Everyone talks about Meta and Google Ads for scale, but Microsoft Ads has quietly become one of the most profitable channels for some Shopify stores. We added $100,000 a year for one client from new shoppers and was getting both better order value and cost per sale.

In this tutorial, I’ll show why it works, the right way to set it up to save you time and bring you more profit, and the one setting that can make or break your account.

Why Microsoft Ads Works When Everyone Else Ignores It

Before we touch the account, you need to understand why this channel can work when everyone else ignores it. Microsoft Ads has two great advantages.

The first is, well, it has a bad hangover reputation with marketers. It used to be called Bing Ads. It feels like the old senile man down the road no one wants to hang out with because there’s ChatGPT ads, streaming TV, or AppLovin that seem more exciting.

But that gap is exactly where the money hides. The client I mentioned proves it.

On Microsoft their average order came in at $137 against $123 on Google, their cost per sale ran 13 percent lower, clicks cost 20 percent less, and the channel added nearly $100,000 a year in new, non-branded revenue. They’re not even in a major country like the United States.

Non-branded means these were brand new shoppers, not people who already knew the store and searched its name.

Cheaper Clicks Are Not the Only Advantage

The secret of Microsoft Ads comes with who actually uses Bing.

Look at these crazy stats from the same store. The 50-64 age range converted at an impressive 5.2%. And these baby boomers are cashed up, often retired, and hungry to spend money instead of passing it down to their children who can’t afford a home.

And why does the older demographic do better on Microsoft Ads? They are overrepresented there, because they likely bought a computer from their local computer shop and Microsoft Edge is the default browser, with Bing as the default search engine. They’re not technically advanced to swap browsers or search engines.

And because they see far fewer brain-rot ads than a twenty-something scrolling TikTok, simple creative and straight-forward offers may still grab their attention, saving you time and money on creative.

The older demographic is the biggest reason Microsoft Ads will either pleasantly surprise you, or just not be worth the effort. If you’re selling skin care to Gen Z, ads won’t do fantastic there but it could still be worth trying.

Treat Microsoft Ads as a Secondary Profit Channel

So here is the rule that makes the whole thing work for most stores. Treat Microsoft as a secondary profit channel, not your main scale channel.

After a decade of doing this, I can safely estimate you’ll probably cap out at 10% of Google’s volume, but the cheaper clicks and conversions make that slice worth it.

Think of it as opening a second checkout lane. It will not replace the main one, but it can process extra customers at an attractive margin.

I recommend every Shopify brand should test it for a few months. So here’s the setup to do it properly without rebuilding your whole ad system from scratch.

Step 1: Create Your Microsoft Ads Account

Create your free account at ads.microsoft.com. There’s no waitlist and no invite needed.

If this is the first ad account for your brand, message Microsoft’s ad support and ask about a promo code for new advertisers. Free ad credit for a five minute chat is the easiest win in this whole video.

Step 2: Import Your Google Ads Account and Choose the Right Settings

Microsoft has a built-in import tool that pulls your campaigns, keywords, ads, and budgets across in minutes. That means you do not need to rebuild everything manually.

But the goal is not to just clone Google blindly. Borrow the useful structure while keeping control of the settings that behave differently on Microsoft.

There’s a few gotcha settings and common mistakes here so you’ve got to do it right.

Set the Import Schedule

Go to “Import”, “Scheduled” where you can import from Google Ads on a daily basis, and click edit. Click “Custom”, then continue. If you’ve got multiple Google Ads accounts, your current one should be selected, and click next.

Configure the “Customize your schedule” to suit your timezone, an hour after you’re likely to finish making changes in Google Ads. So if you can make Google Ads changes up to five o’clock, then configure this to import at six o’clock, an hour after. That one-hour buffer makes sure Microsoft has time to finish the import.

This daily auto update schedule means your Microsoft Ads automatically stays up to date with any changes you make in your Google Ads without you thinking about it.

I suggest turning off the email notifications, you don’t need to be notified of import changes, it can just bloat.

Customise Budgets and Bids

Enable “Customize budgets”, and “Customize bids”. You don’t want the same budgets, or the same bids as Google Ads because performance, search volume, products, and keyword competition, it’s all different.

You’ll likely have lower budgets for an extra safety measure. You can put a placeholder and fix the budget strategy after import.

If you have URL tracking you can add that.

Customise Status

For “Customize status”, the right choice depends on your account. A good default is to not import the status of “Campaigns” because you’ll have some unique campaigns in Microsoft. For example, I don’t like the equivalent of performance max campaigns in Microsoft Ads, and so the import for that doesn’t make sense.

And if you have product segmentation or completely different bidding strategies, you might not want all your campaigns to mirror each other.

It would be very unusual to not have ad groups, ads, and keywords enabled.

Advanced Settings

Under “Advanced settings”, select the campaigns you want to import.

If you don’t know what campaigns you want from Google Ads, you can import them all. But I recommend you avoid importing cold, view-based, display-based, video-based campaigns, like Display Marketing. Microsoft doesn’t do well with raw demand generation across the display network like Google Ads is doing right now with Demand Gen.

Click next. You see here I’ve got most things enabled for campaigns, except targeting “Topic targets” is disabled to help avoid import errors in Microsoft, and be careful not to override any existing negative keyword lists that you’ll create specifically in Microsoft.

Same with “Logo Extensions”, just manually do that yourself. Don’t import “Conversion Goals”. I’ll show you how to set that up later as it requires your own code.

You can copy these other settings if you like but they’re really up to your discretion and strategy. Click next.

On the “Set schedule” page configure time of day, and then whenever you make these changes, enable “Run import now”, that way your account will update straight away based on these settings, and then click “Start import”.

Afterwards, go back into your import history and check for errors. The process for reviewing errors is cumbersome, and not every error will affect performance. For example, some content-label errors may be harmless. Review each one but do not assume the entire import has failed because a minor warning appears.

At this point, you’ve got a good import configuration, but Microsoft still cannot tell a valuable click from a sale. That means it is effectively spending with a blindfold on. The next two steps remove it.

Step 3: Install the UET Tag on Your Shopify Store

That’s Microsoft’s tracking pixel, a small piece of code that tells the platform when someone buys.

You add it through Customer Events in your Shopify settings, then create a purchase goal inside Microsoft Ads. Set that goal to mirror your main Google conversion so both platforms count sales the same way. Skip this step and both you and Microsoft won’t reliably see which traffic becomes revenue.

For the UET tag set up, this is the ID that we want to have available. So in Shopify admin go to “Settings”, then “Customer events”. Create a new conversion code, and call it ‘Microsoft ads tracking’ and set “Permission” to “Marketing” and “Analytics”, and configure “Data sale” to what’s needed for your store.

Here is the copy-and-paste code to track Shopify sales in Microsoft advertising. It includes enhanced conversions:

Paste the template code, update the “uet_id” value here with the UET tag from Microsoft, and click Save. Connect the pixel. That’s how you configure the UET and tracking code.

You can breathe a sigh of relief because that single step does most of the technical work for the next step as well.

Step 4: Set Up Conversion Tracking

Little did you know, you’ve done most of this already.

Go into “conversion goals” where you’ll configure a purchase goal. In “Goal Category”, select Purchase. Select “Event”, click Next. Configuring the conversion action value may vary by purchase price, and you can just pre-fill it with $1. Select your currency. Configure the “Conversion window” to 30 days, one day “View-through”, set Include in “Conversions” to yes, and set the data on the “Conversion attribution model” to “Data Driven”.

Enable “Enhance conversions”. This is configured within the code we pasted into Shopify admin, with email and phone number, which is the maximum fields that is possible for Microsoft currently, in enhanced conversions.

And depending if you have set up UET tag from earlier, then yes or no based on this, “Install the tag yourself”, click Next, and just click continue.

Then click Manual Installation, you want to set an action of “Equals to” “purchase” which matches the conversion code. And enable “Track event on inline action.”

Click “Save and next” and your conversion tracking and UET tags for Microsoft is all set up.

Microsoft can now connect an ad click to an order instead of trying to optimise around anonymous activity. The next step is helping it understand the products.

Step 5: Connect Microsoft Merchant Center

This is what powers shopping ads, the placements that show a product image, title, and price directly in the search results.

The good news is you can reuse the same product feed URL you already built for Google Shopping.

I’ve got to admire Microsoft for their ad strategy. Early on they tried to compete. But they eventually figured out to take an Avis strategy of just being second best in the search ad game, by helping marketers import things to ease their load. This helps people use the platform more so they get more advertisers and more money.

Here’s how to do it: Create a store, if it’s the first time you’re setting up a Merchant Centre account. Import an existing store from Google Merchant Centre. Follow the prompts to connect it up.

Before import, make sure it runs on a schedule, daily. In “Automatic Updates”, check “Automatic Item Update”, and enable “Price and Availability”. Check this “If an offer is out of stock in the feed, override it and update availability directly on the website.”

Click “Product listings” and enable “Show free Product Listings in the shopping tab”, and in Aggregators, enable “Allow all aggregators”.

Under the Feeds tab, you’ll be able to see your products being grouped in the feed “GoogleImport”, which is your Merchant Centre import, and you can check the status of them.

Microsoft does not offer the same clean, dedicated feed-review experience that many advertisers are used to inside Google Merchant Center. If you encounter issues, you may need to download the feed and examine it manually.

However, many of those issues will likely exist in the original Google Merchant Center feed. For that reason, fix the main product feed there and allow those improvements to flow into Microsoft.

At this point, your ads are nearly ready to run, but your budget will burn up fast if you don’t do this next step.

Step 6: Turn Off Microsoft Audience Network

This is one of the big gotcha settings I warned you about at the beginning.

It’s switched on by default when you import, and it pushes your ads onto random display placements that send junk traffic to stores like yours. I’ve seen ecommerce brands go from whinging that Microsoft ads don’t work to making profit with this one change.

Years ago, you could switch off the audience network with a simple toggle. But, and this is just my theory, shareholders demand more profit every year so what better way to get more profit than to take it from your customers by making them pay you more.

So today there’s no simple switch to turn off the audience network. Instead, what I recommend you do is go to the Website Publisher report, filter audience in ad distribution column, and check for sites to exclude.

As a default, you’re most likely going to benefit from excluding big sites of msn.com, outlook.com, outlooklive.com, and bing.com. I suggest you don’t automatically add these because sometimes one or two can actually perform, although you’ll always have one or two that are a big waste of money. Make reviewing the Website Publisher report part of your regular account management to improve your ROAS.

Do this on day one, not after Microsoft has wasted part of your budget. It’s the difference between telling people Microsoft Ads worked and telling people it was a waste.

Now that the junk traffic is removed, the next danger is scaling the account as though it were Google.

Step 7: Cap Your Budget

Cap your budget at around 20 percent of what you spend on Google.

