How stores win Shopping on the products that pay.

Google catches demand that already exists. Somebody types the product name, your listing appears with a price and a picture, and the intent is as high as it gets. The ceiling is that you can only sell to people who are already searching. Meta creates demand instead: it puts the product in front of people who were not looking, which is how a new or unusual product finds its first buyers, and it is better at showing something off visually. If people already search for what you sell, Google is normally the faster path to profit. If they do not know it exists, Meta has to come first. Most stores that grow past a point run both, and use Google to harvest the demand that Meta created.

Shopping ads are the product tiles with a photo and a price, and they come from your Merchant Center feed rather than from keywords you choose. Search ads are the text ads, and you do pick the keywords. For most stores Shopping does the heavy lifting because a shopper can see the item and the price before clicking, which filters out people the price was never going to suit. Search earns its place on terms where you need to say something a tile cannot.

Usually something mechanical rather than anything wrong with the product. Missing or wrong GTINs, shipping and tax not configured for the places you actually ship to, image rules, or a policy flag triggered by an ordinary word in a description. It is tedious to work through and it is often the only thing standing between a store and a working Shopping campaign, so it gets done before anything launches.

It depends entirely on what you sell and who else is bidding, so any number quoted before looking at your market would be made up. What matters more than the click price is what it costs to get a sale, measured against what you keep on that sale. We check whether that arithmetic closes in your category before taking the work, and we will tell you if it does not.

Sometimes, with your eyes open. It can work well for stores with a clean feed and enough conversion data for Google to learn from. The honest downside is how little it shows you: it spends across Search, Shopping, YouTube and Display at once and reports back in aggregate, which makes it hard to tell what actually worked. We would rather start somewhere you can see the moving parts and move into it once there is data worth automating.

Mostly the negative keyword list. It is tedious to maintain and it saves more money than anything else in the account. People looking for a manual, a repair, a used one, a free one, or a part when you sell the whole thing. Each of those clicks costs exactly as much as a real buyer. Blocking them is ongoing rather than a one-off, because the searches that reach you change as the account spends.

Whichever suits you. Some people would rather not set up an account and a Merchant Center themselves, so we do it and give you full access from the first day. Others already have both and just add us. Either way the work is month to month, your spend goes to Google directly, and nothing is hidden from you.