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So you think you are a Maverick and can start managing some Google Ads? Read a few reddit posts and a few AI answers, and now you are ready?
Think again.
In order to manage Google Ads and Structure is a crucial step, as this will be make or break for your or your customer’s return on investment.
Before you even begin to attempt to manage a Google Ads account, you have to educate yourself on a few concepts, and how they interact.
We will discuss what you need and what you need to know before you can begin starting a Google Ads setup.
Strap in, we are in for a bumpy and confusing ride.
On WordPress once you install WooCommerce you create product categories and then individual products within them, and on Shopify once you set up your store you create collections (the equivalent of categories) and then add individual products to those collections.
These products are accompanied by
Take special care when creating these, as Google’s Merchant Centre will pull this data from WooCommerce, using a plugin.
Humans validate this information, so make sure that these are set up perfectly.
Shopify’s official app for product feeds to Google Merchant Centre is called Google & YouTube. In WordPress/WooCommerce the official plugin is called Google Listings & Ads (formerly “Google for WooCommerce”).
Try to keep the Google account that is registered on WordPress, WooCommerce, the plugin and Merchant centre the same.
What these applications and plugins do is to sync your product information on you online shop, with the Google Merchant Centre.
Synchronization is not immediate, and might take a few days.
Google Merchant Centre is a free product repository where you store your product data from Shopify and WooCommerce.
It gets all this product data from the Product Feed, or in extreme cases, manual uploads.
This is how Google gets the chance to understand your products, and ensure that you have everything in place in order for Google to show your products across Search, Images, Maps, and YouTube.
It is not a marketplace, searchers still check products out on your e-commerce website. Look at is as a professional looking link to your products. One can think of it as a product library powered by Google to showcases products from online stores on the Internet.
To join you must meet Google’s policy checks for price accuracy, shipping, and returns. There is a manual approval process, so it is best to have all your products set up before registering for your Google Merchant Centre.
If you ensure that all the information about your products are correct on WooCommerce or in Shopify, then Merchant Centre will be a breeze.
Once your feed is approved you appear in free listings, and you can choose to run paid Google Ads Shopping Ads.
Paid campaigns bid in auctions for the ad slots above or beside the free results, they do not overwrite your organic placement.
If you maintain your Google Merchant Centre account well, as in, fix disapprovals and ensure that your online store and your Merchant Centre is in sync, this will give you a tremendous advantage.
A Google Ads Shopping campaign displays only what it finds in the product catalog stored in Merchant Center, so every title, description, image and price that appears in an ad is read directly from the feed you have linked to Google Ads.
When the campaign runs, Google checks that catalog in real time and decides when and where to surface the products.
You can change product details in the Merchant Centre without changing them in your e-commerce platform.
Titles, descriptions, images, product types and all five custom-label slots are editable, and a manual edit you save in Merchant Center replaces what your WooCommerce or Shopify feed supplies until you change it again.
When Google matches a shopper’s query to your product listing it looks at the text in title, description, product type and other visible attributes, so place the phrases you want to trigger on inside those fields.
Custom labels do not influence matching, they exist only to group or bid on products within Google Ads reports and campaigns.
Topic 4
You need to give Google complete shipping information, entered as settings inside Merchant Center.
You build one or more “shipping services” that spell out countries, costs, carriers and delivery times.
Google shows those details on your ads.
There are a few consideration before deciding to manage a Google Ads account.
This post was written by Zahid Hassan on 5 April 2025.
This page was last updated on 7 April 2025 by Christiaan Gouws.
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