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Step 1: Confirm the connection
- Merchant Center is linked to Google Ads (See section 2 on “Shared Foundations” if you missed it)
- No major policy issues or feed errors (See section 2 on “Shared Foundations” if you missed it)
You have an ecommerce brand or client, a real budget, and a brand new Google Ads account staring back at you, with no idea how to start without burning through your spend.
This guide is your safety net. It is designed for marketers who need a clear way to set things up from scratch with no experience.
You will learn:
Which channels actually matter for ecommerce
How to structure the account so it is readable and fixable later
A practical, step by step way to set up Search, Shopping and Performance Max safely
Think of it as an “ad clinic” for new Google Ads accounts: we are getting the foundations clean before we do anything clever.
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The Ecommerce Channel Stack: What You Are Actually Driving
Before touching buttons, you need to see how the main pieces fit together. For ecommerce, most of your performance will come from four workhorses.
1.1 Standard Shopping: Showing the Actual Product
Shopping ads are those product cards with image, price and merchant name.
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They use your product feed in the Merchant Center, not manual keywords. Google shows different products to the users based on what they think is relevant to the user’s search. That means:
- The quality of your feed = the quality of your traffic
- Titles, images and categories are silent levers you are pulling
Shopping is how you show the exact product at the exact moment a user is comparing options.
1.2 Branded Search: Defending Your Own Name
Branded searches are searches on Google that include the brand name or specific names of the products.
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Examples:
- nike running shoes
- H&M dress
- Adidas promo code
- Lenovo ThinkPad
Why it matters:
- These users already know the brand and are close to purchase
- Cost per Acquisitions (CPAs) are usually low, conversion rates high
- Competitors can bid on these terms if you do not
Brand Search is your “defence line” on the results page. If your market is very competitive (meaning lots of other competitors are also advertising), you would want a dedicated campaign that protects this traffic and lets you control the message and landing page.
If however you have a small ad budget and your brand is already ranking high organically, skip the branded search since users searching for your brand are likely to convert even without you spending money on them.
1.3 Unbranded / Non-Brand Search: Capturing High Intent Demand
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These are generic product types, category or problem based searches.
Examples:
- running shoes for flat feet
- black satin midi dress
- ergonomic office chair with headrest
Why it matters:
- This is where new customers discover you
- Intent is strong but competition is higher
- Costs can escalate if you are sloppy with structure and match types
Non-brand campaigns are your “new customer engine” because they target users who are interested in the products you are selling but are brand agnostic and still in the research stage, open to purchasing from different brands. They need more control and tighter structure than branded search campaigns.
1.4 Performance Max: The Black Box That Needs Guardrails
Performance Max uses your feed and assets to run across Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display and more.
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It can be powerful, but for someone new, it can feel like “data fog”: lots of spend, unclear on what exactly is working and little control over how your assets are shown.
Use PMax as:
- A layer on top of clean Search and Shopping
- A way to find incremental conversions once tracking and structure are solid
Simple starter stack
For most ecommerce accounts, a safe order of operations is:
| 1 | Standard Shopping |
| 2 | Brand Search (if your market is competitive) |
| 3 | Non Branded Search for top categories |
| 4 | Performance Max after the basics are clean |
Shared Foundations: Fix These Before You Launch Anything
If any of these following pieces are wrong, every channel will lie to you. This is the unsexy part that quietly decides whether your account is built on solid rock and will scale beautifully, or is built on sinking sand that will come crumbling down the more you build on it.
2.1 Conversion Tracking: Know What Money Looks Like
Non negotiable:
- A working purchase conversion event
- Correct revenue values flowing into Google Ads
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Good practice:
- Treat purchase as the primary conversion
- Track add to cart or view product as secondary signals, not the main metric you optimise towards if you have sufficient conversions
Safety checks:
- Test a real or test transaction
- Confirm:
- The purchase event fires once per order
- The revenue value matches the order
- You are not double counting (for example, GA4 import plus a direct pixel on the same action with no de duplication)
If this is off, your optimisation and reporting will both be fiction.
2.2 Merchant Center and Product Feed: Your Silent Targeting
For Shopping and PMax, the feed is your targeting.
You need:
- Merchant Center account approved and linked
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Key fields that matter most:
- Title
- Description
- Price and availability
- Product category and product type
- Images
Feed hygiene shortcuts:
- Write titles like real searches e.g. Men's Lightweight Running Shoes - Brand X, not Model 123 Blue
- Use product types and custom labels to group products by:
- Category
- Margin
- Bestseller status
- Price band
These labels become your “handles” later for Shopping and Performance Max (PMax) structure.
