshops. It has to be filed correctly and paired with strong brand, MPN and product-type data, otherwise the items sit in a disapproval queue nobody is watching. Where you do plan to sell through retailers later, issuing your own GTINs is worth doing regardless.
It raises your effective cost per order on US traffic, so a target return on ad spend set before the change will quietly make the account unprofitable while still hitting its number. We rebuild the target from landed margin: product cost, express freight, duty at the applicable rate and payment fees, per product group. In some catalogues that shifts budget toward Europe, and in others it means raising prices for the US market rather than cutting spend.
Usually only for defensive and brand-adjacent terms, if at all. Domestic purchase intent largely resolves inside Trendyol and Hepsiburada rather than in Google Shopping, so a Turkish campaign pointed at your own Shopify store competes with buying habits rather than with other advertisers. The export markets are where the incremental revenue is, and mixing both into one account tends to hide which one is actually funding the business.
Usually two, chosen on delivered economics rather than market size. Germany and the UK are common first picks for textiles and apparel because freight is short, the EU customs union removes tariff drag for European destinations, and English or German content is manageable. The US is attractive on volume and average order value but now carries duty on small parcels and longer freight. We model landed margin for each candidate before spending, then open one at a time so the data stays readable.
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 Istanbul 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.