54 Google Ads Optimizations To Jack Up Shopify Profit

T his is the most dense, free Google Ads optimizations training to get more profit for an ecommerce brand. I’ve condensed over 20 years of Google Ads experience, and what we do at our Shopify marketing agency every day to scale Shopify stores, into 54 rapid tips you can apply right now to get more profit.

You can improve your Google Ads performance with these simple optimizations even if you’re a beginner or have been doing it for 10 years. These simple methods have generated real profit for hundreds of brands. I’ve even created a helpful checklist for you to download and keep at the end.

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Before you continue the Google Ads optimization tutorial for Shopify, I turned this video and article into a 54-point sheet to have by your side that works beautifully with the tutorial. This way you can immediately begin optimizing your Google Ads.

Account Settings and Structure

Think of this as the Marie Kondo moment for your Google Ads account to get your Google Ads account in order. You’re about to declutter the chaos so you can stay in control—because trust me, auto-recommendations don’t spark joy.

1. Turn off all auto-apply recommendations.

Do this from account settings. You need control otherwise your ad account will be out of your control. Start from a blank slate then enable only what you can’t do or is guaranteed to help, which will only ever be a few settings.

Turn off auto-apply recommendations Google Ads

My top personal recommendations are:

  • Enable “Use optimized ad rotation” – Google will show the best ads rather than rotating them equally.
  • I generally don’t mind enabling keyword ones of “Remove redundant keywords”, “Remove non-serving keywords”, and “Remove conflicting negative keywords”.

2. Enable Customer Match

Go to “Settings” > “Account” settings then check the box to use customer match lists in bidding and targeting. The configuration injects steroids into Google’s AI machines so the ads grab you more customers.

Enable Customer Match in Google Ads

3. Use an account-wide negative keyword list

Go to “Account settings” > “Negative keywords.” This will guarantee exclusions of searches you never want to appear for. I’ve seen negative keywords get inconsistently applied to ad groups and campaigns because of poor organisation.

4. Use naming conventions on campaigns and ad groups.

Naming conventions speed up decision-making in Google Ads. There’s many potential formats, but always include the campaign type like display, shopping, or search in the campaign name. Break it down by what’s inside. Five main themes are campaign type, geography, segmentation, targeting, and bidding. An example campaign name that uses three of these is Shopping - AU - High. This is a shopping campaign targeting Australia that has high priority. For ad group or ad asset names, name it by theme or keyword cluster.

5. Use a search strategy to structure your account to capture maximum sales.

The best default strategy for ecommerce brands is to mimic the store’s website navigation. Every product and collection is a chance to capture search traffic. Open a Google sheet with a list of these landing page URLs as rows. Then do a preliminary brainstorm of keyword themes for each collection. Shopping and performance structure is covered later.

6. Do not listen to Google Ads representatives about performance changes.

My team and I have had dozens of conversations with Google Ads staff of all levels. They default to auto-apply recommendations so you spend more money than you should. I’m yet to see anything they advise work, so save yourself time and money by having a blanket rule to ignore Google Ads representatives.

Conversion Tracking and Analytics

If you’re not tracking conversions, it’s like chopping up a chicken blindfolded—messy and probably a disaster—unless you’re Gordan Ramsay. Let’s take off the blindfold, track what’s happening, and make sure you’re getting credit for all the awesome growth you’re creating for the brand in the ad account.

7. Get your conversion tracking right.

Whenever I audit an ad account, this is the first thing I assess because any revenue data you look at is weakened or useless when it’s wrong. If you’re running a Shopify store, follow my Google Ads conversion tracking tutorial to get it right. Use the features of cart data and enhanced conversions to collect better data. Track other conversions that are meaningful to your business like wholesale enquiries and phone calls. Once you measure it, you can manage it.

8. Use the data-driven model on your purchase conversion tracking.

This is an automated attribution method that uses real historical data. Google will look at many data points to build your own attribution model. Every ad, keyword, and product that contributed to the sale should receive recognition to help decisions.

Use data-driven attribution model - Google Ads

9. Enable personalised advertising and Google Signals in analytics.

This lets you create remarketing audiences, retarget people across devices, and enables demographic and interest reporting.

