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.
Minneapolis, MN
Google Ads Management in Minneapolis, MN
Shopping, Performance Max and Search managed around a feed that has to compete with the retailers listing your own SKUs.
Delivered remotely for brands across Minneapolis and Minnesota.
Grow · Minneapolis
Why Minneapolis brands come to us for this
- Feed titles rewritten from vendor model codes to the language buyers actually type, using identifiers your retail history already supplies
- MAP price parity enforced between feed and storefront to stop the price-mismatch disapprovals that stall a catalog
- Custom labels for season, margin and stock cover so bidding responds to what you can actually ship in February
- Budgets shaped to the demand steps — freeze, openers, Q4 — instead of a flat monthly cap that throttles your best weeks
- Brand separated from non-brand so shelf-driven branded search stops disguising how the rest of the account performs
Somebody has already decided they want an insulated bib, a replacement track, a hearing amplifier or a case of a specialty sauce, and the only remaining question is who supplies it. On Shopify that contest happens in Merchant Center rather than the campaign builder, so that is where we start — and brands from this market usually start ahead. Years of supplying national retail means GTINs, MPNs, brand fields and dimensions already exist to a standard most DTC-native brands never had to meet.
What that history does not fix is titles. Vendor-portal titles lead with an internal model code because that is what a buyer's system needed, and a shopper types the category, the machine or the temperature instead. Rewriting titles to lead with searched language, building product types and custom labels around margin, stock cover and season, and clearing disapprovals at the source is where the revenue moves before a single bid changes.
Then structure. Brand gets separated from non-brand immediately, because in a wholesale-grown brand the branded queries are often people who saw the product on a shelf and came looking — genuinely valuable, and completely capable of flattering an account that is otherwise not working. Shopping and Performance Max carry the catalog with asset groups split by margin and product type, Search covers what a feed cannot reach, and bids are only adjusted once the rest of it holds.
Local context
Feed pricing, retailer competition and a budget curve that is anything but flat
Two things make a Twin Cities Google account distinctive. The first is that you are frequently bidding in the same auction as the retailers and dealers who resell you, on your own products, with your own imagery — so listing-level differentiation, a title that reads as the manufacturer, promotion annotations and product ratings do real work, and a MAP-governed price means you cannot simply undercut. It also means the price in your feed must match the price on your page to the cent, because MAP-driven price changes are one of the most common causes of the disapproval spirals we inherit. The second is budget shape. Demand here steps rather than drifts: the first hard freeze, the May fishing opener, the November deer opener and the Q4 gifting run each produce a sharp, short spike, and a flat monthly budget will cap you exactly when the auction is worth winning and leak in the flat weeks. We build the budget curve against the demand curve, move tROAS targets in controlled increments so the account keeps its learning going into a peak, and set seasonal custom labels so stock cover is a bidding input rather than an afterthought.
Scope
What Google Ads includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Minneapolis 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 Minneapolis store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Minneapolis 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 Minneapolis — your questions
You should be deliberate rather than worried. Some of that traffic converts wherever it lands and your margin is better when it lands with you, so competing on your own catalog is usually correct. What matters is that your listing is clearly the manufacturer — brand field, imagery, ratings, promotions and shipping terms — and that you know your MAP floor means you win on presentation rather than price. We report brand and reseller-overlap terms separately so the decision stays visible.
By building the budget curve before the campaign structure. We look at the previous two or three years of order data to locate the actual step changes, then front-load budget into the ramp so campaigns enter the peak already out of learning, rather than raising budgets on day one of the spike and spending the first week re-learning. Between spikes we run at a lower, steady level that keeps the conversion history alive.
It degrades it if you let availability changes flow through unmanaged, because PMax will keep pushing product it can still serve while your budget follows demand for what you cannot ship. We use custom labels for stock cover and set exclusion rules so thin-inventory items stop consuming spend, and where a size run is broken we handle it at the variant level rather than pulling the parent product entirely.
If you have a physical location with real stock and reliable inventory data, yes — local inventory ads and store pickup consistently earn their setup cost in a metro with this much retail habit. The prerequisite is honest availability data flowing from your POS, because nothing damages a local campaign faster than sending someone across the metro for something that sold that morning. If your inventory feed is not reliable, we fix that first.
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 Minneapolis 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.