Q1. "My search cpcs are insane right now, shopping is half the cost for way more volume - why can’t I get it profitable?”

‍

‍

Search will always cost more than Shopping - you're fighting for two or three spots on a ranked list instead of a whole row of products. And you're paying for clicks from people browsing rather than ready to buy.

‍

But that's only half of it. The other half is quality score - and most brand owners don't even know it exists.

‍

Google scores every keyword out of 10 based on how relevant your ad and landing page are to the search. The lower the score, the more Google charges you per click. We're talking two to three times more than you could be paying.

‍

You can pull this into your Google Ads columns right now and see it for every keyword you're bidding on. If you've never checked it, you're almost certainly overpaying.

‍

To improve it you need keyword themed ad groups where every ad is tightly matched to the searches it's showing for. 

‍

Then landing pages that are genuinely relevant to those keywords with solid SEO, fast page speed, and a clean user experience. 

‍

Get those right and your quality score climbs, your CPCs drop, and the same budget goes way further.

‍

Q2. "We've tried launching PMax but can't scale it without ROAS dropping, but everyone online says it's great?"

‍

‍

PMax always goes for the cheapest conversion first and that's almost always someone who already knows your brand. Your ROAS in-platform looks amazing but you're paying for customers who were going to buy anyway.

‍

The way we set up PMax for every brand we manage is to exclude brand terms completely so it's forced to go out and find genuinely new customers. If you need to defend brand terms because competitors are bidding on your name, that gets its own separate campaign with its own controlled budget.

‍

And PMax runs feed-only - no asset groups, no display, no YouTube placements that don't convert.

‍

This is by far the biggest driver of performance on our accounts that have scaled past 8 figures.

‍

Q3. "I never hear anyone talk about product feeds, is it actually worth spending time on?"

‍

‍

Your feed is the foundation of every Shopping and PMax campaign. If it's wrong, everything built on top of it is wrong.

‍

Most feeds are left exactly as Shopify exports them - generic titles, weak descriptions, no keywords, missing attributes. Google has no idea what half your products are or who should see them.

‍

A proper feed has keyword-rich titles built around what customers actually search for, with every product categorised properly so Google knows exactly what you sell and who to show it to. We've taken over accounts and seen massive improvements in performance just from fixing the feed alone without changing anything else.