10. Sync your Shopify customer lists from the Klaviyo Google Ads integration.

If you do any segmentation, aim for at least 2000 people on the list to get some accuracy in Google Ads. Customers who buy 2 or more times are one great segment. This is the list you want to use in your account settings for customer match. See Klaviyo’s documentation to learn how you can do it.

Bidding and Budget Optimization

Now it’s time to make sure you’re not throwing money at Google like it’s your last night in Vegas. These are simple bidding and budget rules that make every dollar in your ad budget work harder.

11. Use enhanced cost per click bid (eCPC).

Set this in your bid settings unless the campaign gets over approximately 30 conversions per month. If it’s over, use a target ROAS bid strategy. Target ROAS is the most commonly used bid strategy in Google Ads for ecommerce.

12. Stop overpaying for branded clicks.

A bad strategy is to run a target CPA or ROAS bid as you’ll pay excessively for a click. An unconventional bid strategy that works for branded campaigns is to use a target impression share bid at 95%. The maximum CPC bid limit is ideally set at the bid strategy that has historically got you a 95 impression share.

Optimize branded campaign bids in Google Ads

13. Use a portfolio bid strategy.

This is a good way to simplify bid management across campaigns. When you simplify management it helps stop accidents, and makes setting ad rules to further automate an account easier.

14. Pair any broad match keyword with a smart bidding strategy.

The broad match type lets you access the widest audience. Broad match also has the added benefit of letting Google analyse the contents of the landing page and other keywords in the ad group to understand its theme. Whenever you use broad, always use a smart bidding strategy like ROAS or CPA bidding to maximise its machine learning.

Maximising Ad Copy

If any of your ads aren’t following all the tips in this section, they’re napping. But I’ll show you how to wake them up with simple tweaks that’ll make people stop scrolling and start clicking. By using these principles, you’ll improve relevance which lowers the cost per click and at the same time, gets you more clicks. These tips are ways I love to beat out increasing competition.

15. What can your brand say that no one else can say?

This is the best way to set your ad apart from other content. It could be a patent, product feature, production process, or trademark. Some brands can’t claim anything unique of value. Those brands should work on their business so they can make a claim. If the brand can say something that no one can, use it in ad copy and ad assets.

16. What are the top three reasons people buy from you?

Again, use these in ad copy and ad assets. To see why people buy, go through customer support tickets, post-purchase surveys, speak with the founder, and read reviews.

17. Set all ad assets at the account level.

Only once all of the recommended assets are built out, should you consider more specific campaign level assets that override the account level. Most stores are fine to not create custom campaign level assets.

Set ad assets at the account level Google Ads Tutorial

18. Use value propositions in call-out assets.

These include free shipping, same-day dispatch, key features, buy now pay later, the number of reviews, sustainability, guarantees, and so forth. Sprinkle them in ad copy, but aim to have at least 6 as call-out assets.

19. Use at least 4 sitelink assets.

The best structure for sitelinks is to link to your most common pages or present alternative offers that may be of interest. By adding at least 4 sitelink assets, you’re likely to increase the quality score of the ad as you’re improving ad relevance, which lowers the cost per click.

Google Ads - Include sitelink assets

20. Use at least 2 structured snippet assets.

The most common structured snippet headers are Brands, Models, Styles, and Types. Think of core product features customers want to know.

21. Use promo assets for any promotions to drive more clicks and sales.

If you have an evergreen sales collection, you can use the promotion asset to promote the collection. I do this for a current client where I create a new promotion asset every quarter then select autumn, winter, spring, or summer as the occasion.

Promote offers with promo assets - Google Ads

22. Use a phone call asset at the account level.

If you have a phone number, make sure you have the conversion set up called “Calls from ads” and that it’s a secondary conversion.

For more help with your ad copy, I’ve taught how to write awesome ads from ad frameworks. Just watch another YouTube video where I reveal the Google Ads system that generated hundreds of millions in revenue.

Add call assets - Google Ads Optimizations

Campaign Optimization and Testing

Time to put your campaigns through a CrossFit workout with simple settings that increase profit and general optimization tips. But don’t worry, unlike CrossFit, the only injury here will be to your competition when they see your results.

