Google Shopping agency · Merchant Center · Performance Max
The Google Shopping agency that bids on what each product earns.
Shopping ads and Performance Max decide what to show from your Merchant Center feed and what to pay from the order values your site reports. Neither tells the bidding what a product costs you. We fix the feed, group your products by margin and send values Google can bid on, then manage your Shopping and Performance Max campaigns week to week.
30 min · No pitch · Senior operator on the call
Engagement intake, currently open
Google Partner
Profit Geeks is a Google Partner agency
$1.42M
Attribution recovered in year one for a Melbourne online apparel brand
Fixed fee
Set for the scope we agree, whatever you spend on ads
Context
Why Shopping campaigns grow revenue while margin slips.
Shopping and Performance Max see two things about each product: the attributes in your Merchant Center feed, and the value your site reports when it sells. Neither tells the bidding what the product cost you. So the campaign learns that a large order beats a small one, even when the small one keeps more after stock, freight and payment fees.
Australian stores have a second gap. Merchant Center expects prices that include GST, and if your tag reports order totals with GST included, every ROAS figure reads 10 percent higher than a break-even worked out on GST-exclusive margin. A campaign can sit just above the number you think it needs and still lose money on every order.
Fixing both changes how the same budget is spent. Products are grouped by what they earn, each group gets a target it can actually hit, and the reports show gross profit next to revenue. That work starts in the feed and the tracking, before any bid changes.
Deliverables
What a Google Shopping engagement covers.
01
A Merchant Center review: disapprovals, missing attributes, product titles, GST-inclusive prices that match the site, and the issues stopping products from serving.
02
Margin labels in your feed. Merchant Center allows five custom labels, and we use them to sort products into margin bands so campaigns and asset groups can bid differently on each.
03
Purchase tracking Google can trust: one primary purchase action, deduplicated by order ID, with enhanced conversions on and cart data sent where it adds profit reporting.
04
A Shopping and Performance Max structure that suits your catalogue, with brand exclusions so new-customer results aren't padded by people already searching for your name.
05
Target ROAS set from each band's break-even and reviewed as conversions come in, with every change and its reasoning written down.
06
Monthly reporting of revenue, gross profit and spend by product group, reconciled to the orders in your store.
Services
The Shopping work we run for online stores.
Which campaigns you need depends on your catalogue, your margins and how much of your revenue comes from people who already know your brand. We set the mix after the audit call, once we have seen the feed and the order data.
Merchant Center feed
Titles, attributes, categories and disapprovals fixed at the source, with supplemental feeds or rules where your store platform can't send what Google needs.
Margin labels
Custom labels that sort products by margin band, price point or stock position, so a clearance line and a best seller don't share one target.
Standard Shopping
For products you want to control by hand, or to test against Performance Max on the same products before moving budget.
Performance Max
Asset groups built around product ranges, brand exclusions on Search text ads, and the search terms report read every week.
More on Performance MaxSearch alongside Shopping
Brand and category Search campaigns run by the same team, so Search and Shopping aren't bidding against each other for the same buyer.
More on Search alongside ShoppingOrder-matched reporting
Google's revenue and gross profit set beside your store's orders every month, using the reconciliation method from our Melbourne DTC case study.
More on Order-matched reporting
We don't shoot product photos or make video; your team or a specialist we recommend keeps that work. Feed titles and ad text are ours, and we brief everything else.
Side by side
How we differ from a typical Shopping setup.
Typical Shopping setup
- Every product in one campaign, at one target
- Bids on order value, GST and freight included
- Feed left as the store platform exports it
- Performance Max credited with brand searches
- Fee climbs as your spend climbs
Profit Geeks
- Products grouped by margin, each with its own target
- Break-even worked out on the same basis as the values Google sees
- Feed cleaned and labelled for bidding
- Brand excluded or reported separately
- One fixed fee, whatever the ad spend
Who this is for
- Australian online store turning over $2M to $20M a year, spending $20K or more a month on paid acquisition
- A catalogue where margin differs meaningfully between products or ranges
- Shopping or Performance Max revenue that looks healthy while the margin does not
- Wants the people who fix the tracking to run the campaigns
Who it isn't
- Wants revenue growth at any margin
- Would rather keep tracking that reports a flattering ROAS
- Expects Performance Max to run unattended
- Turning over less than about $2M and still finding product-market fit
Proof, in numbers
What fixing the tracking did for one online retailer.
An online apparel brand in Melbourne came to us with Meta and Google reports that disagreed with its Shopify orders. These results came out of sixteen weeks of tracking work, and the case study sets out how each was measured. One store's results, not a forecast for yours.