2.3 Basic Audiences: Fuel for Smart Bidding
You do not need advanced audience strategies, but you should have:
- Remarketing lists: all website visitors, cart abandoners, past purchasers
- Optional GA4 audiences if they already exist
- Customer lists if available
These become audience signals for PMax and Search, nudging Google toward the right people faster.
Clean Account Structure: Future You Will Thank You
Structure is how you prevent “data soup”. When everything is lumped together, you cannot tell what is actually working.
3.1 Naming Conventions: No More Guessing
Pick a naming pattern and stick to it.
Campaigns
SG_Search_Brand_Search SG_Search_Unbranded_Shoes SG_Shopping_AllProducts SG_PMax_ CoreProductsAd groups
RunningShoes_Generic RunningShoes_Womenhh OfficeChairs_ErgonomicWhen you open the account in three months, you should understand the strategy just from the names.
3.2 Shopping Structure: Order in the Catalog
Start simple:
- One Shopping campaign for all products or for a big segment of the catalog
- Inside that campaign, split product groups by:
- Category
- Product type
- Or margin based custom labels
You can clone and separate campaigns later for high priority categories, but starting too fragmented makes it hard to get enough data to learn anything.
3.3 Search Structure: Brand and Non Brand
Brand Search
- One dedicated campaign for brand terms
- One or two ad groups are usually enough
Non Branded Search
- Separate campaigns for major product lines or markets
- Shoes, Dresses, Office Furniture
- Inside each campaign, ad groups by tight themes
- Running-Shoes_Women, Running-Shoes_Men, Trail-Running
The rule: one clear idea per ad group. This not only helps you craft your ads to tie tightly with the user’s search intent, but also gives you clean data and easier optimisation later.
3.4 Performance Max Structure: One Box, Clear Boundaries
For a new account, a good starter setup is:
- One PMax campaign focused on ecommerce sales
- Listing groups used to define which products are allowed in PMax
- Asset groups mapped to real categories, not random mixes
You can always split later by category or margin once you see where the wins are.
How to Set Up Standard Shopping Campaigns
Once the feed and Merchant Center are ready, Shopping lets you show real products instead of just headlines.
4.1 Create the Shopping Campaign
Step 2: New campaign
- Type: Shopping
- Subtype: Standard Shopping
- Choose the correct Merchant Center account and country of sale
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Step 3: Settings
- Locations: Select the destinations you ship to only
- Budget: Set your budget based on a sensible daily spend that won’t drain your account too quickly.
There are two initial options:
| Option 1 | A recommended starting point is $20–$50 per day per campaign, depending on the size of the account and the number of products in the feed. If the account has a large product catalog, you can consider starting with $100–$150 per day, especially for high-priority or high-margin product categories. |
| Option 2 | Start with 10x the average daily cost per sale for your products. For example, if you are selling shoes at $100 per pair, and you expect an average cost per conversion of $10, start with a daily budget of $100 to $200. |
- Keep the budget flexible: monitor spend and performance frequently to adjust as needed, but don't start too high as you won’t have enough data to guide decisions yet.
Bidding:
- Low data: Use the Maximise clicks bid strategy with a bid cap.
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Check the keyword planner to have a sense on how much your product-related keywords are currently costing. You can use the upper limit as a guide for your bid cap.
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- Once there is enough conversion data (Google recommends at least 50 conversions for Target ROAS): Use Target ROAS to continue to optimise your ROI. (E.g. If your Return on ad spend is 500% (Calculated as Revenue divided by Ad spend), use 500% as the Target ROAS)
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4.2 Product Group Structure
By default, everything goes into “All products”. That is a recipe for confusion.
Instead:
- Split by Category or Product type
- Then optionally split further by:
- Brand
- Price band
- Margin label
For each product group:
- Set an initial similar bid
- Exclude groups that:
- Are out of stock
- Have terrible economics/ margins
- Are not meant for paid push
4.3 Search Terms and Negatives
Even though Shopping is feed driven, you still get a search terms report (Under Campaigns > Insights and reports > Search Terms).
Use it to:
- Spot irrelevant intent and add irrelevant search terms as negative keywords so that your products won’t show up for those searches in the future.
- Find ultra generic searches that bring clicks but no sales and tune your structure or feed
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This is one of the few levers you have to keep Shopping from drifting into low quality traffic.