Across the accounts we manage for Shopify stores, Microsoft delivers under that, up to 10 percent of the clicks and sales that Google does. The 20% is a safety net for a campaign or two that earns the right to scale. That’s the ceiling for most brands, unless your audience skews heavily to the boomers and it’s working for you.

Trying to force a Google-sized budget through Microsoft Ads is exactly how store owners end up saying the channel doesn’t work. Match the budget to the volume and the profit can follow.

A sensible budget protects the account overall. But it does not protect you from every bad click. For that, you need to see the exact words people typed.

Step 8: Check Your Search Terms Report

One of the most important optimizations you can make on a new ad account in Microsoft is to check your search terms report every week.

This is the list of actual searches that triggered your ads. This matters a lot because Microsoft matches keywords differently to Google. You’ll see queries you’ve never seen before. Broad match especially can pull in some wild stuff.

Add anything irrelevant as a negative keyword the moment you spot it. Pay for a bad search once, never twice.

You may be thinking this sounds like ordinary search-ad maintenance. It is, but it matters more during the first weeks because Microsoft is still showing you how its matching behaviour differs.

Negative keywords stop you paying for the wrong searches. The final step is making sure you are not overpaying for the right ones.

Step 9: Monitor Bids Alongside Impression Share

Impression share means how often your ad shows out of all the times it could have.

On Microsoft you’ll often find you can lower bids and still show almost every time, because there’s so much less competition.

That creates a useful test: reduce the bid gradually and watch whether impression share actually changes. You may also spot one or two keywords hogging all the spend without earning it, so trim those back.

Your goal is not to win every auction, but to win the most profitable auctions at the lowest price the market allows.

With this full structure and setup, most optimizations you make in Google Ads will also help your Microsoft ads. Do all nine of these and you’ve opened a second search channel that brings your Shopify store new customers, but your Microsoft-specific bids, budgets, controls and exclusions remain protected.

The One Limitation No Microsoft Setting Can Fix

The import only works as well as the Google Ads account behind it. If Google isn’t well structured and optimized, Microsoft simply inherits the same mess.

So before you run the import, get a second set of eyes on the Google account it’s copying from. Grab a free Google Ads audit here and fix the source first.

99% of Shopify stores never rank high on Google because no one’s talking about them. After 10 years of growing stores using every SEO strategy out there, this one beats them all and your competitors aren’t doing it.

In this article, I’ll show you how we rank stores fast and get mentioned by AI tools like ChatGPT using ecommerce digital public relations (PR).

Here’s something most Shopify brands completely miss, and it’s the reason their name never gets mentioned by anyone, not even AI. Without this step, your brand stays invisible.

The Power of Backlinks in SEO and GEO

The truth is, backlinks on other websites are the most powerful part of SEO and GEO. They’re how Google and AI decide who to trust. Studies from Backlinko, Semrush, and Ahrefs all show the same pattern: the more quality backlinks you have, the higher you rank and the more traffic you get.

So if no one links to you, you don’t exist. You can write a hundred blog posts and still stay invisible. Try it right now. Ask ChatGPT to name the top Shopify stores in your niche. You’re probably not there. That’s not because your brand isn’t great. It’s because AI can only see what’s already published online.

Real Results from Ecommerce Digital PR

We ran this strategy for a Shopify brand called Blue Bungalow and suddenly, boom: backlinks from Reader’s Digest, Business Insider, even Shopify themselves.

I copied the same playbook for my own agency’s website, Digital Darts, and the results blew my mind. Backlinks from Google. Microsoft. HubSpot. Daily Mail. Before that, I couldn’t get a single mention and now we were landing mentions from the biggest websites in the world.

The shift that changed everything was digital public relations, also known as digital PR. And here’s the crazy part: you don’t need any insider contacts or a PR agency retainer to pull it off. You just need the right system. I’m going to walk you through it step-by-step as you see me achieve a real press mention and backlink on another website. I’ll use a free AI tool to help you land high-value backlinks every month so that the links send traffic, boost SEO rankings, and make sure AI finally recognizes your brand.

Why Ecommerce Digital PR Beats Every Other Link-Building Strategy

This is where most Shopify brands get it completely wrong. Most store owners have no idea how to get good links on other websites. If they do, they’ll chase easy ones like directories or random blog lists, and wonder why nothing changes.

Not all backlinks are created equal. If I offered you $1,000 or $1, you’d pick the $1,000 every single time because it’s worth more. Digital PR is that $1,000 link for your Shopify store. Those easy backlinks? They’re the $1 scraps that look shiny but do nothing.

When your brand gets mentioned in trusted outlets like Forbes, Business Insider, or Shopify’s own blog, three powerful things happen:

1. Instant credibility. You can now say “As seen on…” right on your homepage. That’s social proof that boosts conversions overnight.
2. SEO authority. These sites have massive domain authority. When they link to you, that credibility flows straight to your site, giving you quality over quantity, which is the secret to high Shopify rankings.
3. Real traffic and sales. People actually read these outlets. You’ll see traffic spikes and, often, direct sales from the exposure alone.

Compare that to old-school link-building like directory links, forum commenting, or social bookmarking sites. Anyone can get them. No one brags about being “featured on Yellow Pages.” They barely move your rankings because anyone can get them so easily, and nobody’s browsing those sites looking to buy from you.

So here’s the rule I live by: the easier a backlink is to get, the less impact it has.

That’s exactly why most SEO agencies avoid digital PR. It’s hard. But “hard” is good news for you because it means few of your competitors will ever do it. And when you follow the exact step-by-step system below, landing your first PR backlink becomes easy thanks to a free Shopify app and a free AI tool.

Step 1: Establish an Authority Figure

If you skip this first step, none of the others will work. The biggest mistake I see when brands try to do PR is they have no human face. Journalists don’t quote logos, they quote people. If your brand has no one to speak for it, it doesn’t exist in their world.

We got our Shopify SEO client Mudbrick Herb Cottage mentioned in The Sun. My SEO manager Emily achieved this by being able to position someone in the company as an expert. The pitch had nothing special about it except authority.

So the first step you need to land more PR backlinks is an authority figure; the face of your PR whose name will go onto quotes.

If you don’t have an authority or expert, don’t worry. I’ve worked with many Shopify brands who didn’t have one. Most brands we grow are run by regular people.

First, no one will make you an expert until you give yourself permission to be one. So even if you think your brand doesn’t have one, put your hand up and make yourself one. One of my clients, Galen Leather, finally did this. They simply allowed my team to put their founder’s name on the next PR pitch, and they landed a full story on StarterStory.com.

Second, here’s what’s really cool: if your founder’s shy or your brand is faceless, you can create a pen name, a consistent persona who represents your company. I’ve landed backlinks from massive publications using pen names. Because at the end of the day, journalists don’t care if it’s your real name. They care that there’s a credible voice they can cite.

Step 2: Let the App Watch the PR Platforms

Once you have your authority figure, you need a steady stream of journalist requests to pitch. The old way was to sign up for a stack of platforms and sort a different email digest from each one every morning. That’s a lot of tabs and a lot of noise.

Our free SEO Backlinks by Digital Darts app does the watching for you. Install it and it monitors the major journalist request sources around the clock: HARO, SOS (Source of Sources), SourceBottle, MentionMatch, Connectively, and X. Every request is pulled into one place inside your Shopify admin, so you don’t need to log in to multiple platforms or manually sort through separate digests.

Want even more reach? These platforms aren’t watched by the app, so sign up for the ones that fit and pitch them manually:

• Qwoted: 5 free pitches, then 2 pitches per month. Use your own shop’s domain in the email for an easier verification process.
• Editorielle: paid, but great if you’re in food, fashion, or beauty. Vogue, Glamour, GQ, and Grazia source experts on this platform.
• Journo.com: a paid option worth checking out to scale your digital PR. A lot of PR platforms hate AI, and Journo will kick you out if you’re caught being lazy with AI submissions.

The app covers the highest-volume sources for free. The extra platforms are a bonus, not a requirement, so start with the app and add the others later if you want to widen the net.

Step 3: Add Your Keywords

The app only shows you requests worth your time, and it works that out from the keywords you give it. Open PR Settings and add the topics you can speak to.

Add two kinds of keyword:

• Your expertise or role: what a journalist would quote you as, like “fashion designer” or “fashion stylist.”
• Your category: the broader world you belong to, like “clothing,” “shoes,” or “sustainable fashion.”

Any journalist request that mentions one of your keywords lands in your feed automatically, newest first. Add an exclude term to block a topic, or a whole outlet, you never want to see. Set your brand name too, because the app uses it later to confirm when your quote goes live.

If you also signed up for the manual platforms in the last step, fill out their profiles while you’re here. Treat each profile like your LinkedIn: a clear byline, your area of expertise, your website, and every contact method you’re happy to share. On those platforms some journalists browse profiles to find experts, so a strong one gets you found. On SEO Backlinks there’s no profile to optimize, because it’s reactive: it brings the requests to you.

On a platform like Featured, write a byline that highlights your area of expertise in a few words. If you’re an expert on plants, don’t just put “I love plants.” Add your website and as many contact methods as you can. In your about section, include keywords that describe what you do and what you want to be found for. At the end, mention that you’re open to opportunities and invite journalists to reach out.

Step 4: Work Your Matched Opportunities

This is where the setup pays off. Open the PR Opportunities tab and you’ll see every request that matched your keywords, ready to triage. There’s no ten-minute-versus-one-day race to win, because the moment a request is published it’s already in your feed.

Each row shows the topic, the source, the outlet, and its Domain Rating (DR), so you can judge the prize before spending a minute on it. Filter by source, DR, or deadline to chase only the high-authority outlets that actually move your rankings. Anything flagged “Closing soon” is about to expire, so start there. Add the good ones to your Tracker with one click and dismiss the rest to keep the feed clean.

How to Find PR Opportunities in Any Niche

There’s one more lesson that most people skip and if you miss this, you’ll miss dozens of great backlinks like the ones my team and I landed from Business Insider and AOL.

Not every niche gets the same number of PR opportunities. If you sell something like computer cables, you’ll hardly see any opportunities to write about computer cables. That doesn’t mean PR can’t work for you. Because here’s the secret: SEO and AI mentions do not discriminate on niches.

Even if you sell breakfast cereal, you don’t need every link to be about cereal or food. Think of digital PR like a set of four circles, and use the feed’s filters to work them in order.

