What are Shopping ads (Google Shopping ads)?

You do not write a Shopping ad. You supply product data, and Google builds the ad from it. That data lives in Google Merchant Center, a free Google tool where sellers upload product data so their products can appear across Google². It arrives as a product feed: a structured file of titles, prices, images and availability.

A shopper searches. Google matches the search to products in your feed and shows a product photo, title, price and your shop name¹. So the quality of your titles and data decides what you show for. Keywords in the usual sense are not where you write the ad.

Shopping ads can run in standard Shopping campaigns or inside Performance Max, a goal-based campaign type that can also serve on channels such as YouTube, Display, Gmail and Maps¹. What PMax decides, and how to read it, is covered in Performance Max black box. Where Shopping sits among your other channels is in paid media strategy for ecommerce.

Shopping ads sit close to the sale: the shopper already sees the product and the price. That is why the report often looks good.

Look at who is searching. If most of the revenue comes from people typing your brand name, the ads may be cannibalisation: paid activity taking credit for sales that would have arrived anyway by another route. Many branded searchers may have found you anyway.

For ZFD: We split Shopping revenue by brand and non-brand searches before we call it growth.