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.
Shopping, Performance Max and Search for Milan brands, run out of a Merchant Center feed that has to work in Italian at home and in three other languages abroad.
Delivered remotely for brands across Milan and Italy.
Google is demand capture: the buyer has already decided they want the thing, and the only open question is who supplies it. For a Milan catalogue that makes the feed the whole ball game, and Italian feeds fail in specific, boring, expensive ways. Titles written the way the gestionale names a SKU rather than the way a buyer types a query. GTINs missing across furniture and made-to-order lines where they legitimately do not exist, but with the identifier-exists flag never set correctly, so the product is throttled instead of exempted. Attributes left in Italian on a feed serving Germany. Disapprovals sitting in a diagnostics tab nobody opens.
The second failure is structure, and it has a distinctly Italian flavour. A great many Lombardy brand names are ordinary words — a surname, a place, a material — which means brand search picks up query volume that is not brand intent at all, and a single mixed campaign reports a ROAS that is mostly people who already knew you plus a stack of irrelevant clicks. Separating brand from non-brand, then mining actual search terms in Italian, German and French every week, is where most accounts we inherit find their first real money. Italian query mining in particular needs someone reading the terms, because plurals, gender and regional phrasing produce negatives that a rules engine will not catch.
Then export. Running one campaign across the EU on a floating currency and one delivery promise is the most common way to make Google look expensive. Each market needs its own feed treatment with translated titles, its own price and availability, and a landing page in the same language as the ad. Bidding is the last thing we touch, because a bid strategy applied over a broken feed just distributes the same problem more efficiently.
Two things make the Italian auction feel different from the US one. First, price comparison is a normal part of the purchase here, and buyers are habituated to marketplaces and comparison sites in a way that changes what a Shopping click is worth — if a retailer stocks you, you are frequently bidding against your own distribution, which is a commercial conversation before it is an account setting. Second, the ancillary surfaces matter more than people expect: free product listings and the Shopping tab pull genuine traffic off a clean feed at no media cost, and a feed built properly earns that whether or not you are spending. On top of that sits the seasonal shape of Italian demand — search interest around interiors climbs into April and around apparel into the saldi windows in January and July, and evaporates in August when the country is on holiday and your own depots are shut. We build the budget calendar around that rather than dividing the annual number by twelve, and we watch delivery in the first hour of the Milan morning even though it is the middle of our night, because a disapproval that lands overnight should not cost you a full trading day.
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Milan brand’s realities.
Full service detailDisapprovals 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.
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.
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.
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.
Merchant promotions, sale price annotations, shipping and returns policy setup, product ratings, and local inventory ads where you have stores worth feeding.
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.
We do not work off a rate card. Every Milan 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 scopedMerchant 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.
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.
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.
tROAS targets derived from contribution margin by product group and applied gradually, so the account keeps its learning instead of resetting it every Monday.
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.
Anonymised under NDA. Figures pulled from the client’s own analytics.
~$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.
~$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.
“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.”
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.
Prefer to write it out? [email protected] gets a real reply the same business day, Mon-Fri, 9am-6pm MT.