On Scovaventi, a Shopify store, a €20,000 budget over one year produced €77,000 in sales with an average basket of €190: about €49 per order, €3.85 of sales for every euro spent. On Bosatta, Vespa and Piaggio spare parts sold in four countries, €65,000 produced €240,000 in sales and 127 enquiries from resellers. These are the numbers we start from when an online shop asks us whether Google Ads "works".
Google Ads for ecommerce is, for 80% of the budget, Shopping and Performance Max on the catalogue: campaigns that show product, price and photo in Google's product listings, run from a Merchant Center feed and a target ROAS worked out from margin. Keyword Search stays for the brand and a few high-value categories. The rest is sales tracking, which is wrong in most of the accounts we inherit.
Below are the decisions in order, with measured CPCs to do the maths. This is the companion piece to the guide to ecommerce SEO; the service is described on the Google Ads page.
Which campaign to choose: Shopping, Performance Max or Search?
In September 2026 we read the desktop results for "natural skincare" (1,900 searches a month) and "wine online" (1,300) on Google UK. Text ads found: zero on both. On "natural skincare" the popular products block had 10 listings, from small brands such as Fat Cow Skincare and Conscious Skincare to John Lewis and Amazon, all with photo, price and often a star rating. On "wine online" the page was held by retailer home pages (Majestic, Naked Wines, Virgin Wines, Laithwaites) and an AI Overview (DataForSEO data). Where Google shows products, demand sits in those listings with photo and price, fed by Google Merchant Center, and you reach them with two types of campaign.
- Standard Shopping. You decide product groups, bids and negatives; Google decides which searches each listing appears on. Controllable, slower to scale.
- Performance Max. One campaign that uses the feed plus text, images and video across Shopping, Search, YouTube, Display, Gmail and Discover, optimised to a target ROAS. It scales further and explains less. Since 2023 it allows brand exclusions and since 2025 campaign-level negative keywords: use both.
The common belief is that Performance Max is enough on its own. Not in our accounts: without a brand exclusion it buys searches for your name, which you would have had for free from organic, and reports an inflated ROAS. On a new shop we start with standard Shopping and a brand Search campaign, and move to Performance Max when the feed is clean and tracking counts at least 30 orders a month. On high-value categories ("buy champagne online", 260 searches, CPC £4.86) we keep a separate Search campaign.
Further reading: when Google Ads makes sense.
Why the Merchant Center feed matters more than bids
In Shopping campaigns you do not choose keywords: Google derives them from the feed. If the title is "Brut Impérial NV", the listing will never show for "moet champagne", 18,100 searches a month in the UK. If it is "Moët & Chandon Brut Impérial NV Champagne 75cl", it will. The feed is Shopping's keyword research.
Five fields decide almost everything. The title, with brand, product, the attribute people search for and size in the first 70 characters. The GTIN (EAN barcode), without which Google struggles to match the listing to products it already knows. The Google product category and product_type, which PMax uses for grouping. Price and availability kept in sync with the shop, because a mismatch between listing and page gets the product disapproved. And the custom labels (custom_label_0-4), where you store margin and seasonality: you will need them in the next section.
On Shopify the feed is generated by the Google & YouTube app; on WooCommerce and PrestaShop you need plugins or a feed manager (Channable, DataFeedWatch, Lengow). In every case, check the Merchant Center diagnostics every week: with 20% of products disapproved you are spending on 80% of the catalogue without knowing it. Free listings come from the same feed and cost nothing: switch them on.
How to structure the account by margin, not by category
Break-even ROAS is one divided by gross margin: with a 40% margin it is 2.5, with 25% it is 4, with 60% it is 1.67. A single target ROAS across the whole catalogue treats a product that makes 60% and one that makes 20% the same way, and pushes whatever sells most, not whatever earns most.
The structure we use: products split into three or four margin bands via custom_label, one campaign (or asset group) per band, a different target ROAS for each. Separately, a campaign for bestsellers with a protected budget and a low-priority "catch all" for whatever the others do not cover.
The maths on Scovaventi: €77,000 on €20,000 is a ROAS of 3.85; with an average basket of €190 that is about 405 orders at €49 each. If gross margin were 40%, each order would leave €76 of margin and €27 net after advertising. The same ROAS with a €60 basket would leave €8.40: average basket is the first number to know before opening the account. A limit of the data: we do not publish clients' margins, so the 40% is a working assumption, not Scovaventi's figure.
