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.
San Diego, CA
Google Ads Management in San Diego
San Diego buyers are already typing the query — ingredient, dose, format. The work is a Merchant Center feed that survives a supplement catalogue long enough to be eligible for it.
Delivered remotely for brands across San Diego and California.
Grow · San Diego
Why San Diego brands come to us for this
- Merchant Center remediation first: policy language, supply-length variants, GTIN and attribute gaps
- Campaign structure organised by ingredient, dose and certification, not by your internal catalogue tree
- Brand and non-brand separated, with PMax brand exclusions so it stops claiming easy conversions
- Weekly search-term mining, with negatives and new exact terms actually shipped, not just noted
- Separate Spanish-language keyword and ad sets for real border-metro demand, not translated English
Google is where you harvest intent that already exists, and San Diego sells into some of the most specific intent in consumer commerce. Someone is typing magnesium glycinate versus citrate, NAD precursor dosage, third-party tested creatine, 4/3 chest zip for January water. That specificity is a gift: the query tells you the objection, the certification and often the competitor already in the frame. It is also a trap, because a generic account structure will bury those terms inside a broad campaign and you will never see them.
Before any of that we go into Merchant Center, because in this city the feed is where most of the money is stuck. Supplement catalogues get flagged under healthcare and medicines policy for wording that lives in the product title. Supply-length variants — 30, 60 and 90 day — arrive as three items Google cannot tell apart. Carlsbad hardgoods catalogues show up with missing GTINs, no size or material attributes, and a thousand variants competing with each other. Goods finished on the Otay Mesa side need country-of-origin declared honestly or the account gets a suspension nobody budgeted for.
Then the structure: brand search separated from non-brand so nobody claims credit for people who already knew your name, Performance Max with brand exclusions and asset groups split by margin rather than by product type, and a weekly search-term review that actually results in negatives and new exact-match terms. The account should look different every month, or nobody is reading it.
Local context
Ingredient-level queries, feed-level problems, and a Pacific clock
The nutraceutical and formulation density around Sorrento Valley and Torrey Pines means San Diego brands compete on Google against comparison content, marketplaces and each other on attribute-level queries — ingredient, form, dose, certification. That rewards a campaign structure organised by those attributes and punishes one organised by your internal product taxonomy. The North County hardgoods half of the market has the opposite problem: enormous variant counts, weak feed attributes and Shopping impressions spread thinly across near-identical items, which is a feed engineering job long before it is a bidding job. Two more local realities shape pacing. You sit in Pacific time while the largest slice of your national search volume happens between 6am and 9am Eastern, so a budget that caps out mid-morning is capping out before your team is at a desk. And there is genuine regional intent here that national playbooks skip: craft beverage and specialty food pull local pickup and delivery searches from Chula Vista and San Ysidro up through Oceanside, a meaningful share of it in Spanish, and Del Mar's summer meet plus the July convention week move that demand in ways your annual average hides.
Scope
What Google Ads includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a San Diego 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 San Diego store
We do not work off a rate card. Every San Diego 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 San Diego — your questions
Almost always in the product title and description rather than in the ad. Ingredient names paired with outcome language trip healthcare and medicines policy, and once a few items are flagged the whole feed gets scrutinised. We rewrite the feed layer separately from your storefront copy using supplemental feeds, so the product page can keep the detail a researched buyer wants while the item sent to Google stays inside policy. That split is the fix most brands here have never been shown.
Not one campaign. Deep action-sports catalogues need custom labels for margin, stock depth and seasonality, so a wetsuit thickness that sells from October and a board volume with three units left are not bidding on the same terms with the same aggression. We enrich the feed with the spec fields buyers actually search — length, volume, thickness, flex, material — then segment on those rather than on collection names your customers never see.
Against the national buying day, not your office hours. A large share of your click volume arrives before 9am Pacific because the Eastern half of the country is already at lunch, so daily caps set for a local rhythm quietly throttle the best hours of the day. We look at conversion value by hour in your own account, then set pacing, bid adjustments and any promotion launch times around that curve rather than around a standup.
It depends entirely on the category. Nutraceutical and skincare demand is national and a local campaign wastes money on geography that does not matter. Craft beverage, specialty food, surf retail and anything with pickup or local delivery have real regional volume across the county, including Spanish-language queries with far less competition than their English equivalents. We size both before splitting, so you are not funding a local layer that does not exist.
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 San Diego 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.