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.
Portland, OR
Google Ads Management in Portland, OR
Capturing demand that already exists for your category, starting with a Merchant Center feed that actually describes the product.
Delivered remotely for brands across Portland and Oregon.
Grow · Portland
Why Portland brands come to us for this
- GTIN, MPN, size, width and material attributes closed off so size-specific Shopping queries can match
- Custom labels for margin, season and stock cover, so broken size runs stop absorbing budget
- Brand isolated from non-brand so the real cost of a new customer is visible rather than blended away
- Restricted-category feed handling for cider, wine and spirits clients instead of quietly excluding the range
- Local inventory ads where a Portland showroom holds genuine stock, with no sales tax as a live incentive
Google is the demand-capture channel: someone has already decided they want a resoleable boot or a single-origin subscription, and the only question is whose listing they click. For a Shopify store that contest is settled in Merchant Center, not in the campaign builder, and a Portland catalogue gives the feed more to work with than most — if the data is actually in the fields rather than in the description.
So the first weeks go into the feed. GTINs and MPNs closed off, which is where footwear and hardgoods brands lose eligibility and any hope of a competitive impression share. Size, width, colour, material and age group populated as real attributes so size-specific queries can match. Titles rewritten to lead with the words buyers type — the model name and the attribute, not your internal SKU convention. Custom labels for margin band, stock cover and season, so a style with two sizes left is not being bid on like a full run. Disapprovals fixed at source, and for cider, wine and spirits clients, the restricted-category rules handled properly rather than by hiding products.
Then structure. Brand traffic isolated so it stops flattering the non-brand numbers, and so you can see what you are actually paying to acquire a new customer. The catalogue goes into Shopping and Performance Max with asset groups cut by margin and product type instead of one bucket. Search covering the specification and comparison queries a feed cannot reach. Query mining every week with a maintained negative list, because in this category the research, DIY-repair and job-application traffic around famous local employers is a genuine budget leak.
Local context
You are buying attention in an auction shaped by the brands next door
Non-brand terms in footwear, outdoor and technical apparel are among the most expensive in retail, and in this metro the companies setting those clearing prices are headquartered a short drive away with budgets no small brand should try to match head-on. Winning here is about where you refuse to compete: skip the generic category term, buy the attribute, use-case and comparison queries where your product is genuinely the right answer, and let Shopping carry the model-name demand your PR and community already created. Two other local specifics change the account. Seasonality is sharp and weather-driven — rain gear and insulation demand arrives with the wet season and evaporates, so budget has to be shaped to the calendar rather than divided by twelve. And if you have a Central Eastside or Hawthorne showroom with real stock, local inventory ads and store-visit reporting are worth setting up, because Oregon shoppers pay no sales tax in store and a nearby in-stock listing is a strong prompt.
Scope
What Google Ads includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Portland 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 Portland store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Portland 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 Portland — your questions
Width usually yes, size usually not in the title itself. Width is a differentiating attribute people search on and it belongs early in the title where the algorithm and the shopper both see it. Size belongs in the size attribute, where it can be matched properly without bloating the title and pushing the model name out of the visible portion. The rule we work to is that the title carries brand, model, the attribute that decides the purchase and the category — everything else lives in its own field.
Mining and structure, in that order. Repair, resole, warranty and how-to queries are high volume around durable goods and they convert badly on a product campaign, so they go into a maintained shared negative list rather than being rediscovered every quarter. But they are not worthless — they are strong organic and remarketing content, so we usually build the repair and care pages properly on the SEO side and let those queries land there for free instead of buying them.
Against the season and the stock position, not evenly. For rain and insulation categories the sensible pattern is to build up before the first sustained wet stretch, hold budget high through the peak, and pull back rather than fight for expensive clicks once demand collapses. The constraint people forget is inventory: there is no return on bidding hard into a style whose common sizes are gone, which is exactly what the stock-cover custom label is for.
Within limits, and the limits are stricter for spirits than for beer, cider and wine. Certain formats and targeting are restricted, age and destination targeting rules apply, and Merchant Center requires the category to be declared and configured rather than slipped through. The workable approach is usually a compliant feed for the permitted products, plus search coverage on the club and gifting demand where policy allows, and honesty about the products where the answer is no.
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 Portland 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.