Keywords, match types and negatives in ecommerce Search
Search has three jobs. The brand: "majestic wine" gets 165,000 searches a month, "laithwaites" 40,500, "naked wines" 33,100; a competitor can buy them, and a brand campaign with CPCs well under £1 (£0.48 on "majestic wine") defends them. High-value categories. And the cheap long tail: of the 20 ads DataForSEO recorded for Laithwaites, several sit on wine, grape and producer names with 50-110 searches ("tempio prosecco", "vidal new zealand sauvignon blanc", "pillastro puglia primitivo 2022") at CPCs between £0.49 and £1.49, and one lands directly on a product page. Twenty ads are a clue, not a statistic, but the clue is clear: producer and grape keywords cost a third to a sixth of the generic ones.
| Keyword | Searches per month | Average CPC | Top of page bid (low-high) |
|---|---|---|---|
| wine online | 1,300 | £3.29 | £0.91-4.23 |
| buy wine online | 1,000 | £3.38 | £0.77-4.08 |
| wine delivery | 2,900 | £3.73 | £0.87-4.12 |
| online wine shop | 480 | £2.08 | £0.69-2.75 |
| buy champagne online | 260 | £4.86 | £1.02-4.50 |
| natural skincare | 1,900 | £2.24 | £0.94-2.91 |
| organic skincare online | 10 | £1.77 | £0.81-1.69 |
| tempio prosecco (Laithwaites ad) | 110 | £0.81 | n/a |
Match types: phrase for categories, exact for the brand, broad only with target ROAS and at least 30 conversions a month, otherwise it buys everything. Negatives go in on day one: "free", "recipe", "used", "how to", "jobs", marketplace names, and for wine the cocktail recipes ("moscow mule" gets 27,100 searches a month in the UK and does not buy bottles). Then the search terms report every week for the first month.
Further reading: long tail vs short tail keywords.
Which page the ads should land on
Shopping and Performance Max land on the product page, with no alternative: that page needs price, delivery cost and delivery times above the fold, variant availability, reviews and a buy button that works on mobile. Category Search lands on the category, never on the home page.
Trust is part of the landing page. On the "wine online" results page one of the "People also ask" questions is "Where is the best place to buy wine online in the UK?": anyone arriving from an ad for a shop they do not know is asking the same thing. Shop reviews (Trustpilot, Feefo, Google), a returns page, company and VAT numbers in the footer, recognisable payment methods. The rest of the reasoning is in landing pages that convert.
How to track sales without counting fake events
Tracking is where most accounts are broken. Two numbers from our own projects, outside ecommerce but identical in mechanism: when we took over Valore Solare, the account was counting 15,267 "conversions" in a month against 5,467 clicks, all technical events; on Sunscape in 2024 there were 1,487 conversions at €0.61 each. With numbers like these, automated bidding optimises on noise.
The rule for an online shop: one primary conversion, the purchase, with order value and transaction ID to prevent double counting; add to basket and checkout as secondary conversions, visible but not driving bids. Then three things that are mandatory in 2026: enhanced conversions, which send the buyer's hashed email and recover orders that cookies lose; Consent Mode v2, required by Google for traffic from the European Economic Area since March 2024 and the sensible default for UK traffic too; and a single source for the purchase, either the Google Ads tag or the GA4 import, not both. On Shopify the Google & YouTube app sets it all up in one step; check it anyway with a test order, because we often find the purchase counted twice by an old tag left in the theme.
One last thing nobody tracks: returns. With 25% returns, the ROAS on screen is 25% higher than the real one. On Bosatta, spare parts, the problem hardly exists; on a fashion shop it decides whether the campaign makes or loses money.
Further reading: GA4 and Google Ads, how to link them.
What is a sensible minimum budget for an online shop
The minimum budget is whatever it takes to reach 30 orders a month, the threshold below which automated bidding does not have enough data (Google recommends at least 15 in the last 30 days for target ROAS; we want double that before trusting it). From there you calculate with measured CPCs.
- Generic Search on wine. CPCs between £2.08 ("online wine shop") and £3.29 ("wine online"). At a 2% conversion rate an order costs between £104 and £165; thirty orders, £3,100-5,000 a month. With a £50 basket it does not pay; with a £150 basket, only just.
- Shopping on the catalogue. The 100 keywords that bring Majestic the most organic traffic have an average CPC of £0.66. At £0.66 and 2% conversion an order costs £33; thirty orders, about £1,000 a month.