23. Disable the display and search networks in search campaigns.

You’ll always improve ROAS with this setting adjustment. The search network can do well, so once your campaign is profitable, you can enable the search network. Monitor its performance at the campaign level by segmenting by network.

24. Fix disapprovals and limited delivery of assets from the policy center.

By getting more things approved, you may help increase impressions. At the very least, this will also keep your account tidy, and Marie Condo happy.

Fix disapprovals in Google Ads

25. Exclude low-performing placements that waste ad spend.

For Performance Max, click on “Report Editor” > “Performance Max placements report”. For other campaigns, you can go to “When and where ads showed”, then click “Where ads showed”.

26. Run a dynamic search campaign to scrape keywords you haven’t thought of.

For a basic structure, build ad groups from either collections or products. Target based on a URL of /collections or /products. If using collections, exclude /products to account for Shopify’s URL structure where products can have /collections in the URL.

27. Add negative dynamic ad targets to your dynamic search ad campaign.

A classic mistake I see in Shopify is targeting the whole store, which will advertise blog posts and pages like your privacy policy on top of your collections and products. You can add negative targets like /pages and /blogs to exclude unwanted URL handles. These exclusions are unnecessary if you’re using the strategy I just shared of targeting /products and /collections.

28. Add new keywords from the search terms report that gather notable volume.

Don’t bother adding any keywords that aren’t in your top 30 of search terms. This can help your reporting but it mainly gives you the option of setting a bid at the keyword level.

Use search terms to add new notable keywords - Google Ads

29. Exclude branded terms from non-branded campaigns.

Periodically filter your search terms in non-branded campaigns to look for branded terms then exclude any branded terms you find. This funnels searches to where you want them and avoids bloating the performance of non-brand campaigns.

30. Review the quality score of keywords

You do this by adding the quality score column then optimizing those with a 7 or below. Write new ad copy, split out the keywords in their own ad group, and use the keywords on the landing page. Raising the quality score can lower the cost per click by 50%, letting you either double conversion volume or cut costs.

Optimize quality score - Google Ads

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Shopping Ads and Feed Management

Now it’s time to polish up your shopping and Performance Max campaigns so well that even window shoppers dive into their wallets. You’re guaranteed to improve your shopping ads by following these tips. If you’re running Performance Max campaigns with listing groups, everything in this section improves those campaigns as well.

31. Maximise the fetch frequency of your feed in Merchant Center.

If your feed is done through the content API, you don’t need to worry about this. Have your feed update at least daily to maximise the accuracy of product data.

Maximise feed fetch frequency for Google Ads

The more accurate your product data is, the less disapprovals you’ll get, plus people who click the ads are less likely to get different information, which affects conversions.

32. Enable automatic item updates

This is to ensure availability status in your product data matches the landing page. Most Shopify themes have the schema markup to use this feature in Merchant Center. The Rich Results Test tool tells you what markup is on your product pages. If you want the feature, or if you run into markup errors, use my structured data template in my Shopify SEO guide.

Enable Automatic Item Updates Google Ads

33. Exclude products from your feed when a % of variants are out of stock.

Most Shopify brands are not doing this. You can achieve this in DataFeedWatch with a rule on the include/exclude products tab. This tactic improves conversion rates for better efficiency. A search term like “red dress” has extremely high volume. If you look at the red dress product page for Sparrow & Finch Boutique, you’ll see half of their dress sizes are out of stock. For the sake of simplicity, if you presume each dress size serves an equal target market size of 1/6th, then with 3 of the 6 sizes being out of stock, this product page will convert at half the rate it would when fully stocked. So this feed rule is great for efficiency. If you want to test this change, just note the date you make the change then see the effect on conversion rates in your shopping campaigns.

Exclude out of stock variants - Google Ads Feed

34. Front-load your product titles with the most important keywords.

This will help increase impression volume and potentially get more clicks from shopping. Your product titles might appear truncated in the shopping carousel. So for popular brands, this means adding the brand attribute at the beginning of titles. If the brand is not often searched you can add it to the middle or the end of the product title. Your goal is to match more of the title to the most popular search queries for your products. When the campaigns run, you can refer to the search terms report for your most popular search queries then adjust the titles. Also, minimise or avoid character symbols like the pipe symbol (“|”) and hyphens as they hurt readability and take up space. Keep the title length to under 150 characters.