• Circle 1: Your direct niche. The most relevant opportunities. For my agency, that might be getting quoted by Jasper.ai about SEO. These are golden because they’re highly relevant and great for SEO.
• Circle 2: Your product category. Using the cereal example, this includes anything related to food. Still relevant, just a bit broader.
• Circle 3: Business. General business opportunities where you can share lessons from running your brand, mistakes you’ve learned, or tools you use. For instance, we got Galen Leather on Shopify by talking about their packaging.
• Circle 4: Personal. These opportunities are outside business entirely; lifestyle, relationships, politics, personal finance, and more. My SEO manager Eliot got a backlink on AOL after sharing his story about moving to Bali while working remotely. That article had nothing to do with SEO, but it still linked to our site because he mentioned his role at Digital Darts.

The circular framework isn’t about avoiding any circle, it’s about prioritization. Focus first on inner-circle opportunities because they’re most relevant and face less competition. Journalists in those areas get fewer pitches, and since those topics match your authority, your chances of being accepted are much higher.

When you’ve got your keywords and this prioritization system in place, you’re no longer guessing which PR chances are worth your time. You’re strategically choosing the ones that build authority, get backlinks, and move your Shopify SEO forward.

Step 5: Write a Pitch That Lands the Backlink

You’ve got your first media opportunity in the feed. Now it’s your chance to turn that into a backlink and real exposure. But here’s the catch, thousands of other business owners just got the same request. Only a handful, sometimes even one, will actually get featured.

Most people do what’s easy. They copy the journalist’s question, paste it into ChatGPT, and hit send. It feels efficient, but it’s the fastest way to get ignored and in some cases, banned from the platform. Journalists can spot AI fluff instantly. What they want is something that sounds human, specific, and memorable. Even when the question looks simple, never just answer it directly. That’s the fastest way to blend in with everyone else.

That’s why I use a four-part structure that’s helped dozens of Shopify brands land real media coverage to improve their SEO. It works for nearly every opportunity because it taps into psychology and gives journalists exactly what they’re looking for.

The 3-Minute Media Machine: A Four-Part Pitch Structure

The following process utilizes the free tool I created for you to turn journalist requests into high-authority backlinks and press mentions to grow your Shopify SEO.

Part 1: The Hook

This is your opening 1 or 2 lines max. The hook’s role is to grab the journalist’s attention right away. If you grab the journalist’s attention, they’re likely to reuse it in their publication to attract readers.

There are three types of hooks that will set your response apart from everyone else:

Contrarian hook: challenges conventional wisdom. Journalists love fresh perspectives, and a contrarian hook makes them curious to understand why you don’t follow the norm and how your approach is different. It’s about using cognitive dissonance to interrupt and surprise.

Surprising fact hook: by presenting a surprising fact, you make the journalist, and their audience, stop and think about their own practices. They’ll want to know more about the gap and how they can avoid it. This hook is hard to do as you need unexpected data, but AI research makes this a breeze.

Credibility hook: establishes authority quickly as someone who has seen the challenges firsthand and knows how to solve them. It appeals to journalists who are looking for expert sources with a proven track record.

Whether you choose to challenge the norm, present an unexpected fact, or establish your authority, the goal is to make the journalist stop and want to read more.

Part 2: Insight

Here, you’ll provide deeper context by sharing a personal story or example related to the hook. This makes your pitch relatable and being relatable makes for good PR.

Part 3: The Takeaway

This provides actionable advice readers can apply. Offer something practical that your audience can immediately implement to start seeing results. Think of this as the logic section of the pitch.

Part 4: The Close

Here you want to emphasize to readers the main point or benefits of following your advice. I highly suggest you finish the pitch with a strong quote that ties everything together. Strong quotes have a play on words, alliteration, musical rhythm, or contain profound wisdom.

Then at the end, always include your name, position, and the full website URL you want linked to.

Step 6: Track Every Pitch in the App

Whenever you finish a pitch, track it so you have a record of what’s done and what’s working. You were probably going to build a Google Sheet for this. The app already is that sheet.

Every opportunity you add becomes a row in your Tracker. For each one:

• Log the pitch you sent. Paste your reply into the pitch field so you can reuse it, or repurpose it into short videos and emails later, which is great for Shopify brands wanting new content angles. Mark it submitted and the date stamps itself.
• Source and outlet, tracked automatically. See which platforms actually produce results over time.
• Confirm the coverage. Journalists rarely tell you when they use your quote, so use the Find coverage button, which runs a search like site:outlet.com “your brand”. When you find the article, paste the URL and set the status to Published.

The tiles at the top count how many pitches you’ve tracked, pitched, and published, plus your published rate, so you always know if the habit is paying off. Every Published row is a real editorial backlink, dated and linked, ready to reference in your marketing.

Make Digital PR a Daily Habit

When Shopify brands and marketers start out doing digital PR, they stay on top of it for a week, then stop. If you’re going to succeed, you’ve got to make this part of your daily work routine. The good news is the app shrinks that routine to minutes: no logging into seven platforms, no sorting digests. Create a repeating daily task in your project management tool like ClickUp or Asana to open SEO Backlinks, work today’s matched opportunities, and update the Tracker. Consistency is the difference between those who succeed with digital PR and those who don’t.

The awesome news is I landed that mention I showed you earlier, and I got a bunch of others using the same AI tool you can use for free.

Now you know how to do digital PR to grow your Shopify brand but you’ll still lose money if you make common marketing mistakes that quietly kill profit. Read this next article about Shopify Marketing Mistakes and how to fix them for your brand.

Are your Google Ads bringing in new buyers, or are they catching people who already want to buy from you? After auditing hundreds of Google Ad accounts recently, I can say 95% of ecom brands still have no idea how to get new customers with Demand Gen. So in this article, I’ll show you how to build the campaign so you get more sales, what creative to use, and the budget rule that stops you panic-editing on day two.

Why Your Google Ads Revenue Hits a Ceiling

All Shopify stores eventually hit the same Google Ads ceiling. Revenue caps, but the problem is not always your campaign settings, structure, or your ad creative.

Revenue usually hits a ceiling because most stores rely primarily on Search and Shopping, which are both demand capture channels.

What does that mean? Someone already wants a product and you show up for it, or they know about your product so they search and buy directly from you.

But if that is your whole growth plan, you are fighting over people who are already in-market. It’s a tiny pond with lots of fish elbowing each other for space. If fish had elbows.

How Demand Gen Finds New Customers

Demand Gen is different. I see it driving new incremental customers every day for our Shopify Google Ads clients. Demand Gen lets you get in front of people before they search, across Google’s visual surfaces like YouTube, Shorts, Discover, Gmail, and parts of the Display Network.

That matters because not every future customer wakes up and searches for your exact product. Sometimes people need to see the problem, the product in use, or be reminded they have been putting up with a bad solution for way too long. That is where Demand Gen fits.

This gem of a campaign type creates demand, warms up new buyers, and gives your brand more reach before the search happens.

And because it’s such a different strategy to create demand, many Google advertisers have no idea what to do. If you’ve run it before, you’ve probably wasted money. You launched it like a conversion campaign, slapped on a target CPA, judged it after three days, and then complained Google did not instantly find buyers hiding under the couch.

This setup shows you how to create and run Demand Gen the right way for your brand.

The 8-Step Process for Building a Demand Gen Campaign

Here’s the clean eight-step process.

1. Create the Campaign Without Guidance

First, create the campaign without guidance. The guided flow pushes you toward settings that aren’t ideal for ecommerce.

Choose Demand Gen as your campaign type.

2. Set Your Campaign Goal to Purchases

Second, set your campaign goal to purchases. Google optimises toward the goal you give it, so choose the one that pays the bills.

3. Connect Your Merchant Center Product Feed

Third, connect your Merchant Center product feed. This lets Google pull your Shopify product images, prices, and names into your ads. For ecommerce, this is one of the biggest Demand Gen advantages, and a lot of people miss it.

I suggest you select your best sellers, your best offers that have been proven to convert well that are optimised for Demand Gen, that I’ll soon show you.

Before you launch, Google has two special feed attributes you must use to make your feed in Demand Gen perform well.

The first is [lifestyle_image_link]. This gives Google a lifestyle image instead of only a product-on-white shot.

That matters on visual placements like Discover, YouTube, and Shorts, where a plain product image can feel like an ad among organic content. You want your Demand Gen ads to look organic so they perform better.

The second field is [short_title]. Your normal product title might be built for SEO or Shopping. That is fine. But in visual ads, a long title gets cut off. [short_title] gives Google a cleaner version to use when space is tight.

4. Leave the Target CPA Blank at Launch

Fourth, leave the target CPA blank at launch. Scary, yes. Surprising, yes. But don’t enter your cost-per-acquisition target into Google Ads yet. Set CPA too early and you can choke the campaign before it learns. Then it barely spends, barely collects data, and you call it broken.

That happens all the time. Another worthy tactic is setting the CPA 3x your target so it still delivers. Once conversions come in, you can step down the bid if CPA is high. Don’t step it down to your normal CPA that’s made of returning customers. Demand Gen is filled with new customers so be more lenient with a higher CPA bid.

5. Set a Starting Budget

Fifth, set a starting daily budget ideally two times your ideal Demand Gen CPA.

Even though you’re not entering a target CPA into Google yet, you still need an internal CPA benchmark. If your target CPA is around $60, start around $120 per day. I’ve seen $10 a day do fine, but it’s unpredictable because Google can’t learn.

6. Make Creative for the Placement

Sixth, make creative for the placement. This is a HUGE challenge and frustration for doing Demand Gen well and basically determines the whole campaign performance. How do I make native creatives? What creative do I make? You want creative for each placement. And yes, this is where the hard work is at and another reason why so few brands get new customers with the campaign.

The strategy for video is another whole YouTube video and challenge. But for now, the fastest tactic is to use your best Meta or TikTok ads. For images, get all over ChatGPT Image 2.0 or the latest image models if a newer one is out. You get crazy good images for Demand Gen this way. The trick is to prompt it to first study what makes great Demand Gen creative, then give it your website and the image dimensions you need.

Do not stretch one ad across every placement like a fitted sheet on the wrong mattress. Shorts need fast vertical creative. Images need to stop the scroll. Match the format to the placement and you give the campaign a much better chance to survive, to thrive, to scale the business.

7. Wait Before Touching the Target CPA

The seventh tactic for making Demand Gen work is to wait. That’s the hardest part about spending money on Google Ads. Give the campaign two to four weeks, or enough purchase data, before touching the target CPA. Once it has purchase signals, Google has something real to optimise from. That is when you go back in and add your target CPA.

Now you’re steering a campaign with buyer data behind it, instead of trying to control it before it has learned anything. That setup gives Demand Gen room to work before you start bossing it around.

Now you know how to get new buyers in Google Ads by building a Demand Gen campaign that gives Google room to find new buyers.

But that new demand is pouring water in a leaky bucket if you don’t capture it well. If you want a partner to build and run these campaigns properly for your store, take a look at how we handle Google Ads for Shopify brands.

Most Google Ads accounts get worse as they get more complicated.