$1.42M
Attribution recovered in year one
About 18%
Revenue Google under-reported before the rebuild
32% → 4%
Meta-reported orders against Shopify orders, gap before and after the rebuild
58% → 71%
Visitors opting in to tracking once the consent banner was rewritten
What you actually buy
We fix the measurement, then we run the account. It starts with a free call.
Which of these sounds like your week?
- Meta says one number, Google says another, the CRM says a third, and the bank says something else again.
- The leads come in and most of them are rubbish.
- Traffic is fine. Not enough of them buy.
- You cannot spend more without losing margin.
- Something is wrong and you cannot say what.
All five are the same job. We fix the measurement first, then the same senior operators run the spend against it. The free call is where we work out which part you need first.
00 · Free
Run your own numbers
Six calculators and an attribution reference. Work out your break-even ROAS, your CAC payback, and whether the spend is structurally profitable, before you talk to anyone. The calculators need no signup.
01 · Free · 30 minutes
The profit audit call
A senior operator looks at your real spend, revenue and attribution gap on a call. You leave with a written fix list you keep, whether or not we ever work together. No deck, no follow-up sales sequence. We reply within one business day with three times to choose from.
02 · Optional · Two weeks
The two-week diagnostic
Read-only. We change nothing in your accounts. Every tag, event and consent rule mapped and written up: 20 to 35 pages, every issue rated P0 to P3 with an engineering-day estimate, and a 90-minute walk-through on day twelve. Yours to hand to us, your own team, or your existing agency. About a third of clients run this first, then decide.
03 · The engagement · Ongoing
The rebuild, then we run it
The first twelve weeks rebuild the measurement server-side so the reports reconcile to the bank, and work the funnel where the leak actually is. From there the same senior operators keep running Google Ads, Meta and search, with budget, bids and creative decided weekly against contribution margin and the reasoning written down. If your measurement is already sound, management starts straight away.
What it costs
Four things set the number
- The size of your stack
- How many ad platforms are live
- The state of your CRM integration
- How many service lines and locations you run
Two things do not
- Your industry
- How much you spend on ads
Revenue only matters because a bigger business is usually a bigger scope. We do not price off a percentage of it. We charge for the work, not for what you look like you can afford.
How it is billedThe rebuild is fixed scope, paid in instalments. Ongoing management is a fixed fee for the agreed scope. Both are quoted in one written proposal after the call. No hourly billing and no percentage of ad spend.
Included at no extra costThe written playbook and decision log, yours to keep whether we run the account or your team takes it in-house.
Where to go next
The rest of the work, by service and by city.
Most engagements pull from more than one of these. If you're not sure where you fit, the free profit audit is the right starting point. We'll tell you on the call.
Related services
Other locations
Sydney
Melbourne
Brisbane
Perth
Adelaide
National
Proof, with the working shown
We'd rather show you the maths than the buzzwords.
“Profit Geeks rebuilt our whole sales engine, and not just the ad accounts. They went after the systems sitting behind them too. Sales are up 140% and we've pushed past $25M. Honestly the bit I didn't see coming was the operation running leaner than it did back when we were half the size.”
“We were quietly bleeding about a thousand dollars a week and had no idea why. They found the leaks, sorted out the measurement and the offer, and now we'll do more than $10K in a single day. Same product. Completely different business.”
“We went from scraping together two installs a week to running four crews and fifteen-plus jobs a week, north of $10M turnover. The clever bit was they tied the scaling to what we could actually deliver, so growth never broke the operation. Booked jobs, not vanity leads.”
“After iOS, our Meta numbers stopped matching the bank, and we'd basically been writing the gap off as “just tracking.” Profit Geeks rebuilt our measurement server-side and reconciled it straight back to the P&L. Turned out about $1.42M of ad spend in year one had been working all along. They're the first team that showed me the maths instead of a dashboard.”
“We didn’t spend a dollar more on ads. What they did was fix how we counted a booked job versus a platform “conversion,” cut the wasted spend, and by week twelve our blended ROAS had more than tripled. Revenue went from $4.8M to $9.1M. Same senior bloke on every call too. No juniors, no relay race.”
Reasonable questions
What you're probably thinking.
01
We've been burned by an agency before.
Most of our intake has. The difference is structural. A senior operator runs your account, not a junior hidden behind a dashboard, and you leave the first call with written findings you own even if we never work together. No relay race, no account manager translating between you and the people doing the work.
02
How do I know it'll actually work for my business?
You don't yet, and neither do we until we've seen your numbers. That's why the first step is a diagnostic, not a contract. We've documented this in DTC and home services (the case studies show the full working) and run the same playbook in professional services. If the maths isn't there for you, we'll tell you on the call.