35. Get more products approved in Google Merchant Center.

Every product that’s limited or disapproved in the Merchant Center lowers the potential impressions you can generate in shopping ads. You also miss out on free traffic from the free listings program. Disapprovals happen for a number of reasons in shopping. Such reasons include having an unknown category, policy violations, and missing attributes. Each week, or at least once a month, you want to review the diagnostics inside the Merchant Center to fix the errors or warnings. Read the feed chapter of my book Google Shopping for Shopify to learn how to fix any error.

Get more products approved in Google Merchant Center

36. Provide the cost of goods sold attribute.

This is an optional attribute that enables gross margin and revenue metrics in Google Ads. Pretty important for profit, hey? The data in Shopify comes from the cost per item field from product pages. This field is accessible through the API to apps like DataFeedWatch. What you do is combine the cost of goods sold (COGS) attribute with revenue tracking and cart conversions, which is done in my conversion tracking guide linked to in the description. To set up the cost of goods sold field for Google Ads, in DataFeedWatch, map Google’s cost_per_goods_sold attribute to Shopify’s cost_per_item field.

37. Segment products with custom labels to increase results.

Custom labels are a feed attribute for you to use how you want. What you do is use the custom label field to match your Performance Max or shopping campaign strategy. You can have custom labels for price range, profit margin, season, promotions, sell-rate, or even ROAS bucketing. You can manually assign product values in your feed software or you can use scripts. My favourite script for this is the Flowboost Labelizer Google Ads script. This script will segment products based on conversions, while considering a certain level of click and impression volume. I highly recommend that script.

38. Provide as many attributes as possible in your shopping feed.

There are dozens of possible attributes to include in your Google Shopping feed. I’ve written a darn book on the subject! I’ve managed feeds for over a decade, and I don’t know all of the attributes off the top of my head. Go through the feed chapter of my book reviewing each attribute for 3 products to get a sample. In a spreadsheet, record what attributes you don’t provide in the feed so that you can then add them.

Every year Google is doing more to automate the creation of values in a feed or removing a mandatory attribute to make product submission simpler. You don’t want any of this. What is easy is not best. Where others are lazy, you can beat them. Provide as many attributes as possible to maximise impressions, clicks, and sales.

Performance Max

I still can’t believe they named it Performance Max. It sounds like something you’d see in an action movie, not something us Google Ads nerds would deal with daily. Performance Max can pack a punch if you know how to use it. If you don’t know how to use it, it will steal your budget faster than a villain robbing a bank. Here are some simple optimizations to get these campaigns performing at superhero level.

39. Opt out of optimized targeting for Performance Max and Demand Gen.

Do this in your campaign settings, under “Automatically Created Assets”. This setting stops Google from creating vertical and square videos, or shortened versions, from an original video.

Opt-out of optimized targeting - Google Ads

40. Create a custom video made for YouTube ads.

If you don’t do this, Google will make automated videos in Performance Max. The automated videos are pretty bad.

One day these videos will be incredible. It could be years. Until then, avoid automated videos and get the benefits of better creative by making a good video ad. I suggest at least having a good 16×9 for YouTube and 9×16 for short formats.

41. Exclude your brand name from your Pmax campaigns.

Do this by going to campaign settings then “Brand Exclusions”. You should have a branded search campaign to capture such terms. If you allow branded terms in PMax, it will bloat the success of the campaign like nothing else and risk hurting incrementality.

42. Disable the customer acquisition setting for acquiring new customers.

New customer acquisition is about getting incremental revenue, which is sales that wouldn’t have otherwise happened without seeing the ad. So disabling this setting is about controlling incrementality.

Disable new customer acquisition setting

The most reliable rule for increasing incrementality in Google Ads is going after non-branded searches, not whether someone previously has purchased from you or not. If you skew the campaign towards new customers, you’ll miss on incremental revenue from returning customers. New and returning customers will make non-branded searches, so it makes sense to disable an optimization of new customers.

43. Use Mike Rhodes Performance Max Insights script.

The script lets you see where PMax campaigns are spending budget, gives you search terms insights, shows additional asset group insights, reveals product performance data, and more. There’s a lot of analysis you can do with the script so treat using this as its own skill.