After auditing over a thousand accounts, I’ve found simpler structures usually win. To prove that to you, one Shopify store we worked with grew revenue 59% after we simplified their account.

So I’ll show you exactly what we changed, why it worked, and how to use the same approach in your store.

Here’s the mistake that was holding them back…

The Over-Management Error Killing Google Ads for Shopify Stores

Like a lot of advertisers, they thought more campaigns, more segmentation, and more settings means more control. But the opposite is usually true.

It spreads the budget thin, starves Google of data, and makes optimization harder. This huge trap is what I call the over-management error. People keep adding complexity because it feels productive. It looks advanced. But what looks like control is often just noise.

That was exactly the problem in this client account.

How We Fixed It

First, we combined similar campaigns and grouped low-volume products together. Because there were fewer campaigns, it was simpler to understand and make budget decisions, and Google had more data to learn. Then we increased ROAS targets for those fewer campaigns.

We had the confidence to do that because we had clearer profit goals from the groups of products. That gave the account a cleaner structure, stronger signals, and far less wasted budget.

These changes doubled new customers and increased impressions and revenue. Their revenue jumped from $20K to $34K, and their store-wide conversion rate went up from 1.67% to 2.37%.

That’s a 59% increase in revenue from consolidating campaigns. Keep that 59% lift in mind, because the next few steps are exactly what made that possible.

Here’s how you can copy this for your store right now. It starts with a very simple question: is your account actually giving Google enough data to learn from?

Step 1: Audit Your Google Ads Account

Go into your account and ask these questions.

1. Are any campaigns driving fewer than 20 conversions a month? If yes, they’re too thin to give Google’s algorithm anything useful to learn from.
2. Do you have campaigns that show in the same searches because of similar products? Look at your search terms report. That splits your budget and confuses the algorithm.

That’s the aha: if a campaign never gets enough data to learn, it doesn’t matter how neatly you organized it.

If you answered yes to any of those, you’ve found your problem campaigns. Now you know what to pause and what to merge. That freed-up budget is what we’ll put to work in a moment.

Step 2: Choose the Right Campaign Type for Your Shopify Store

After auditing your account, the next question you need to be asking is: which campaign type should I choose? And this is where a lot of Shopify stores get pushed toward the wrong starting point.

Don’t Start With Performance Max

If you’re a Shopify store, my advice is to not start with Performance Max. It looks easy on the surface and you might think, “I can reach audiences across all of Google with a single campaign!” But that’s also the issue. It spreads your budget and leads to worse decision-making. You’re basically paying Google to guess. This is a killer if you’ve got a small budget.

Also, its extra settings and reporting leads to confusion, and you’re forced to use a smart bidding strategy of conversions or conversion value, which makes it a rough starting point for newer advertisers.

Start With a Shopping Campaign Instead

I recommend most Shopify stores have a solid Shopping campaign before bothering with anything else. Shopping is king for most Shopify stores because your products appear visually at the top of results, buyers are already in purchase mode when they search, and you can see exactly which products are profitable.

If you want the easier way, Shopping gives you more clarity, more control, and better visibility into what is actually working.

I’m not going to run through a full Shopping setup now. I did that recently in this Google Ads tutorial for Shopify that goes for almost two hours. But I do have some fast and easy wins to help you optimize your Shopping campaign to scale profitably. And this first one is the most overlooked revenue lever I know.

Step 3: Optimize Your Product Feed

Here’s the thing. A Shopping campaign is only as good as the product data feeding into it. It’s the part people skip because it isn’t sexy.

And the single biggest lever most Shopify stores are leaving untouched is their product titles.

Google reads your title to decide which searches your product shows up for. Most Shopify stores just use whatever title they put on their product page, which is usually written to sound good to a human, not so much to the search engine. That sounds harmless, but it creates a huge mismatch between what buyers type and what Google thinks you sell.

Real Data: What One Title Change Did

We wanted to see what effect title changes have even on a small store, so we tested this for a Shopify client. One store had 28K impressions and a conversion value of just under $7K. We optimised their product titles to include more relevant keywords and high-interest attributes. About four weeks later, from this one change, the result was a 46.1% increase in impressions and a 62.37% increase in conversion value.

That’s not a small tweak. That’s a completely different business outcome from the same ad spend.

Remember earlier when I said simple often beats advanced? This is exactly what I mean. One feed change can outperform a pile of fancy account tweaks.

The Product Title Formula

The fix is to front-load your titles with the words people actually search, but also include attributes Google needs to know exactly what your product is. If you have a well-known brand, the formula is: Brand + Product Type + Key Attributes.

So instead of “The Wanderer”, which tells Google nothing, you’d write “Kathmandu Wanderer Men’s Waterproof Hiking Jacket 3-in-1.” Now Google knows exactly what it is and who to show it to. Google immediately sees relevance. Buyers see their search reflected back at them. That’s what clearer data looks like.

The trick is making the title useful to the algorithm without making it awkward for the human. You’re writing for an algorithm and a human at the same time.

To make this simple, go through your top 10 products and rewrite their titles using that formula. You can pull query data from Google Search Console for each product page for real keyword ideas. That alone will often improve your match quality more than any bid adjustment will.

I’ve given you what I think is the biggest change to boost your revenue fast in feed data. But feed optimization gets more complicated, so I have a whole chapter of my book dedicated to it. Check that out if you need more help, along with a free downloadable checklist to help you optimize your feed.

Step 4: Limit Products and Focus Budget on Winners

Once Google better understands what you sell, the next step is making sure it doesn’t spread ad spend across products that never deserved the budget in the first place.

This is where a lot of Shopping campaigns start wasting money without the advertiser realizing it. In the beginning, grouping products together makes sense because you’re still trying to learn what works. But once the data starts showing you clear winners, that same setup can become a problem. What helped you early can end up holding you back later.

A common mistake is putting the entire store into one Shopping campaign and just leaving it there. I work with a store that has more than 50,000 products, and that gives you a good picture of how messy this can get. Think about what happens when all of those products compete inside one campaign. Your budget gets spread across everything, including products that were never likely to generate profit in the first place.

That means Google starts spending on weak products while your bestsellers get very little attention. Before the campaign has enough clean data to really understand what is working, the budget is already gone. Your winners are in the account, but they’re buried under too much noise.

Focus on Your Strongest Products

Once you have enough data to see clear bestsellers, stop treating every product equally. Narrow your Shopping focus to the products that have already proven themselves. These are the ones that already sell well, already show demand, or represent your strongest offer.

That doesn’t mean the rest of your catalog never matters. It means your budget stops pretending every product earned equal attention.

This matters because Google performs better when you give it cleaner signals. A product that already converts gives the system a much better chance of finding more buyers, faster.

To do this for your store, take your strongest products and create one ad group for each of them.

Then exclude the other products inside each ad group so that every ad group stays tightly focused on one winner. That keeps the budget concentrated instead of diluted across your whole catalog.

Now the campaign becomes much easier to control. You’re no longer feeding money into thousands of products that may never work. You’re giving more budget and more data to the products most likely to turn clicks into sales. That’s what makes scaling possible.

There’s another big advantage here too: clarity. Once the ads are running, you can see exactly what searches, clicks, and conversions are happening for each product. That makes optimization much easier because you’re not guessing which product is responsible for the result.

That’s the difference between looking organized and being profitable.

Step 5: Bidding Strategy (Don’t Jump to Automation Too Early)

This is another place where people make Google Ads harder than it needs to be. They jump into automated bidding before the account has enough data to make smart decisions. That sounds advanced, but early on, it means expensive guesswork. Google cannot optimize well if it does not yet know what a real buyer looks like.

Automation is not a shortcut to strategy. It’s an amplifier. If the inputs are weak, it just scales weak decisions faster.

So instead, start with Manual CPC and let the campaign prove itself first. That gives you more control, better visibility, and time to collect clean purchase data. Once you’re getting enough consistent purchase data, then automation starts to make a lot more sense.

Control first, data second, automation third. That order matters. Handing the keys to Google too early is one of the fastest ways to lose control of the account. But once the campaign has proven it can convert, automation can help you scale.

Step 6: Add Negative Keywords to Stop Wasting Ad Spend

The next tip is embarrassingly simple, but most beginners skip it completely and it’s one of the fastest ways to improve performance.

When Google decides which searches to show your Shopping ads for, it’s not perfect. You could be selling cat toys and end up paying for clicks from people searching for dog toys. Every irrelevant click is money that could have gone to someone who was actually going to buy.

Negative keywords are how you fix that. They tell Google which searches to block your ads from.

Go into your Search Terms Report and sort by Clicks, highest first. Scroll through and look for anything obviously wrong such as searches with no conversions that keep burning your budget. Add those as negatives.

From there, also think like your customer from day one.

If you don’t sell a certain brand, add it as a negative. If you sell weed killer, it might be a good idea to block certain other weed-related keywords. If you sell cat products but don’t sell other pet products, consider blocking the broader pet-related keywords. Build those lists before the wasted clicks happen.

My rule at our Shopify Google Ads agency is simple: I’ll pay for a bad search term once. Never twice. The moment I find an irrelevant query, it goes onto a shared negative keyword list that applies across every campaign. That way it’s blocked everywhere, immediately.

Done consistently, this alone can improve your click-through rate by 10–15% out of the gate. And a higher CTR means Google sees your ads as more relevant which lowers your cost per click over time. It compounds.

Step 7: Fix the Merchant Center Leaks Most Sellers Never Find

This last step is where most campaigns leak money without anyone noticing. Because sometimes the problem isn’t the search term. It’s the fact that shoppers see your ad and choose someone else.

Google needs to know why people should click your ad instead of your competitor’s. Google Merchant Center looks at a bunch of things to calculate click-through rate, but these are the 8 main ones:

• Pricing
• Merchant Center promotions (related to pricing)
• Shipping
• Returns
• Product reviews
• Seller ratings
• Browse experience
• Purchase experience

Each one is a lever you can pull. This is why two stores can sell nearly the same product and get completely different results from Google Ads.

A client selling cycling gear was nearly hidden for “men’s road bike.” Their product was solid. Their title was optimized. But they were losing clicks because their price was higher than the competitor above them, who also had strong review ratings. So we used pricing monitoring software, set floor prices for products, and fed that data automatically into the Shopify store and feed. Product pricing was automatically adjusted to stay competitive, yet profitable. Their click-through rate lifted significantly. Google picked up the improved engagement signals and their position moved up along with the volume of revenue.

This is removing friction. Imagine two stores selling nearly the same product. The one that feels cheaper, safer, faster to ship, and easier to return often wins the click before your campaign settings ever get a say.

Here’s something you can do right now. Log into your Merchant Center and go to Store Quality. You’ll see exactly where you’re falling short.