03
What if there's nothing worth fixing?
Then you've spent thirty minutes and walked away with a second opinion that cost you nothing. We'd rather say no than take on an engagement we can't earn, so we turn away intake that isn't a fit. There's no pitch and no follow-up sales sequence.
04
What does it cost, and what am I signing up for?
A fixed fee for the measurement rebuild, then a fixed fee for ongoing management, both quoted in writing after the call. No per-channel markup and no percentage of your ad spend. The same senior operators handle measurement, media and margin, and scaling is tied to your contribution margin, so spend only climbs when the numbers say it's working.
Frequently asked
What operators ask before booking the call.
Do Google Shopping ads actually work?
They can. Google's point is that shoppers see the photo, price and store before they click, so the clicks that arrive are better qualified than most. Whether they work for your store is a margin question: a product needs enough margin to pay for the clicks it takes to sell it, and the campaign needs to know which products those are. Feed quality, conversion values and margin labels decide that more than any bid setting.
Read the Melbourne DTC case studyHow much do Google Shopping ads cost?
You pay for each click, at a price set in the auction, and you choose the daily budget. Google can spend up to twice the average daily budget on some days, but over a month it won't charge more than 30.4 days of budget. The number to know is the most you can pay per click: average order value excluding GST, times your contribution margin, times your conversion rate. A $120 order at a 35 percent margin and a 2 percent conversion rate gives $0.84. Pay more than that and each sale loses money.
What Google Ads costs in AustraliaHow does Google Shopping work?
Shopping ads are built from your Merchant Center product data, not from keywords. Google matches a search to products in your feed and shows an ad with the product image, title, price and store name, on Google Search, the Shopping tab and Google Images among other places. You run the paid ads through a Standard Shopping or Performance Max campaign. Your products can also appear in free listings, which Merchant Center switches on by default in most cases.
How much does a Google Shopping agency cost?
Agencies in Australia usually price Shopping the same way as other Google Ads work: a share of ad spend, commonly 10 to 20 percent and lower as spend grows, or a set monthly retainer: about $1,500 to $3,000 for a smaller account and $3,000 to $8,000 for a mid-sized one. Accounts with large feeds can cost more, because the feed is work in itself. Our fee is fixed for the scope we agree, it never moves with your spend, and you get it in writing after the free audit call. If the numbers say our fee won't pay for itself at your spend, you will hear that on the call.
How much a Google Ads agency costs in AustraliaShould I run Standard Shopping or Performance Max?
Often both, doing different jobs. Performance Max reaches every Google channel from one campaign and suits stores with steady conversion volume and decent creative. Standard Shopping gives you product-level control and a clean comparison. When both target the same products, Google no longer favours Performance Max automatically; Ad Rank decides which one serves. Google's experiments can test the two on the same products, which beats guessing.
Our Performance Max guideIs $20 a day enough for Google Shopping?
Only if your orders are cheap to win. Twenty dollars a day is about $608 a month, and Google needs at least 15 conversions in 30 days before Target ROAS can run on a Shopping campaign. That works only if an order costs about $40 or less in ad spend. If yours cost more, start Standard Shopping on your best-margin products with simple bidding, track every order properly, and add budget once the numbers hold.
Do you run Meta and TikTok for online stores as well?
Yes. We run Meta (Facebook and Instagram), TikTok Ads and search alongside Google for online stores, plus other paid channels where your customers are, all measured against the same order data so budget can move to whichever channel earns it. Email and SMS flows stay with your team or Klaviyo agency, and we share the margin data with them so they can see which customers are worth winning back.
Our ecommerce marketing agencyWhat happens after you book
Three steps. No mystery.
Step 01 · Within 1 business day
30-minute audit call
A senior operator on the call. We look at your real numbers, spend, revenue, attribution gap, and tell you on the call whether the rebuild is worth doing for you and where it would start. No pitch deck.
Step 02 · Within 1 week
Written proposal
Fixed scope, fixed number, written up. The proposal names deliverables, timeline, the people involved, and the price. No hourly billing, no retainer drift.
Step 03 · Within 2 weeks
Engagement starts
Senior operators from day one. The measurement rebuild starts, we take over day-to-day buying on the channels we can measure, and the first working session lands. Inside two weeks of the call.
Next step
Find out what your best sellers actually earn.
The free 30-minute profit audit is a call with a senior operator who reads your Merchant Center feed, your Shopping and Performance Max campaigns and the order values your tag reports. You keep the written findings, hire us or not. Bring a month of store orders, so what Google claims can be checked against what you actually sold.