Google Shopping runs on product data rather than keywords. What you send to Merchant Center decides what you are eligible to show for; what you do in Google Ads decides what that costs. These guides follow that chain end to end — the feed, the campaigns spending against it, the measurement that tells you what happened, and the competitive and AI-driven shifts changing how products get found.
Feed data, titles, custom labels, images and bidding — the levers that decide which of your products show at all, and what each click costs.
The product data behind every Shopping ad and free listing: feed setup and optimization, disapprovals, the reports Google Ads doesn't carry, and the tools that manage all of it.
ROAS is the default metric and the most misleading one. These cover what to measure instead, whether the conversion data underneath it can be trusted, and where the budget is quietly leaking.
How often your products appear at all, and who takes the placements when they don't. Impression share answers the first; auction insights and price benchmarking answer the second.
The structural decisions that outlive any single optimization: which campaign type you run, how you bid, how you split brand from non-brand, and whether a CSS partner or a second platform earns its keep.
AI agents are starting to browse, compare and buy on a shopper's behalf. Google's UCP and OpenAI's ACP both want structured product data, and neither works with a neglected feed.
A practical map of the current API version, GAQL resources, metrics, segments, field compatibility and reporting queries.