Rebuilding Profitability in Google Shopping at Scale

The challenge

A heritage fashion retailer was scaling spend into a leaky bucket: Performance Max cannibalized branded queries, the product feed was thin, and reporting hid which products actually made money.

Objectives

Reach 350%+ ROAS at £30k+ monthly spend; make product-level profitability visible; reduce wasted spend on non-converting queries by half.

Research

A 90-day query and placement forensic across the account, margin data joined to product performance, and competitor price-position analysis across the top 200 SKUs.

Strategy

Segment the catalog into profit tiers and let structure follow margin: hero products get dedicated budgets, long-tail items pool into efficient catch-alls, and brand traffic is fenced off from PMax.

Execution

Rebuilt the feed (titles, GTINs, custom labels for margin tiers), restructured campaigns around profit tiers, negated 4,100 wasteful queries, and ran landing-page CRO tests on the top sellers.

Results

ROAS climbed from 210% to 486% in four months while spend scaled from £18k to £42k monthly. Wasted spend fell 63%, and the finance team now sees margin-true ROAS per category.