Maybe your return window is 14 days and competitors offer 30. Maybe your product reviews are thin. Pick the two biggest gaps. The ones that drive the most traffic get priority. Fix them.

Even if you’ve fixed everything in this article, you’re likely making some other mistake in your ad account that’s leaking profit.

To help you fix that, I’ve created a comprehensive tutorial doing a Google Ads account setup for a real brand from scratch.

When I first started Google Ads, I thought whoever spent more always won. But after 20 years doing Google Ads, I’ve made many small Shopify budgets under $50 a day become profitable. It usually comes down to six simple decisions.

In this article, I’ll show you the exact setup that gives a small Google Ads budget an edge.

1. Consolidate Campaigns to Stretch Your Google Ads Budget Further

A while ago I took over a small Shopify account spending about $10–$20 a day on Google Ads because I had some equity in the business. When I opened the account, I immediately saw the budget was sliced so thin that nothing had enough data to actually work.

And this is what happens in most small budget accounts. They’re overbuilt. Too many campaigns, ads in too many places, too many keywords, too many products. As a result, your budget gets diluted, the data becomes patchy at best, and nothing gets enough volume for Google to properly learn. It feels like you have more control, but in reality the account just creates little noise. Everything gets just enough to waste money, but not enough to make good decisions.

I see this a lot with Shopify stores. They launch Search, Shopping, Performance Max, Dynamic Search Ads, and branded splits before they even know what actually converts. Then they wonder why every campaign doesn’t scale.

So the first thing I did was simplify the structure. I paused the extra campaigns and rebuilt the account around just two campaigns: one Search campaign and one Shopping campaign. And I know that sounds almost too simple, but this structure works incredibly well when the budget is small.

Why? Because when you consolidate, two important things happen.

First, your budget backs the campaigns most likely to generate sales. Search and Shopping have been the most reliable Google Ads campaign types for decades because they capture people who are actively looking to buy.

If you run something like Performance Max on a tiny budget, your ads show across YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and other placements where people aren’t actively searching for your product. But Search and Shopping capture people at the bottom of the funnel; the people already looking for a solution and ready to spend money if your product fits.

The goal early on is not maximum reach. The first goal is to get great data for Google, which requires more concentrated budgets.

Secondly, and just as importantly, you learn faster too. You can see what ads work, what keywords waste money, and what products people search for.

So if you’re running a small budget, say $50 a day or less, go into your account and create one Search campaign and one Shopping campaign. Fold everything else into those campaigns, or pause them until you have consistent conversion volume.

The two-campaign setup finally gives your budget a real chance to work. But structure alone won’t save you if that money is still being spread across the wrong places. The next leak is where small budgets quietly get stretched so thin they never produce a clear winner.

2. Use Location Targeting to Focus Your Ad Spend

When your ad budget is small, you don’t need to reach. You need to spend your precious money on what’s most likely to bring in sales otherwise

Sporting teams will spend hundreds of millions on a single superstar because they know one game-changer is worth more than 10 average players just filling up the jerseys. So instead of trying to target everywhere, start where you can actually afford enough clicks to see patterns.

If you can, start small on location. Just because you can ship around the world does not mean you should advertise everywhere. By focusing on your best country you’re instantly cutting out hundreds of other countries that have their own lessons which would suck your ad spend dry.

Sometimes you can go even narrower. You can target a state or even a city where you know you ship fast and customers already buy. Your hometown is a good idea if the messaging on your website says you’re from the area, because people like to support locals.

So in your campaign settings, go to locations and choose your best performing country only. Cut locations down to your best-performing area first, or your easiest area to serve. If a lot more people buy locally, you can add your home state and city to the targeting in observation mode. This lets you see exactly how these people convert so you can make better decisions.

Once you stop trying to reach everyone, the next question becomes: who exactly should you pay to click? This is where your search campaign can either become a profit machine or an expensive guessing game.

3. Build Your Search Campaign Around Specific Keywords

Another good way to lock in on your superstar customer is through your search campaign. And this is where a lot of advertisers quietly burn money. They go after broad keywords and hope Google eventually figures out who their real buyers are.

Google won’t ever learn where your customers are if clicks go up, sales don’t, and your budget is tiny. This is about control. The more specific the search, the easier it is for Google to match you with the right person. And that’s how you stop wasting money on clicks that were never going to convert.

You can safely increase control at the ad group level because we’ve reduced the appearance of control at the campaign level in step 1. So the goal here is simple: build your search campaign around the exact phrases your best customers are most likely to type into Google. Once you do this, your search campaign stops being a general fishing expedition and starts being a sniper, only chasing the target you want.

There are two ways to find those phrases. The first is from your own data if you already have it. The second is by using your product page to generate ideas which is important even if you do already have data.

If you’ve run Google Ads before, pull up your search terms report. Then sort by conversions so the searches that actually led to sales rise to the top.

Those searches are gold. They’re not guesses. They’re the exact words real buyers used before purchasing from you. Take those search terms and add them as keywords in your campaign. Wrap them in square brackets so they’re exact match keywords. That tells Google to focus on those specific searches instead of drifting into loosely related traffic.

Now, some people hear “exact match” and think it’s too restrictive. On a small budget, restrictive is exactly the point. You’re not here to explore. You’re here to survive long enough to find what works.

But don’t stop there. I want you to do this next part whether your account is new or established. Take your bestselling product and copy the product page URL. Then plug that URL into an AI tool and ask it to scan the page and generate related search phrases people might type when they’re looking to buy that product.

This works because the tool can pull from the product features, positioning, use cases, and wording on the page and that usually gives you a much stronger list of specific search terms than just brainstorming from scratch. If your account is new, this gives you a starting point. If your account already has data, this helps you expand beyond what you’ve already found and uncover more specific searches worth testing.

Precision is everything with a small budget. Going broad and imprecise is a Google Ads budget killer. You need your campaign focused on the most relevant searches possible so Google learns faster and wastes less money on the wrong clicks.

That’s your search campaign focused on your superstars. But in Shopping, you can’t target keywords. So what do you do with your Shopping campaign in this two-campaign setup?

4. Limit Products in Your Shopping Campaign

Up to this point we’ve talked about structure, targeting, and keywords. But the next mistake is the one that quietly drains the most money from small Google Ads accounts and it usually happens inside the Shopping campaign.

Here’s where this gets dangerous for Shopify brands specifically. There’s a store I work with that has 50,000 products. Imagine all of that going into one campaign. A common mistake I see is advertisers putting their entire store into a single Shopping campaign. Very democratic. Very unprofitable.

When you advertise all of your products in Shopping, your budget gets spread across everything. Google will waste money on products that could never make you profit. Your bestsellers get no spend. And your budget disappears before the campaign has enough data to figure out what actually works.

Instead, you want to narrow the campaign down to your strongest products; the ones that already sell well, have clear demand, or represent your best offer. Start by choosing a small group of products to focus on. Your bestsellers are the safest place to start. These are products that have already proven people want them. They’re more likely to convert, which gives Google better signals much faster.

In your Shopping campaign, create one ad group for each of these products. You do this by excluding all other products at the ad group level.

Now your budget isn’t being diluted across your entire catalog. It’s concentrated on a smaller group of items with the highest chance of generating sales. When your ads run, you’ll be able to see exactly what searches and conversions are happening for each product. This is one big advantage that Shopping has.

Later, once you’ve found products that consistently generate sales, you can expand. But in the beginning, focus wins.

So now your structure is tighter, your targeting is tighter, your keywords are tighter, and your product focus is tighter. You can still burn money if the wrong people click your ads. This next step prevents bad clicks before they cost you a dollar.

5. Pre-Qualify Clicks With Your Ad Headlines

Let’s say your campaign is getting clicks, but those clicks aren’t turning into sales. There could be a simple reason for this: you’re paying for people who were never going to buy in the first place. And if the wrong people are clicking your ads, nothing else in the account really matters. Your cost to get a customer climbs, good data gets harder to find, and you end up changing budgets, bids, and structure when the real problem was the click quality all along.

This is one of the reasons a higher CTR can actually be a bad sign.

A lot of the time, the problem is hiding in plain sight, it’s in the headline people see before they click. If the headline is too broad, too vague, or too curiosity-driven, it pulls in people who were never a fit in the first place.

Things like “Shop Now”, “Best Gifts for Her”, “Premium Quality Activewear”, “Official Store Online”. Those headlines might get clicks, but they don’t do enough to filter who the click is coming from. They don’t screen out the wrong clicks.

So the fix is to qualify the click in the headline. That might be price, like “Dresses from $89”, location, like “Ships Australia Wide”, audience, like “Plus Size Only”, or a buying condition, like “Order by 2pm for Same Day Send”.

Now the shopper can tell much faster whether the ad is for them. Someone looking for a cheaper option might skip it. Someone outside your delivery area might skip it. That’s exactly what you want. You’re trying to get the right click.

If needed, pin that qualifier in Headline 1 so it always shows because if it gets pushed down, the wrong people can still click before they see it.

So today, add one hard qualifier to Headline 1, or pin it to position 2 if it’s really critical. Then watch how your click-through rate, your cost to acquire a customer, and conversion rate respond over the next month.

Your click-through rate might drop, but that’s fine. In fact, sometimes a lower CTR is the first sign your ads are getting healthier. Once the wrong people stop clicking, your spend gets cleaner, your data gets stronger, and the campaign gets a much better shot at becoming profitable.

6. Optimize Aggressively and Cut Losers Early

I’ve got an optimization tip that helps so much when you’re on a tight budget. Most brands wait too long to cut losers. They keep spending like the campaign is about to turn a corner — out of gratitude, or because they don’t want to reset learning. Meanwhile, the parts of the account that are actually working stay underfunded.

Every extra dollar you leave in a loser is a dollar you’re not putting into something already proving it can bring in sales.

So the rule is simple: cut losers early, then move that spend into what is already producing conversions or ROAS.

For example, if one ad group has spent $150 and still hasn’t produced a sale, while another is already converting, the answer is not to keep being patient with the loser. The answer is to stop starving the winner. Now this could also be more narrow at the keyword level, which you need to investigate.

Here’s how to apply this right now. Every week, sort by spend and look for anything that has spent enough money to justify a result but still hasn’t produced conversions. Look at the keywords. It can be ad groups. It can be mobile versus desktop users. It can be products in Shopping. Pause it or reduce it. Don’t keep giving it a bit more time just because it feels promising.

Then shift that budget into what’s already showing it can convert. This is how you go from a small budget to making good profit.

A small Google Ads budget isn’t a disadvantage, it’s a forcing function that makes you focus on what actually works. Apply these six decisions and you’ll be ahead of most accounts spending ten times more.

With so many new features being released, you’ve likely got your campaigns set up the wrong way. Follow this deep-dive Shopify Google Ads tutorial showing you a complete setup for a brand I created. It reveals best practices so your Google Ad account drives more sales from the start.

