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.
Washington, DC
Google Ads Management in Washington, DC
Google captures demand that already exists — and in Washington a great deal of it exists for about six weeks in spring and again during conference season.
Delivered remotely for brands across Washington and District of Columbia.
Grow · Washington
Why Washington brands come to us for this
- Feed rebuilt for institutional catalogues: ISBN and GTIN handling, variant-distinguishing titles, clean availability on limited runs
- Brand isolated from non-brand so a well-known institution's own name stops flattering the whole account
- Custom labels for margin, stock cover and season, so exhibition items and evergreen merchandise are bid differently
- Weekly query mining against research, job-seeker and general-enquiry terms that institutional brand names attract
- Budget shaped around blossom season, conference weeks and the September fiscal-year push instead of equal monthly splits
Google Ads works when someone has already decided they want the thing. In this market that decision is often made by a visitor who saw an exhibition, a member who read a mailing, or an administrator told to source a specific publication. Your job is to be the listing they find, and on Shopify that fight happens in Merchant Center long before it happens in the campaign builder.
Institutional catalogues break feeds in specific ways. Publications arrive without GTINs or with ISBNs in the wrong attribute. Merchandise variants share one title with the distinguishing detail buried in a description. Exhibition items get listed and then sell out in a week, leaving disapprovals and stale availability behind. Custom labels for margin, stock cover and season are what keep a small catalogue from being bid on as though every item were equal.
Structure comes next. Branded search for a well-known institution can be enormous and will happily absorb the whole budget while reporting a beautiful return, so brand is isolated into its own campaign, budget and target. Shopping and Performance Max carry the catalogue; Search covers the queries a feed cannot reach — a specific report title, a credential, a named exhibition. Query mining runs weekly, because in this city a store with the word 'institute' or 'society' in its name attracts an extraordinary volume of research, job-seeker and general-enquiry traffic that will spend your budget quietly.
Local context
Demand arrives on a calendar you did not set
Washington's search demand is unusually scheduled. Spring school trips and blossom season produce a concentrated visitor spike; annual meetings and conference weeks bring a national audience into the geo for a few days at a time; the federal fiscal year closing on 30 September pulls institutional purchasing forward into September. That means budget has to be shaped around known windows rather than divided into equal months, and campaigns need to be built and approved well before the window opens because Merchant Center review and campaign learning both take time you will not have in week one. Local inventory ads earn their place here too — a Georgetown, Union Market or Eastern Market retailer with real footfall can show in-stock availability to someone already within a few blocks, which is a genuinely different auction from national Shopping.
Scope
What Google Ads includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Washington 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 Washington store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Washington 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 Washington — your questions
It does not, if the data goes in the right place. ISBN-13 is a valid GTIN for books and belongs in the GTIN attribute rather than in a custom field or the title. Where it goes wrong is mixed catalogues — books, merchandise and print editions in one feed with inconsistent identifier rules — which produces intermittent disapprovals that look random until you audit the feed by product type.
Usually you reduce rather than stop, and you shift the mix. Local consumer demand softens and institutional purchasing pauses while budgets are uncertain, so non-brand prospecting in the DMV gets less efficient. Brand defence stays on because it is cheap and the traffic still converts, and national non-brand often holds up fine. We treat it as a budget reallocation with a documented trigger, not an emergency.
For a store with real footfall in Georgetown, Union Market or on Capitol Hill, the answer is often local inventory ads rather than plain Shopping. Showing accurate in-store availability to someone searching nearby is a much shorter path to a sale than competing nationally on a product a hundred other stores carry. It requires your POS inventory to be trustworthy, which is the actual prerequisite.
We build it as a scheduled push rather than a permanent setting: budget raised into the window, geo and radius adjusted around the venue where it makes sense, ad copy referencing the event, and everything reverted afterwards with the results recorded. The mistake we most often inherit is a conference-week setting from three years ago still quietly running against a national audience.
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 Washington 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.