Cutting Shopping CPA by 62% With Feed Strategy Alone

A client came to us convinced they needed a bigger budget and fresh creative to fix a Shopping CPA that had crept up for months. They needed neither. We cut their Shopping cost per acquisition by 62% without adding budget or making a single new ad. The entire fix lived in the product feed and the bidding structure. Here is the teardown.

The feed is the campaign

In Shopping, you don't write ads — the feed is your ad. Titles, product types, and attributes decide which searches you show for. This account's titles were the manufacturer defaults: brand name, model number, and nothing a customer would actually type. So Google matched them to broad, low-intent queries and spend leaked everywhere.

We rebuilt titles around search intent, leading with the category and the attributes people actually search on (use case, size, material, colour) rather than SKUs. That one change shifted impressions toward queries that convert.

Segment by margin and intent, not one big campaign

Every product had been dumped into a single Shopping campaign with one target, which meant high-margin best-sellers were bidding against low-margin long-tail products for the same budget. We split the catalogue into tiers by margin and conversion rate, and set bidding targets per tier so the account spent aggressively where each sale was worth it and conservatively where it wasn't.

Add the negatives Shopping can't set for you

Shopping campaigns match on the feed, so you control relevance almost entirely through negative keywords and query filtering. We mined the search terms report and cut the informational and wrong-intent queries that were quietly eating 20-30% of spend: 'how to', 'repair', 'used', competitor and spare-part searches that would never convert for a full-price new product.

Check the feed first

Before you ask for more budget or new creative, check whether your feed is actually telling Google what you sell and who should see it. Most Shopping accounts leak spend on queries they never meant to bid on. Fixing the feed costs nothing.