- Natural skincare. CPCs of £1.77-2.91, but "organic skincare online" gets 10 searches a month and "natural skincare products uk" 20: Search has no volume, so the budget goes on Shopping and Performance Max.
In practice, for a shop with a basket above £50 and margin above 35%, we start at £1,000-1,500 a month, all on Shopping and brand, and increase when ROAS holds for two months in a row. Scovaventi ran at around €1,700 a month on average. Below £500 the account does not collect data and months go by without learning anything.
The budget is not flat. "Wine delivery" goes from 2,400 searches a month over the summer to 6,600 in December; "wine online" from 720 to 1,900. The November-December budget needs to be two and a half to three times the summer one, and gift campaigns go live in October.
If you sell in more than one country
Bosatta sells in Italy, Spain, France and Germany with one feed per country in Merchant Center (local language, currency and shipping) and one campaign per country, because ROAS figures are not comparable. Machine-translated titles need reviewing by someone who knows the sector's terms in that language. Selling into Switzerland adds one more constraint: a Swiss Merchant Center target, prices in francs and customs charges stated on the product page, otherwise Swiss checkouts empty out; from Lugano we see it from both sides of the border. The same logic applies to shipping from the EU into the UK, which also means customs.
The mistakes we find in ecommerce accounts
- Performance Max without a brand exclusion. ROAS looks like 8, but half the sales come from customers who would have typed your name anyway.
- Feed titles copied from the stock system. "ART. 4471 BRUT NV" shows up for no search at all.
- One target ROAS across the whole catalogue. It pushes low-margin products because they are cheaper.
- Add to basket as the primary conversion. Bidding optimises on an event most users abandon before paying.
- No negatives in the first month. The budget goes on recipes, "free" and job searches.
- Campaigns switched off on 20 December because "the budget has run out". You lose the month with the highest demand and restart in learning mode.
- Returns not counted. Real ROAS is lower than the one on screen, and in some categories below break-even.
If your account has three or more of these, the answer is not a bigger budget. The website side of the check is in why your website does not convert.
Google Ads or SEO for an online shop?
Google Ads brings orders from the first week and stops when the budget stops. Organic rankings on a category take six to twelve months and then stay: Majestic is first on Google UK for "champagne" (49,500 searches a month) and for "buy wine" (33,100, a keyword that costs £3.20 a click), without paying for those clicks. On Scovaventi and Bosatta the model is the same: Shopping and Performance Max cover the catalogue from day one, SEO builds the categories, and every category that reaches page one is one where, the following year, we can lower the target ROAS or switch off Search.
The organic side, with category architecture, filters and platform differences, is in the guide to ecommerce SEO. How the two channels work together is in how to make SEO and Google Ads work together; how to win back people who viewed a product and did not buy is in how to do remarketing.
Frequently asked questions
What is the minimum Google Ads budget for an online shop?
Whatever gets you to 30 orders a month: about £1,000 with £0.66 CPCs and a 2% conversion rate, £3,100-5,000 with generic wine Search at £2.08-3.29 a click. For a shop with a basket above £50, a realistic starting point is £1,000-1,500 a month.
Standard Shopping or Performance Max?
Standard Shopping at the start, to keep control of search terms and products while the feed and tracking are fixed. Performance Max once there are at least 30 tracked orders a month, with the brand excluded and campaign negatives in place. Mature accounts keep both: Shopping on bestsellers, PMax on the rest.
Is Google Shopping free?
Merchant Center free listings appear in Google's "Shopping" tab and sometimes in the product block, with no cost per click. To get volume you need campaigns, but the feed is the same: switch on free listings anyway.
Does Google Ads work with Shopify?
Yes, and it is the platform with the least friction: the Google & YouTube app generates the feed, syncs price and availability and sets up purchase tracking with enhanced conversions. Scovaventi and Bosatta are both on Shopify.
Google Ads or Meta Ads for selling online?
Google catches people who are searching for the product; Meta creates demand among people who were not. On Scovaventi we use them together, and the €77,000 in sales comes from both. If your product gets searches on Google, start with Shopping; if it does not, start with Meta and use Google for brand and remarketing.
Where to start
Open Merchant Center and count the disapproved products; then open Google Ads, go to "Conversions" and count how many actions are set as primary. If the first figure is above 10% of the catalogue or the second is anything other than one, you have found your first two weeks of work, and neither costs any budget. If you would like to compare your account's numbers with the ones in this article, get in touch.