How to Set Up Search Campaigns Safely
5.1 Brand Search: Your Cheapest Wins
Step 1: Create the campaign
- Type: Search
- Goal: Sales or Leads
- Use the website domain
Step 2: Bidding
- Similar to Shopping Campaigns, if there is little conversion data in your account: I start with clicks instead of conversions, and use the Maximise clicks bid strategy with a bid cap.
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Check the keyword planner to have a sense on how much your brand-related keywords are currently costing. You can use the upper limit as a guide for your bid cap.
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- Once there is enough conversion data (Google recommends at least 30 conversions over a month or longer and 50 conversions for Target ROAS): I would switch to Maximise conversion value (With a Target Return on Ad Spend)
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Step 3: Settings
- Locations: only where the store actually sells or ships
- Languages: normally the site language
Step 4: Keywords
Focus on brand variations in Phrase and Exact match to prevent overlaps with your unbranded search campaign:
- [brand]
- [brand + category]
- "brand”
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If you didn’t already know, square brackets tell google that is an exact match keyword. Inverted commas tell google that is a phrase match keyword. Learn more on keyword match types here.
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Step 5: Ads
- One or two responsive search ads
- Use the brand name in multiple headlines
- Feature key value props:
- Free shipping
- Returns
- Official store
Step 6: Budget
- Start modest, you can always raise it.
- You can get a general sense of the maximum budget you would need for the campaign by taking the estimated monthly searches multiplied by the top of page CPC bid.
For example, for the keyword “adidas” in Singapore, there are a total of 60,500 monthly searches costing SGD1.72 for the top of page range. The maximum budget that this keyword could potentially cost each month will be around 60,500 x $1.72= $104,060.
Step 7: Negative keywords
After publishing the campaign, add negatives keywords for:
- Careers or jobs
- Customer support queries if you do not want those as paid clicks
- Countries you cannot serve
Be sure to use either exact match or phrase match for negative keywords.
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Brand search now becomes your “control point” for brand traffic instead of leaving it to organic results and competitors. Remember, if your market is not very competitive, you have a small ad budget and are already ranking high organically, skip the branded search since users searching for your brand are likely to convert even without you spending money on them.
5.2 Non Branded Search: Controlled Exploration
Step 1: Create a non brand campaign for one core product category.
For example, if you are Adidas, you can create one campaign for shoes, one campaign for clothing, one campaign for bags. (You can further segment each product category into different product types later on at the keyword/ adgroup level)
Step 2: Bidding
- New accounts- Similar to brand search: if there is little conversion data in your account: I start with clicks instead of conversions, and use the Maximise clicks bid strategy with a bid cap.
Check the keyword planner to have a sense on how much your product-related keywords are currently costing. You can use the upper limit as a guide for your bid cap.
- Once there is enough conversion data (Google recommends at least 30 conversions over a month or longer and 50 conversions for Target ROAS): I would switch to Maximise conversion value (With a Target Return on Ad Spend)
Step 3: Settings
- Same as brand search campaigns, use locations where the store actually sells or ships and the site language
Step 4: Ad groups
Each ad group gets one tight theme
- RunningShoes_Generic
- RunningShoes_Women
- RunningShoes_Men
Step 5: Keywords and match types
- Focus on high intent terms:
- “buy running shoes online”
- “women's trail running shoes”
- Start with Phrase and Exact match
- Avoid going broad match only on day one as costs can go out
- Learn more on keyword match types here
Step 6: Ad copy
For each ad group:
- Use the main keyword in at least one headline as this will help improve your ad rank and help your ad rank higher
- Call out the main benefit:
- Comfort, durability, style, premium, etc
- Mention key offers:
- Shipping, returns, discounts
- Add social proof if you have it:
- E.g. 4.8 star average rating/ No. 1 in country
Step 7: Extensions
Use extensions to help improve the attractiveness and click through rates of your Search Ads. The most common and impactful extension to implement is sitelink extensions. Sitelinks to key categories or top sellers help users to navigate to specific pages on your site (for example, a specific product or store hours)
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Other useful extensions to include for your Search ads include:
- Callouts for short value bullets
- Structured snippets to list brands or styles
- Image assets for products or lifestyle images to show use cases of your products
Step 8: Budget
- Budget: Higher than brand search, but still controlled so it cannot eat the entire account. Always start small and scale the campaign as you go.