If you only have a Google Ads Performance Max campaign for your ecommerce store, you’re missing sales. There’s a right way to run Performance Max that’s working great for my Shopify Google Ads clients after testing dozens of setups.

In this article, I’ll show you a simple strategy that consistently performs better and it only takes a few minutes to do.

Why Running Only One Performance Max Campaign Is Costing You

People see Performance Max and say, “Ooh, I can reach audiences across all of Google with a single campaign! Sounds great!” And to be fair, that’s exactly why so many smart store owners buy into it.

But this leads to lazy thinking and poor results.

Performance Max distributes your budget evenly like your Year 2 PE teacher giving everyone a participation medal whether you did well or not. This happens in all campaigns, but it’s chronic in Performance Max.

When you make this mistake, you donate Google your profits on a silver platter. And the frustrating part is, it usually doesn’t look broken.

We had a client with this exact issue. Within a couple of months of us coming on board, they started hitting targets again with uncapped budgets.

The surprising thing is that established stores can fall into the same mistake. The store I just mentioned had a decade’s worth of data. And that’s important, because this isn’t a lack-of-data problem. It’s a Google ad setup problem.

The Fix: Separate High-Intent from Low-Intent Searches in Google Ads Performance Max

The good news is there’s a simple fix that’s fast to do. The key change is separating high-intent searches from low-intent searches. But keep reading until the end, because there’s a tricky gotcha to avoid.

High-intent searches like your brand name, the brands you stock, or specific product attributes that have historically performed well, are bottom-of-funnel searches. That means they’re close to or ready to buy.

So they need to be in their own dedicated campaign. By doing this, you can control spend for these higher-value searches.

And this is the key point: high-intent and low-intent searches should not be competing inside the same budget, because they’re not doing the same job. That’s the structural mistake. So let me show you exactly how to fix this without creating overlap or starving the wrong campaign.

The 8-Step Performance Max Strategy

Step 1: Review Your Search Terms and Identify High-Intent Queries

Review all search terms from all your campaigns, live and paused, and identify any that drove conversions from high-intent searches. You can eyeball this data yourself or use a Google Ads script to extract it. Take note of the conversion value/cost these high-intent searches achieved.

This gives you the list of queries that have already proven they deserve special treatment.

Step 2: Add High-Intent Terms to a Negative Keyword List

Add these terms to a negative keyword list named “High Intent.” Wrap the searches in square brackets so they’re exact match. That exact match detail matters, because then you’re only including the high-converting searches.

Step 3: Create a Second Shopping Campaign

Assuming you’ve only been running one Performance Max or Shopping campaign, create a second Shopping campaign. I recommend Standard Shopping. And yes, there’s a reason I’m bringing Standard Shopping into a Performance Max strategy in 2026. This is where it earns its place.

Step 4: Separate Low-Intent Searches into Their Own Negative Keyword List

Review all search terms from your original campaign that’s been running both low and high intent. Filter out all the high-intent terms. Save the low-intent terms to a new negative keyword list, exact match, and name it “Low Intent Queries #1.”

At this point, you’ve effectively separated the two intent buckets. Now we need to make sure Google treats them differently.

Step 5: Set Target ROAS Bidding for Both Campaigns

Set the bidding strategy as Target ROAS for both campaigns. Make your original campaign the High Intent campaign and set it at the historical conversion value/cost achieved by those high-intent searches. For the Low Intent campaign, set it slightly below that.

That way, your strongest searches are held to the standard they’ve already shown they can hit, while the lower-intent traffic has room to explore without dragging everything down.

Step 6: Set Campaign Priorities

Set campaign priorities: High Intent = low priority; Low Intent = high priority. This is one of those counterintuitive settings that makes more sense once you see how the next step directs the traffic.

Step 7: Apply Negative Keyword Lists to the Right Campaigns

Apply the negative keyword lists correctly. Apply the “Branded/High Intent” list to the Low Intent campaign. Apply the “Low Intent Queries #1” list to the High Intent campaign.

Get this part right and you’ve funnelled traffic to the right places. Get it wrong and the traffic will leak across campaigns.

Step 8: Apply a Shared Budget and Avoid This Common Gotcha

Apply a shared budget across both campaigns. This is the gotcha I mentioned earlier.

A common mistake is trying to “game” the setup by giving the Low Intent campaign a smaller or separate budget. When that budget runs out, low-intent searches not yet added as negatives can spill into your High Intent campaign.

Using a shared budget early ensures High Intent traffic isn’t diluted. Later, as you refine negatives and performance stabilises, you can split budgets.

So early on, don’t optimise for control at the cost of clean traffic separation. Protect the structure first.

Keeping the System Getting Smarter Over Time

Once live, refine negatives as searches come in and monitor results. Even strong accounts take time to ramp up. How do you refine negatives? Use the method from Step 1.

That’s what keeps the system getting smarter over time: you’re continuously teaching each campaign what belongs where.

And once you’ve done this, Performance Max stops acting like a black box and starts behaving more like a controlled growth channel.

Now you’re using Google Ads Performance Max the right way, splitting out high-intent from low-intent searches. But there are still dozens of other ways Google Ads can chew up your budget without you realising it. This is only one leak. To fix the rest, read my next article on the biggest and most common Google Ads budget drainers and how to plug them.

Most beginners start Google Ads with Performance Max and lose money fast. Google’s own app in Shopify encourages you to do it.

After 20 years managing and teaching Google Ads, I’ve found beginners get better results starting with one much simpler campaign first. In this guide, I’ll show you the best Google Ads campaign for beginners in 2026 including what to set up, what to skip, and exactly why.

Why Performance Max Is a Terrible Starting Point for Google Ads Beginners

To start, you need to understand why Performance Max is a terrible campaign choice for beginners.

First, you never actually learn how to do Google Ads yourself because too much of it is automated. It’s great for getting going fast, but terrible for learning.

Second, your store is unlikely to grow because your tiny budget is spread thin across all the places where ads show such as YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail, and other placements.

The problem with these placements for a lot of stores is people aren’t actively searching for your product there. They are demand generation, not demand capture.

Demand generation should become a main part of your strategy later on, but as a beginner store you’ve got to focus on easier sales.

The Better Way to Start Google Ads: Choose a Search Campaign

So here’s the new and better way.

First, go to ads.google.com and sign up if you haven’t already. Second, create a new campaign and create a campaign without guidance.

This is where beginners mess up. They see Performance Max and say “ooh, I can reach audiences across all of Google with a single campaign!” No. With small Google Ads budgets, you need to focus your ad spend, your effort, and give Google the data it needs to learn fast. That rules out most campaign types, which have their use for more advanced setups.

The honorary mention is Shopping, which is the other bread-and-butter campaign type for most ecommerce businesses. There are plenty of other videos teaching you how to do Shopping. But this single campaign setup gives you control.

So choose a Search campaign. These types of ads show on top of Google Search results with your website, a text header, description, reviews and return policy, links to your website. You’ve seen them before, unless you’ve been living under a rock.

Step-by-Step Google Ads Campaign Setup for Beginners

Conversion Goal: Purchases

For your conversion goal, select Purchases. Skip the next screen.

Campaign Name

Give your campaign a name. “Search general” or “Search primary” are great names. If you’re only targeting one country, add that too.

Bidding

In Bidding, I recommend choosing Conversion value. You can add a specific target later when you’re ready.

Campaign Settings: Networks

Uncheck Google Display Network. This is a Search campaign, so we don’t want other display ads confusing the data. Leave Google Search Partners Network unchecked as this gives campaigns the best chance of Google Ads success for beginners.

Locations

Put the locations you sell to here. If you sell worldwide, just put in your best performing country so your budget doesn’t get spread thin. Don’t miss the hidden dropdown. Make sure you select Presence to only target people in those regions.

Language should match the language of your ads.

EU Political Ads & Broad Match Keywords

For EU political ads, select NO.

If you see Broad match keywords, select Off.

Audience Segments

I recommend a 4 primary audience setup to begin with, which I cover in my longer Google Ads tutorial. You can add those in later.

More Settings & AI Max

For More settings, leave these as standard.

Avoid AI Max settings like the plague as a beginner. It’s an advanced strategy.

Skip the rest of that.

Keyword Strategy for Google Ads Beginners

For keyword and asset generation, you can use Shopify’s built-in AI tool to get keyword suggestions, or plug in your product page to ChatGPT and ask for suggestions.

Either way, I recommend you start with your best selling products and the main keywords that are used for those products.

Exact Match Keywords

Wrap each of the keyword phrases in square brackets to get exact match keywords. They’re the most precise of the 3 keyword types. You want this for control. Seeing a pattern here?

Phrase Match Keywords

For beginners I also suggest 1–2 phrase match keywords, wrapping your best keyword for your product in apostrophes. This is one step broader and makes your ads appear for searches with a word before or after the phrase, like “best dog toy feeder” or “dog feeder reviews”.

Do not upgrade your keywords to broad match. That’s an advanced strategy.

Writing Google Ads Copy: Use a Custom GPT

For actually creating the ads, use this custom GPT I built. You can access it for free here.

Let’s say I’m selling a dog toy footy feeder. I take the product URL, plug it into the GPT, choose brand tone, add some keywords to target, and it gives me some great ad copy. I’ll still need to check and refine them, but it’s already done that heavy lifting for me and given me different angles to work with.

I recommend starting with 4 headlines and 2 descriptions. One headline is keyword rich, another headline is a question, the other two are benefits. Make your descriptions benefit and feature rich. For both headlines and descriptions, stick to title case which the GPT I created for you does automatically.

Ad Extensions, Budget, and Publishing Your First Google Ads Campaign

Business Name and Ad Extensions

Business name is set at the account level.

Create at least 4 sitelink extensions,

6 callouts,

and 3 or more structured snippet extensions.

Setting Your Budget

Budget depends. Be aware that Google may spend up to 2x the daily budget you set here, but it won’t exceed your monthly budget.

Publish! Well done and congratulations. Take a big breath and give yourself a pat on the back.

Making Changes After Publishing

You can change any of the campaign settings by clicking the cogwheel next to the campaign, or the budget here.

You can also add more ad group themes inside your campaign. Just keep it to one theme per ad group.

Once you’ve set up a great Search campaign, you then face the next problem of rising ad competition and high ad costs. Getting your first campaign live is just the beginning. Read this next article on how staying profitable is the real game.

If your Google Ads aren’t scaling your Shopify store, you’re making one of these 8 mistakes. After managing hundreds of millions for brands, I’ve seen the same patterns over and over. These are the biggest reasons why Google Ads don’t work and exactly how to fix them.

This first mistake is so common that I estimate 7 out of 10 Shopify brands are doing it right now.

