Google Shopping Ads: Complete Campaign Setup Guide 2026

In Shopping you don't write ads. You write a feed. If the feed is bad, no campaign setting saves it.

The title: 80% of the job

Google matches the search to the product title. A bad title means you don't appear at all, whatever you bid.

The formula that works, in this order:

Brand + Model + Product type + Key attribute + Size/Colour

"Nike Air Zoom Pegasus 40 men's running shoes black UK10" beats "Pegasus 40" every time.

What matters:

• the first 70 characters are the ones people see
• use attributes people actually search for, not internal codes
• don't stuff keywords into ungrammatical strings; it gets penalised

The rest of the feed

Main image: product on white, no overlaid text, no watermark. Text on the image is grounds for rejection.

Correct GTIN. Without it, your products don't enter price comparisons and you lose impressions.

Google category, as specific as possible. Not "Apparel", but "Apparel > Shoes > Athletic Shoes".

Availability and price in sync. A mismatch between feed and site is the most common cause of account suspension.

Campaign structure

Don't put the whole catalogue in one campaign. Split by margin or by performance:

• best sellers with good margin — separate budget, aggressive bids
• the rest of the catalogue — small budget, discovery role
• low-margin products — minimal budget or none

Without splitting, the popular products eat the budget and you never learn what the rest could have done.

What to check weekly

Merchant Center diagnostics. Rejected products, warnings, price mismatches. That's the first stop, before any performance report.

A catalogue with 15% rejected products means 15% of your stock is invisible, and nobody is looking there.

What Shopping won't do

It won't sell products priced above the competition without a visible reason. The price comparison is literally next to you in the results. If you're more expensive, you need something else — delivery, warranty, availability — and a way to show it.