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.
Toronto, ON
Google Ads Management in Toronto, ON
Demand capture across two countries and two languages, run from a Merchant Center setup that most GTA accounts never configured properly.
Delivered remotely for brands across Toronto and Canada.
Grow · Toronto
Why Toronto brands come to us for this
- Separate Merchant Center country targets for Canada and the US, with feed rules emitting the correct currency and landing page
- Canada and US split into separate campaigns with tROAS derived from each market's real contribution margin after cross-border cost
- French-language Search and PMax for Quebec built from a French query set, not a translated English one
- Brand isolated from non-brand so cheap Canadian branded clicks stop disguising the true cost of US acquisition
- Shipping, returns and tax policies configured per country in Merchant Center to clear price and policy disapprovals at source
Google is demand capture: the buyer has decided they want the product and the only question is who sells it to them. For a Toronto store that question has a country attached, and the country lives in the feed rather than in the campaign builder. A single Merchant Center feed with CAD prices cannot serve a US shopper legitimately — the currency in the feed has to match the currency on the landing page for that shopper's market, or you collect price-mismatch disapprovals and lose the impressions before anyone looks at a bid.
So the work starts in Merchant Center. A properly configured country target set for Canada and the United States, feed rules that emit the right currency and the right landing page per market, shipping and returns policies configured per country, and tax settings that reflect how Canadian prices are quoted. Then the attribute work every catalogue needs: GTIN and MPN gaps filled, product types and custom labels arranged around margin and remaining cover, titles rewritten to lead with the phrase a buyer types rather than an internal SKU name.
Structure comes next. Brand separated from non-brand so your Canadian branded traffic — which is usually cheap, loyal and already yours — stops flattering the American prospecting that is doing the actual acquisition work. The catalogue runs through Shopping and Performance Max, with asset groups split by margin band rather than one bucket for everything. Search takes the questions no attribute set can be made eligible for. French-language campaigns for Quebec run as their own line with their own negatives, because a French query set is not a translation of the English one. Bids get adjusted only once all of that holds.
Local context
Your two markets have opposite auction economics
A GTA brand running one blended Google account is almost always subsidising one market with the other and cannot see it. Canadian non-brand auctions are thinner: fewer competitors, lower CPCs, but a much smaller pool of demand that you can exhaust before lunch. American non-brand is the opposite — effectively unlimited volume at CPCs that can be several times higher, against incumbents with more authority and faster shipping. Blend them and the Canadian efficiency hides how expensive US acquisition really is, so you keep raising budget into a target that only looks achievable because of domestic traffic propping it up. We split Canada and the United States into separate campaigns with separate budgets and separate tROAS targets derived from contribution margin per market, which is different in each because your US orders carry duty, cross-border shipping and a different return rate. Only then does a bid change mean anything.
Scope
What Google Ads includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Toronto 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 Toronto store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Toronto 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 Toronto — your questions
One feed with correct country targeting and market-specific feed rules can, provided the price and currency in each country's version matches what that shopper sees on the landing page. What fails is a single CAD feed pointed at a US target: prices mismatch, products get disapproved, and the account quietly loses its American impressions. We verify it in the diagnostics tab per country rather than assuming it works.
Where you have the French storefront to send the click to, usually yes — the auctions are thinner, CPCs are lower and the intent is strong. Where you do not, it is a waste, because a French query landing on an English product page converts badly and the ad experience score reflects it. We check the French query volume in your categories before recommending it rather than treating it as an automatic yes.
Separate campaigns per country before anything else, then asset groups split by margin band and product type inside each. Feeding one PMax campaign both markets hands Google the choice of where to spend, and it will chase whichever market converts most cheaply, which is nearly always Canada. That looks like efficiency and is actually the algorithm declining to do the hard half of your growth.
By calculating contribution margin per market and setting a tROAS from each rather than using one account-wide number. A US order carrying duty, cross-border freight and a higher return rate needs a materially higher return to break even than an Ontario order does. Most accounts we inherit have never made this distinction, which is why their US expansion looked profitable right up until the annual accounts arrived.
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 Toronto 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.