How Shopping ads work
There are no keywords. You upload a product feed to Google Merchant Center — title, description, price, availability, image, brand, product identifier, category — and Google decides which searches your products deserve to appear for by reading that data. The advert itself is assembled from the feed too: the shopper sees a photograph, a price and your shop name before deciding whether to click.
That makes the feed the targeting mechanism, and the product title the single most influential field in it. Merchant Center also checks that the shop behind the feed is real and functioning — reachable contact details, a stated returns position, secure checkout — and that the price and stock on the feed match what a visitor finds on the page. Where the two disagree, the product is disapproved rather than shown at the wrong price. Shopping is only available in the countries Google supports for Merchant Center, so confirm your target market is on that list before planning around it.
Why Shopping ads matter
Intent is unusually specific. Someone typing a product name with a size, a colour or a model number has already decided what they want and is choosing where to buy it, and a listing that answers with a photograph and a price meets that moment better than a line of text can.
The visible price also does useful filtering. A shopper who finds the figure too high simply scrolls past, which costs you nothing, so the clicks you do pay for come from people who accepted the price before arriving. The same transparency works against you if you are the dearest listing on the row without a reason for it.
Where Shopping ads go wrong
Most problems are feed problems dressed as campaign problems. Titles exported straight from a shop database read like stock records rather than the phrases people search, so the product never matches the query in the first place. Missing identifiers, a stale price, an out-of-date availability status or an image with promotional text burned into it all quietly remove products from the auction.
The second failure is treating the catalogue as one block, bidding the same for a best seller and a discontinued accessory. The third is forgetting that searches are still searches: without negatives, listings drift onto queries for parts, repairs, manuals and second-hand versions of what you sell.
What to do about it
Fix the feed before touching bids, and rewrite titles the way a customer would search — brand, product, then the attributes that actually distinguish it. Keep price and availability synchronised automatically through your platform rather than by hand, because a manual feed goes stale the first busy week. Watch the disapprovals list as a routine task, not an emergency, since one policy issue can remove a whole category.
Then split the catalogue so products with different margins and different demand can carry different bids, and add negatives from the search terms report as you would on a search campaign. The mechanics of feed setup and campaign structure sit in Google Shopping campaign work, and the feed side is covered in more detail under Google Merchant Center.