Mistake 1: Your Account Is Too Fragmented

Most brands think more campaigns means more control. But in reality, it usually does the opposite.

It splits the budget, thins out the data, and leaves every campaign too weak to build momentum. So the account looks organized on the surface, but underneath, nothing is getting enough signal to really learn.

We saw this in one account that looked clean at first glance. Lots of neatly separated campaigns. But when we looked closer, each one was pulling in barely enough conversion data to make useful decisions. So performance stayed flat. Not because the offer was bad, but because the structure was too fragmented.

Once we simplified the account and combined similar campaigns, things moved fast.

Revenue went from $20K to $32K. Conversion rate jumped from 1.67% to 2.37%.

That’s the key lesson.

The algorithm cannot optimize around signals it barely receives. If every campaign is underfed, you are not creating control. You are creating hesitation.

How to Fix a Fragmented Google Ads Account

First, look for campaigns that are too thin to produce meaningful learning. If you have a bunch of campaigns bringing in barely any conversions each month, that is your first red flag.

Second, combine similar campaigns. Group low-volume products together. Stop splitting campaigns over tiny differences unless you have enough conversion data to justify that separation.

For most stores, simpler is the better starting point.

Usually that means one tight Search campaign, or a Search campaign paired with a Shopping campaign.

If you are running Shopping, keep products grouped until clear winners emerge.

If you are running Search, keep it centered around one clear offer, one theme, and one strong intent.

Now, you might be thinking: “But isn’t segmentation more advanced?” Only when the data supports it. Because advanced structures without enough data are not sophisticated. It’s just a pig with lots of makeup on.

So the rule is simple: don’t segment because it feels advanced. Segment when the data proves you should.

That’s how you give campaigns enough room to learn. And once you fix that, the next question becomes: how do you make expensive clicks work when you lose money on them?

Mistake 2: You’re Bidding in the Most Expensive Auctions

This is another mistake that quietly drives up costs fast.

A lot of brands go after the most obvious keywords. “Buy dog food.” “Best collagen powder.” “Face cream for women.” Those convert. That’s the reason people are bidding on them. They are bottom-of-funnel searches. But they are also where the auction is most crowded, competition is fiercest, and clicks are often the most expensive.

So if that is your entire keyword strategy, you are marching straight into the most crowded auction on Google with a giant sign that says, “Hi, I would like to overpay now.”

The smarter move is to go one step up the funnel. Instead of targeting only the product someone wants, target the problem that makes them want it in the first place.

For example, a lot of brands want to show up for “buy dog food.” But the better opportunity might be: What should I feed my dog? It’s a “what” search — cheaper, still packed with intent, and closer to the real reason someone starts looking in the first place.

Skincare examples: Why am I breaking out all of a sudden? Why am I always tired? How to fix dry skin at home?

Those are not random information searches. They are often the first signal of a buyer entering the market.

How to Find Lower-Competition, High-Intent Keywords

Start with your Search Terms report. Look at what people are actually typing. Then use Google Search Console and Google Ads Keyword Planner to find real customer questions around the problem.

Focus especially on phrases that begin with: how, why, when. Those are often problem-aware searches. The person may not be ready to type in the product yet, but they are already looking for a solution.

Once you find those searches, do not dump them into the same generic ad groups as your buy-now terms. Build campaigns or ad groups around those problem themes instead. Keep the messaging tight to the question they are asking.

There is one mistake people make here all the time: they start targeting top-of-funnel keywords, but they forget to change what they ask those clicks to do.

Mistake 3: Your Landing Page Breaks the Conversation

A lot of stores get the click and then waste it.

Someone searches for a specific problem, clicks your ad, then lands on a generic product page that doesn’t continue the conversation. That kills scale. Think of the click as a conversation. If the landing page replies with something unrelated, that conversation dies awkwardly.

If someone searches “benefits of acupressure mat,” the page should feel like the natural next step. It should speak to the problem, build trust, and then position the product as the solution. Not just dump them onto a page and hope.

So the fix is simple: match the landing page to the search as tightly as possible. If the search is problem-based, the page should open by addressing that problem directly.

A very simple structure is:

1. Match the intent in the headline
2. Explain the problem clearly
3. Add proof or credibility
4. Introduce the solution
5. Make the next step obvious

This is also why one ad group per landing page or theme works so well. It forces tighter alignment between the keyword, the ad, and the page. Your landing page should not feel like a plot twist. It should feel like the next sentence.

This next tip reveals how a lot of advertisers get tricked by their own metrics and end up losing profit because of it.

Mistake 4: Your Ads Attract Clicks Instead of Buyers

More clicks does not automatically mean better ads. Sometimes the better ad actually gets fewer clicks, because it is attracting the right people.

For example, a more specific headline might lower CTR slightly but improve conversion rate and cost to acquire a customer, because it filters out low-intent clicks before they happen.

And that feels wrong at first. If hearing “lower CTR” makes you nervous, good. That’s exactly why this mistake is so common. Because most people write ads like they are trying to be liked by everyone. But good ads do not do that. Good ads say no. They tell the right person, “this is for you,” and the wrong person, “keep scrolling.” That is what qualification looks like.

To increase profit, rewrite your ads and assets to filter; not to attract everyone.

Use qualifiers that make the offer clear upfront. The easiest ones are: price, discount, audience, location, product category. For example: Starts at $25. Up to 50% Off. For Remote Executives. Designed for Sensitive Skin.

Those lines may reduce clicks a little. Good. That means fewer unqualified people are clicking through and wasting your budget.

But remember, the ad still has to match the landing page. If the ad promises something specific and the page turns broad or generic, click quality drops fast. The conversation breaks, and so does performance.

A lower CTR is not always bad. If the traffic converts better, that ad is doing its job. And that brings us to one of the most expensive mindset mistakes in Google Ads.

Mistake 5: You Obsess Over CPC Instead of Profit

A lot of brands panic when cost-per-clicks rise. But cheaper traffic is not the goal. Profit is the goal.

Expensive clicks don’t scare strong businesses. They expose weak ones.

At the end of the day, your ability to scale comes down to three numbers: how much you make from a customer, how often people convert, and how much it costs to get them to click. That is it. A click is only expensive relative to how much value your business can pull out of it.

Because if your AOV and conversion rate are strong, you can afford clicks that weaker competitors simply cannot. And that is where scaling actually happens.

Start asking: “How do I make each click worth more?”

There are three main ways to do that.

1. Improve Conversion Rate

Make the page clearer. Build more trust. Remove friction. If more visitors buy, every click becomes more valuable.

2. Improve AOV

Use bundles, upsells, and post-purchase offers. Change your product line so customers naturally buy more.

3. Improve Email

A lot of visitors will not buy on the first click. But if they come back later through good email flows, that original click becomes more valuable than it looked at first.

That is the real scaling mindset. But there is a way that scaling can go wrong fast.

Mistake 6: Your Store Doesn’t Convert Cold Traffic Well Enough

Google Ads sends a lot of first-time visitors. So if your store only works for people who already know you, scaling gets capped fast.

A lot of brands think they have a traffic problem, when really they have a page that does not do enough to convert cold visitors. Because cold traffic needs more. It needs a clear value proposition. Strong visuals. Reviews. Trust signals. And a checkout that feels easy and safe.

Even something simple like adding PayPal, Apple Pay, and Google Pay can reduce hesitation because it makes the whole experience feel more legitimate.

So audit your page like a first-time buyer. When someone visits for the first time, what do they see in the first 3 seconds? Visit one of your pages used in Google Ads and give yourself 3 lazy seconds to figure out what’s going on. Do you know what it is, why it matters, why you should trust them, and what to do next? That’s the 3-second stranger test.

If the traffic is broader or more problem-aware, do not force it straight onto a standard product page. In those cases, a dedicated landing page often works better because it can educate first, then sell.

A lot of scaling problems are not really traffic problems. They are first-impression problems.

Now, if you can do this next point, you will have made it in ecommerce.

Mistake 7: You Haven’t Increased Customer Value

I remember looking at one ad account and thinking, this should be scaling harder than it is. The ads were working. CPA was acceptable. The conversion rate was decent. On paper, it looked fine.

But revenue was at a ceiling for years.

When I dug deeper, the problem became obvious. The business was doing almost nothing after the first sale. Poor emails. Poor product strategy. When I dug through unpublished reviews, I saw poor customer experience. They were paying to acquire customers and then just stopping there.

That is the real point here. Stores that scale are not only good at getting the first sale. They are good at increasing what each customer is worth.

And that extra value can come from a few simple places: bundles, one-click upsells, emails, customer experience. But the biggest one is improving your product line, because your products directly relate to lifetime value.

If one store makes more per customer, it can afford to scale harder. It can bid more aggressively, absorb higher CPCs, and stay profitable.

So do not just look at what happens before the add-to-cart. Look at what happens after it. Do you have a one-click upsell in Shopify? If not, install an app like Zipify’s OneClickUpsell or Rebuy and add one.

Are customers genuinely loving your product? Do you look after all customers? There’s so much you can do for retention. And the good news is, this does not require some massive breakthrough. Even a modest lift in average order value can change how aggressively you can bid.

Because the brand that scales hardest is often not the one getting the cheapest customer. It is the one making each customer worth more.

Remember how I mentioned hitting a ceiling? That’s what this next mistake is about.

Mistake 8: Google Ads Don’t Work at Scale If You’re Not Generating New Demand

Every Shopify brand doing Google Ads hits a ceiling at some point. You keep pushing Search and Shopping harder, but those campaigns mostly capture demand that already exists. They do not create it.

The problem is, by only showing up once someone is already searching, your growth is capped by however many people are already in the market.

I saw this in one account where Search was performing fine, but scale kept stalling. Every time we pushed harder, CPCs rose, efficiency tightened, and growth flattened. The problem was not the account structure. The problem was that I was trying to harvest demand the brand had never created.

Search is a harvest channel. YouTube and Demand Gen campaigns help plant the field.

Demand Gen and YouTube campaigns let you get in front of people before they search. Before they know your brand. Before they are comparing options. You are not just waiting for intent anymore. You are helping create it.

That matters because once more people know you, Search gets stronger too. Branded search lifts. Retargeting improves. Conversion paths get easier.

Do not treat Search as your only growth engine. Use Demand Gen and YouTube to reach cold audiences earlier, build awareness, and create the demand that Search can later capture.

Don’t forget to download the checklist to find and fix the most common Google Ads mistakes stopping your Shopify store from scaling.

Even if you avoid all these mistakes, Google Ads has a bunch of default settings that suck ad spend if you don’t change them. Read the next article for the top tips to improve your Google Ads performance and stop leaking budget there too.