- As a good beginning, I usually aim for minimally 10 clicks a day per keyword. Look at the Top of page big (CPC) in keyword planner to get a sense of how much it would cost to gain ~10 clicks a day (10 x $Bid= daily budget).
When you look back at this campaign later, it should be obvious which theme or intent is working.
How to Set Up Performance Max Without Losing Control
Performance Max can feel like magic or mayhem depending on how you set it up.
6.1 When You Are Ready for PMax
Good signals you are ready:
Purchase tracking and revenue are accurate
Merchant Center is clean and approved
Search and Shopping are already live and not a total mess
You have at least some basic creative assets
If those points are shaky, fix them first before setting up a Performance Max campaign because Performance Max relies heavily on automated optimisation (very little room for manual tweaks from you) and hence needs a significant amount of clean data.
6.2 Creating the PMax Campaign
Step 1: Goal and conversions
- Choose Sales as the objective
- Make sure the primary conversion is Purchase with value
Step 2: Settings
- Locations and languages as before
- Budget: start smaller than you think, PMax can scale fast. It is generally recommended to have at least USD50 per day to gain enough data for PMax to run effectively.
- Bidding:
- Low data: Maximise conversion value without a target
- Later: add a Target ROAS that lines up with your profitability goals
Step 3: Brand controls
- Use brand exclusions if needed so PMax does not just feast on brand terms while your non brand and shopping work hard elsewhere
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This helps to ensure that brand search is being captured separately by brand search campaigns and not Pmax, so that you can optimise Pmax towards reaching new customers.
6.3 Asset Groups: Mini Campaigns Inside PMax
Create asset groups by theme or category, not by random mixes.
For each asset group:
| Final URL | for a relevant category or collection page |
| Headlines | Product focused Benefit focused Offer focused |
| Descriptions | Why buy from this brand |
| Images | Clean product images and at least one lifestyle shot if available |
| Logos and videos | if you have them |
Think of each asset group as a mini “brand ad” for that category inside the PMax system.
6.4 Audience Signals
Audience signals give PMax an idea of who they should target. They aren’t exactly what Google will use, but rather as a starting point of how they’ll go about targeting.
Add:
- Search themes that are related to your products (these can be keywords you’ve used in unbranded search)
- Remarketing segments (e.g. Website Visitors, People who have clicked on an ad, Customer lists etc.)
- In market audiences that match your vertical (also known as "interest category" where Google has profiled people who are interested in purchasing a particular type of good or service based on their web activity.)
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These are hints, not hard filters, but they help PMax start smarter.
6.5 Listing Groups
This is where you choose which products PMax can use.
- Include the product segments that make sense for this campaign
- Exclude products that:
- Already have their own special campaigns
- Have stock or margin issues
- The client specifically wants to keep out
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This is how you put guardrails around what PMax is allowed to push.
A Safe Launch Sequence You Can Reuse
Here is a simple “Safe Launch Sequence” you can follow for almost any ecommerce client.
Verify tracking and feed
- Purchase tracking with correct values
- Merchant Center linked and mostly clean
- Feed has usable titles, categories and images
Launch Standard Shopping
- One main campaign
- Product groups split logically
- Obvious problem products excluded
Launch Brand Search (If market is competitive)
- Tight brand keywords
- Strong control over messaging and landing pages
Launch Non Branded Search for top categories
- Clear ad group themes
- Phrase and Exact keywords for high intent searches
Confirm data flow
- Impressions, clicks and conversions look reasonable
- No shocking irrelevant queries dominating spend
Layer in Performance Max once there is at least 50 purchase conversions (ideally 100)
- One PMax campaign with clear asset groups
- Audience signals added
- Listing groups curated
This sequence keeps you out of panic mode and gives you clean data for the follow up piece on optimisation and scaling.
One Page Setup Checklist for Your Desk
Here’s a checklist before you go-live:
Foundations
- Purchase tracking with value is implemented and tested
- Merchant Center is linked and approved
- Product feed has sane titles, prices and categories
- Basic remarketing and customer audiences available
Search
- Brand Search campaign created with brand terms in Phrase and Exact
- Non brand campaigns set up for top categories
- Ad groups are tightly themed
- Responsive search ads written for each ad group
- Sitelinks, callouts and structured snippets added
Shopping
- Standard Shopping campaign created
- Product groups split by category, type or labels
- Unwanted products excluded from the campaign
Performance Max
- PMax campaign created only after Search and Shopping are stable
- Asset groups mapped to real categories with proper URLs, copy and images
- Audience signals added
- Listing groups checked so only suitable products are included