Case studies / eCommerce
Google Ads, Shopping, retargeting & CROA half approved feed doesn't sell half your catalogue. It sells the wrong half.
Headset Buddy arrived with a large share of its product feed disapproved and an account inherited from previous agencies. Over two years we cleared the feed, rebuilt Search and Shopping, added retargeting, and worked on the site itself. Clicks rose 85 percent. Conversion value rose 320 percent.
An accessories brand selling compatibility, not just hardware.
Headset Buddy sells adapters and accessories that connect headsets to computers, desk phones, smartphones, and stereo systems, the parts that let people keep the audio hardware they already own instead of replacing it.
We were brought in on an account that had already been through previous agencies, carrying an inherited campaign structure and a product feed with a large share of disapprovals sitting underneath it.
Disapprovals don't remove products at random. They reshape what you sell.
When part of a feed is disapproved, the store keeps trading, just not on the catalogue it thinks it has. Whatever survived the disapprovals becomes the entire Shopping presence, and it's a selection nobody chose. The products that get sold are the ones that happened to stay eligible, not the ones the business would have picked.
Selling an accidental catalogue.
Shopping runs, clicks arrive, orders come in. It looks like an underperforming account rather than a broken one, which is exactly why it can persist for a long time without anyone questioning the product mix underneath it.
- Campaigns Still running
- Catalogue shown Whatever survived
- Product mix Unchosen
- How it presents Weak performance
The full range, back in the auction.
Restoring eligibility put the whole catalogue back in front of buyers, including products that had been invisible. More traffic, and a different mix of purchases: conversion value grew faster than conversions, because buyers were now reaching items they couldn't previously see.
- Clicks +85%
- Conversions +243%
- Conversion value +320%
- Average order value +22%
An inherited account and a feed that wouldn't clear.
Headset Buddy sells adapters and accessories that connect headsets to PCs, desk phones, smartphones, and stereo systems, the parts that let people keep the hardware they already own.
The products were good. The advertising account had been through previous hands, and four things were wrong with it.
A large share of the feed was disapproved
Policy issues in the product data kept a significant portion of the catalogue out of Shopping entirely. Disapproved products don't bid, don't serve, and don't appear anywhere in the account as a performance problem.
The account structure was inherited, not designed
Campaigns built by previous agencies, layered over time, with budget spread across groupings that no longer reflected how the products were bought.
Buyers search by compatibility, not by product
Someone looking for an adapter searches by the connectors they need to join. That's an enormous long tail of highly specific queries, and a loosely structured account cannot match ads to them with any relevance.
Tracking gaps hid what was working
Without reliable conversion measurement, the account had no way to distinguish the campaigns producing revenue from the ones producing clicks.
Six parts, and the first one gated the rest.
No amount of campaign work improves an account whose products aren't allowed to appear.
Clear the Merchant Center disapprovals
The product feed audited against Google's requirements, corrected, and resubmitted until the catalogue was eligible. Until this was done, every other improvement would have been applied to a fraction of the range.
The full catalogue back in Shopping results.
Rebuild the account rather than adjust it
A full audit of the inherited structure, then a rebuild around how the products are actually bought. Inherited accounts accumulate campaigns that made sense once; adjusting them preserves decisions nobody would make today.
Budget controllable at the level that mattered.
Cluster keywords by compatibility
Keyword research built around the connector and device combinations buyers actually search for, grouped into tight themes so each ad could speak to a specific compatibility question rather than to adapters in general.
Relevance across a very long tail of queries.
Separate campaigns by job
Search, Shopping, Display, and retargeting split so each had its own budget and its own measure of success, rather than one campaign type quietly consuming another's spend while looking responsible for its results.
Each channel judged on its own terms.
Fix tracking, then optimise against it
Conversion tracking rebuilt so revenue could be attributed properly, followed by continuous bid, keyword, and audience refinement across two years of running the account.
Compounding gains rather than a one time lift.
Work on the site, not just the account
Conversion rate optimisation alongside the media: testing ad creative, landing pages, and the path from a Shopping click through to checkout. An adapter buyer needs to confirm compatibility before they'll commit, and anything that makes that harder costs a sale the ads already paid for.
Conversion value up 320 percent over the period.
Conversion value grew faster than conversions.
Three figures came out of the engagement, and the relationship between them says more than any one of them alone.
- Clicks +85%
- Conversions +243%
- Conversion value +320%
- Implied average order value +22%
Conversions grew nearly three times faster than clicks, which means the conversion rate roughly doubled. The account stopped buying traffic that was never going to convert.
But conversion value grew faster still. The same buyers were spending more per order, because products that had been sitting disapproved were suddenly visible again, and some of them were worth more than the ones that had survived.
That's the part most feed recovery work never measures. A disapproved catalogue isn't simply a smaller catalogue. It's a different one, selected by whichever policy issue happened to apply, and the business ends up selling the products Google allowed rather than the products it wanted to sell.
If your Shopping revenue is flat and your product mix looks odd, check your disapprovals before you check your bids.
Four things for any Shopping account.
Compare eligible products to total products
It takes seconds and almost nobody does it. If the two numbers differ, you're advertising a catalogue you didn't choose.
Watch order value, not just conversions
If conversion value moves differently from conversion count, your product mix is changing. That's usually the more interesting story.
Rebuild inherited accounts
Adjusting someone else's structure preserves assumptions you can't see. It's faster to rebuild around how the products are bought today.
Match structure to how people search
For technical or compatibility driven products, buyers search in very specific terms. Tight keyword clusters are the only way to be relevant across that tail.
What went into it.
Six of our services, over a two year engagement.
Other feed and Merchant Center work.
How many of your products are actually eligible?
Most merchants have never compared their eligible product count against their full catalogue. If the numbers don't match, you're advertising a selection nobody chose. Give us read only access and we'll show you what's disapproved, why, and what it's costing. Findings are yours to keep either way.
Read only access · No obligation · You keep your accounts