One Google Ads habit quietly drains more budget than bad keywords. After doing thousands of audits, I still see brands doubling down on it. In this article, I’ll show you that habit and the top 3 Google Ads budget killers for 2026 and how to save Shopify stores money by fixing them fast.

First up is the fastest win that stops bad clicks before they ever cost you a dollar.

Budget Killer #1: Paying for Traffic That Was Never Going to Convert

Let’s say you’ve got a new Google Ads campaign, ad group, or asset group, and your ads are getting clicks but those clicks aren’t turning into sales. The reason is likely that you’re paying for traffic that was never going to convert.

The greatest factor for conversion rate is the source of traffic and how qualified those visitors are. And there’s a hidden influence on this that isn’t keywords.

If the wrong people are clicking your ads, nothing else in your account matters.

Your CPA shoots up and confidence in the campaign drops.

This is exactly what was happening for an established client of ours during their End of Financial Year sale. Broad, generic headlines like “Get a Free Quote” or “Best Deals Today” aren’t attracting the best people. I could have been attracting even more buyers by using some special trigger words.

When sale periods like Black Friday spike your costs, you can’t afford to buy traffic. You have to go after buyers. This is how you win with a small Google Ads budget.

The Fix: Pre-Qualify Clicks with Ad Copy

Here’s the simple change I made that fixed it. I pinned a clear sales message in Headline 1 — “Up to 50% Off EOFY Sale” — that filtered for intent and created urgency.

Sounds crazy simple, right? It is.

The result was a lower CTR, from 6.4% to 5.61%, and a lower CPA, from $13.13 to $11.28.

But here’s the big one. This headline improved conversion rate from 4.76% to 6.29%.

The extra bonus is improved revenue too, shown by the difference in ad spend and ROAS. The only reason that number isn’t higher is it was added late and didn’t get the same ad spend as the previous one.

Now, this doesn’t just apply to sale periods. Fewer, better-qualified clicks always leads to higher conversions. The trick is in how you qualify interested shoppers, as that depends on who you’re targeting.

How to Apply This to Your Store Now

1. Add a qualifier in your headline. Some good qualifiers are pricing, location, discount, or audience demographic. For example, “Starts at $25” or “For Remote Executives”.

2. Optional: Pin that headline to position 1, or another position that makes sense for the flow of the copy.

3. Compare CTR, CPA, and conversion rate after 5–7 days. Even if CTR drops, the clicks will be higher quality, so CPA should lower and conversion rate should increase. The bonus is that total revenue sometimes jumps too.

That’s a quick win. This next part is where most brands accidentally make things worse because after fixing click quality, they fall straight into that silent budget-killing habit I mentioned at the start.

Budget Killer #2: Too Many Campaigns Starve Google of Data

Many marketers think more campaigns equals more control. Sorry to break it to you… it doesn’t. It often leads to worse decision making.

Too many campaigns spreads your budget thin. Your results become patchy, you can’t tell what’s working, and nothing seems consistent.

When campaigns get less than 20 conversions per month, Google struggles to learn. This is the silent killer. Too many campaigns starve Google of good data and destroy its ability to make good decisions.

We had a client with this exact issue. They tried splitting out more campaigns to “get control”. They basically ended up with one campaign per product and location. After getting confused at the poor results, they called in the experts.

The Fix: Consolidate Campaigns for Cleaner Data and Better Results

This is how we fixed the problem to scale their Shopify store.

First, we combined similar campaigns, such as branded and non-branded, and grouped low-volume products together. Because there were fewer campaigns, it was simpler to understand and make budget decisions, and it gave Google more data to learn.

Then we increased ROAS targets for those fewer campaigns, which doubled new customers and increased impressions and revenue. We had the confidence to do that because we had clearer profit goals from the groups of products.

Their revenue jumped from $20K to $34K.

Not only that, but the store-wide conversion rate went up from 1.67% to 2.37%.

That’s a 59% increase in revenue from consolidating campaigns.

Do you see how merging smaller campaigns gets you better traffic ready to buy?

More campaigns doesn’t equal more control. More campaigns can worsen Google’s learning, scatter your budget, and confuse your decisions.

How to Apply This to Your Store Now

1. Audit your campaigns. Note any driving less than 20 conversions per month.
2. Combine audiences, locations, product groups, or keywords into a smaller number of well-structured campaigns. An important one is branded vs non-branded keywords.
3. Reallocate budgets to those consolidated campaigns to help Google learn faster.

Even once you consolidate campaigns, Shopify stores often hit a ceiling if they stop here. Don’t. This next unlock compounds your revenue fast.

Budget Killer #3: Your Best Products Are Being Held Back

Let’s say you’ve got a Shopping or Performance Max campaign running all your products, but most of the sales come from just 2 or 3 items. The issue is that Google fixates on products that convert early — so products with great potential or a high lifetime value rarely get seen. Your best products can be held back.

We’ve had many clients come to us with this very problem. They tried adding more budget to the same campaign, hoping those forgotten products would catch up.

Nope. Still poor ad impressions. They tried running all products together with equal weight.

But at scale, this destroys profit because products have different margins.

The Fix: Segment and Scale Top-Performing Products

Instead, we segmented “Top Sellers” into a dedicated campaign by tagging high performers. Then we gave them more visibility, tighter and more persuasive copy, and better bidding.

The result for one client was a huge 173.24% increase in revenue as conversions increased from 39 to 89 over the same period of time.

When you group all your products together, your best ones get held back. You don’t need more products, you just need to let your stars shine while giving others a chance.

How to Apply This to Your Store Now

1. Isolate the losers. View products by title, type, or brand. Then group the ones with low impressions and clicks.
2. Identify top-performing products by ROAS, revenue, or conversions. Tag them as “Top Sellers”.

3. Move those into a separate campaign with their own budget and bidding by having a filter at the campaign level. Or you can exclude the products at the listing group level for Performance Max —

— or at the product group level for a Shopping campaign.

4. Scale that top-seller campaign as the products prove themselves to really let them shine.

Make sure you get your free Google Ads profit checklist. After you fix these 3 things, the scariest thing about Google Ads right now is a bunch of default settings that are quietly sucking ad spend. To fix that problem too, check out my other article covering all of my quick top tips to improve your Google Ads performance.

Most AI-written Shopify articles and collections never rank. But after testing dozens of AI workflows, we made one that consistently pushes pages to number one in Google. In this video, I’ll walk you through the exact prompts so you can copy them for your store.

The Shortcut to Finding Rankable Keywords

Here’s where most store owners kill their SEO before it even starts. They guess keywords or trust a tool without context but that’s like throwing darts blindfolded. Every miss costs time, money, and momentum.

We saw this firsthand with a client of ours, TrueTrac. They have two flagship products. No giant catalog.

Everyone says you need a lot of products or a massive content budget to rank high.

Instead, we flipped the script. We started by finding three problem-based keywords their customers were already searching for. But here’s the twist: when we checked Google, the top results weren’t blogs at all. They were collection pages.

So we built collection pages as well by following the exact AI prompts you can get by downloading the free resource at the start of this article.

This instantly created SEO-optimized content that ranked them first for entirely new search terms.

This generated hundreds of free clicks made up of people ready to buy because problem-based searches convert.

Here’s the real lesson: SEO isn’t about churning out content. It’s about matching searcher intent. This is what Google loves.

How to Find Low-Competition Keywords Step by Step

Here’s how you do it:

Step 1: Grab a product or collection name from your store.

Step 2: Plug it into Ahrefs or Semrush.

No subscription? Install the free Shopify app SEO Expert: Digital Darts and open Search Performance. It shows the Google Search Console queries your store already gets impressions for, and anything ranking below position ten there is a keyword you can win without paying for a tool.

Step 3: Filter for KD 0–10 and domains under DR 10. Translation: look for terms where small sites already win.

Step 4: Search them in Google. If the top results are collections, don’t waste time writing a blog. Build a collection page.

Now you’ve got your first batch of SEO-ready topics without writing 50 random blog posts. But keywords alone don’t rank. The structure of your page makes or breaks it and this is where AI gives you an unfair advantage.

How to Use AI to Rank: Structured Content Right From the First Draft

Most people still grind away at SEO articles the old way, typing for hours, rewriting paragraphs, and praying Google notices. And then… nothing. Their post disappears on page five, buried, never to be seen. That’s not just frustrating. It’s wasted traffic, wasted time, and in many cases, lost revenue.

For TrueTrac, we tested dozens of different AI workflows. Most of them looked good on paper, but the drafts still flopped in search. Until we cracked a system that completely changed the game. Instead of fighting Google, we built custom GPTs that structure content exactly how Google wants it.

And for collection pages? Google doesn’t want fluff. It wants precise answers to exact queries. That shift alone cut our build time for collections from 2 hours to 20 minutes.

Here’s how it works. Say I want to rank a collection for “baby summer dresses”. Instead of guessing or outlining from scratch, I just drop that phrase straight into the GPT.

In seconds, it generates a clean draft that’s already optimized for structure and search intent. You can even test it yourself. I’ve linked free versions of both the article GPT and the collection GPT in the downloadable resource at the start of this article.

At that point, all I have to do is skim for details and polish. And just like that, I’ve got traffic-ready content without the grind.

That’s the raw power of AI workflows. But here’s the catch (and this is where most people fail). A perfectly structured draft won’t rank if you stop here. And that’s where the next step comes in.

Don’t Hit Publish After Draft One

Hitting publish after draft one is the single biggest SEO mistake. It’s why so many posts sit lifeless on page five, invisible to anyone searching.

Every time you skip this step, you’re basically handing free traffic to your competitors.

We refused to let that happen at TrueTrac. Instead of stopping at new pages, we refined them. The difference was night and day. By comparing each draft against the top three results, the pages went from zero traffic to 895 clicks in just three months.

That’s hundreds of ready-to-buy visitors from searches that competitors once owned.

How to Refine Your AI Content Against Competitors

So how do you actually do it? With AI.

The same prompt I’ve made for you handles all of this automatically. All you’ve got to do is drop in your collection name and paste the top 3 competitor URLs. That’s it.

In seconds, it breaks down the exact questions people are asking, shows you what competitors are covering that you’re not, and spits out a list of real SEO upgrades ready to copy and paste.

It’s not vague fluff like “add more images.” You get a precise, competitor-backed checklist of content gaps and improvements. That’s how you leapfrog straight past page five without any guesswork.

You can take this further. Rather than pasting competitor URLs by hand, SEO Expert: Digital Darts exposes an MCP connector so ChatGPT or Claude can read your live audit and Search Console data directly, then write against your real numbers instead of whatever you remember to paste in.

The scary part about AI today is that even if you master this process, Google is still stealing your traffic with AI Overviews. This means less sales for you from organic search. So learn this simple Shopify SEO trick that’s already beating Google’s AI and how you can protect your clicks before they vanish.