I think it’s the best script made in the past 2 years.

Location and Audience Targeting

You’re not just tossing ads into the void here. Let’s make sure you’re hitting the right people, in the right places—because showing ads to everyone is like inviting the whole internet to your birthday party. Not everyone’s coming.

44. Overlay engaged audiences in observation mode onto campaigns.

Do not target only. Observation model lets you collect performance data on the segment. Use your main customer lists and purchase events with the longest window of 540 days. Also add in some engaged pageview audiences like those who viewed products or collections in 7 days. Pre-empt higher performance on customer lists and purchase lists with an increased bid modifier.

45. Overlay high-affinity audiences in observation mode onto campaigns.

Go to your audience manager then click “your data insights”. Use the top 5 audiences as these will likely have the highest conversion rate. As data rolls in, you can probably add a bid modifier of 10% on the audiences to increase volume. Keep it to 5 otherwise some people will begin overlapping which distorts performance.

Overlay high-affinity audiences

46. Add state and city level locations to your location targeting.

For example, if you’re targeting the United States, don’t just input the country, but add California. If you’re spending a thousand dollars a day, it begins to make sense to add cities as well. If you get too granular, you won’t get enough conversion data to make any better decisions. By adding states or cities, even though the places were already targeted with the country setting, you’re unlocking a simple report at the campaign level that lets you see performance by region.

47. Use a location bid modifier.

Decrease or increase based on return. This works well when you have the state and city locations added. If you’re using the maximise clicks or a manual bid strategy, you can set a bid modifier by location based on performance. If you’re not using the maximise clicks or manual bid strategy, there’s no point setting a bid modifier as Google will theoretically, consider it when bidding for you.

48. Exclude low performing locations.

Sometimes you’ll have cities or countries that absolutely suck. You can stop targeting them. You can view the performance of regions in a custom report by adding the country, state, or city dimensions to a report.

49. Change location setting to “Presence.”

You can find this option in campaign settings. What the other interest setting does is target people who are in regions you’re not targeting, but appear interested. For example, if you own a pet store in Australia and choose Australia as a targeted location, your ads can show to people located or regularly in Australia, or to people who have expressed interest in Australian pet stores now or in the past. I have seen interest targeting drive the occasional sale on target and perform on target. So I suggest you review the performance of this by creating a custom report then adding a user location dimension. Don’t add the match location dimension. The user location dimension tells you where people are located, and how they’re performing.

Use presence-only location settings

Increasing General Efficiency

Here’s the final section of this massive training. You’ve done well to get this far. Everything in this training, in some way, is meant to make the ad account better. Or, in other words, more efficient by making more sales or cutting costs. I’ve got some blanket rules and tactics to create more efficiency that hasn’t been covered yet.

50. Increase your ROAS targets or lower your target CPA bid.

By doing so, this will improve your ad efficiency. You should see business-level metrics like contribution margin, and profit on ad spend, improve.

51. Create high-converting landing pages for non-shopping ads.

If you can improve conversion rates by 50% by driving traffic to a custom landing page, you can spend so much more in Google Ads. Some keywords that were previously unprofitable, suddenly become profitable. For brands spending thousands a month in Google Ads, it’s seriously worth it to invest in custom landing pages. (We can do this for Google Ads clients.)

52. Use individual budgets for each campaign.

An exception is when you have an intentional strategy for shared budgets, such as grouping your high performing campaigns with their own budget so low performers do not take ad spend from it.

53. Consolidate ad groups.

Consolidation is about grouping learnings to help Google’s AI drive more consistent results. Sometimes you can have many low impression ad groups because you want a custom landing page. A better alternative is to consolidate ad groups getting under 2000 impressions in 7 days, then set a relevant landing page in the final URL value of each keyword.

54. Get into scripts.

There are scripts that you’ll never do or waste a lot of time doing, such as automatically checking all ad assets and ads for broken links. Scripts save you time or aim to make you more money from better efficiency. Brainlabs have a fabulous GitHub repository of Google Ads scripts. Once you have a script set up, check about once a month that it’s functioning as intended with no errors.

Leverage scripts for efficiency

    That’s the last optimization tip. I know it was dense but I hope these tweaks squeeze out more profit from your Google Ads account for your store.

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