How to set up Google Shopping ads in 2026: a beginner's guide

Most people build their Google Shopping campaign backwards.

They open Google Ads, click New campaign, and then realise they have no Merchant Center, no approved feed, and no conversion tracking. Three days of scrambling later, they have a campaign live with broken tracking and a feed full of disapprovals.

This guide goes in the right order. Prerequisites first, campaign second, first-week checks last. By the end, you have a live Google Shopping campaign and you know what to look at once it is running.

Before you start: get Merchant Center right first

You cannot run Google Shopping ads without Google Merchant Center. It is not optional, not a recommendation - it is the technical requirement.

Merchant Center is where your product data lives. Google Ads pulls from it to serve your Shopping ads. If your Merchant Center is not set up, or your products are disapproved, Google Ads has nothing to show.

Before you touch Google Ads, confirm three things in Merchant Center:

1. Your account is verified (your website domain is claimed and confirmed)
2. You have an active product feed with at least one approved product
3. The Issues tab shows no account-level warnings

If you have not set up Merchant Center yet, read the step-by-step Merchant Center setup guide first. Come back once your products are live and approved.

The quality of your feed matters too. A feed full of generic titles and missing attributes will produce weak Shopping results from day one. The complete guide to Google Shopping feed optimization covers what to fix and in what order before you go live.

Step 1: link Merchant Center to Google Ads

Once Merchant Center is clean, linking it to Google Ads is a two-minute task.

In Merchant Center: Go to Settings, then Linked accounts. Find the Google Ads section. Enter your Google Ads customer ID - it is the 10-digit number in the top right corner of your Google Ads account. Send the link request.

In Google Ads: Go to Tools and Settings, then Linked accounts. Find the pending Merchant Center request and click Approve.

That is it. Your product feed is now available inside Google Ads when you create a Shopping campaign.

One thing to double-check: both accounts should show the link as Active. If Google Ads still shows Pending, you have not approved the request yet.

Step 2: set up conversion tracking before you spend a dollar

This step is non-negotiable.

Google Shopping runs on Smart Bidding. Smart Bidding learns from your conversion data. If you launch without conversion tracking, Smart Bidding is completely blind - it spends your budget on traffic with no idea what converts.

Set up a Purchase conversion action in Google Ads before you launch.

Go to Goals, then Conversions, then click New conversion action. Choose Website. Select Purchase. Follow the steps to get the conversion tag.

You have two ways to install it:

Via Google Tag Manager: Paste the conversion ID and label into a new Google Ads conversion tag in GTM. Set the trigger to your order confirmation page. Publish.

Via Shopify Google channel: Install the Google channel in Shopify. It handles the conversion tag automatically and pulls product data into Merchant Center at the same time.

After installation, test it. Place a test order and refund it, or use the Google Tag Assistant Chrome extension to confirm the tag fires on the order confirmation page. In Google Ads, check Goals, then Conversions, and look for a green tick or a test conversion recorded.

Do not launch without a confirmed working conversion action. A campaign with no conversion data is a campaign you cannot optimise.

Step 3: Performance Max or Standard Shopping?

This is the decision most beginners get stuck on. Here is a clear answer.

Performance Max is Google's newer campaign type. You give it your product feed, your creative assets, your budget, and a bidding goal. It serves ads across Shopping, Search, YouTube, Display, and Gmail automatically. It decides where to show your ads and how much to bid on each impression.

Standard Shopping is the classic campaign type. You control which products get shown, set bids manually at the product group level, and manage the structure yourself. More control, more work.

For your first campaign, start with Performance Max.

Here is why. When you have fewer than 30 conversions a month, manual control in Standard Shopping often hurts more than it helps. You end up underbidding on products that would convert and overbidding on ones that would not. Performance Max handles that complexity for you while your account builds up conversion history.

Once you have consistent monthly conversions and you want to test product splits, control budgets by product group, or run tighter bid strategies, Standard Shopping earns its extra complexity.

The full Performance Max breakdown covers when and how to make that switch. For now, Performance Max is the right call for a first campaign.

Step 4: build the campaign

In Google Ads, click the blue + button and choose New campaign. Select Sales as your objective. Click Continue.

For Performance Max:

Select your Merchant Center account when prompted. Set your target country and language. You will be asked to add an asset group - images, headlines, logos, and videos. Add what you have. If you only want Shopping placements for now, you can still launch without full creative assets and the feed will carry the campaign.

Name the campaign clearly: something like "PMax - All Products - UK" or "PMax - All Products - US". You will thank yourself when you have multiple campaigns running.

For Standard Shopping:

Select your Merchant Center account. Set your target country. Choose your campaign priority - Low is fine for a single campaign. After saving the campaign, set up one ad group with "All products" as the product group. You can split by category or brand later once you have data.

A note on structure: the Shopping campaign setup is the simpler part. The real work is in the feed. Two campaigns with the same feed will get similar results. The differentiator is feed quality, not campaign structure.

Step 5: set your budget and bidding

Budget and bidding choices in the first few weeks directly affect how quickly you exit the learning phase and start getting useful data.

For Performance Max:

Start with Maximise conversion value as your bidding strategy. Do not set a Target ROAS yet. Without conversion history, a target ROAS locks Smart Bidding into a constraint it cannot meet and you end up with almost no traffic. Let it learn without a target for the first 4-6 weeks. Add a Target ROAS once you have real data to base it on.

For Standard Shopping:

Start with Maximise clicks. This gets you data fast. After 30+ conversions, switch to Target ROAS.

Daily budget:

A practical starting point is a budget that can get you at least 5-10 clicks per day. You can estimate your product's cost-per-click in Google Keyword Planner before launch. The key principle: do not set the budget so low that Smart Bidding cannot collect enough data to learn. Smart Bidding needs real conversion signals. A campaign that gets 2-3 clicks a day cannot generate those signals fast enough.

Plan to sustain your starting budget for at least 2-4 weeks without interruption. Pausing and restarting resets the learning phase.

Step 6: launch and your first-week checklist

Your campaign is live. Here is what to check every day for the first seven days.

Day 1 to 2: product approval in Merchant Center

Go to Merchant Center, then Products, then Diagnostics. Look for any new disapprovals. A new campaign sometimes triggers a re-review of your feed. Fix disapprovals quickly - every disapproved product is a gap in your ad coverage.

Days 1 to 7: impressions in Google Ads

If you see zero impressions after 24 hours, something is wrong upstream. Check in this order: Is the Merchant Center link Active in both accounts? Are there approved products in the feed? Is the campaign targeting the right country? Work through that list before assuming a bidding issue.

Days 3 to 7: clicks and conversion data

If you have impressions but no clicks, your product images or prices may not be competitive. Search manually for your own products in Google and look at what comes up. Does your listing stand out? Is the price in the right range for the category?

If you have clicks but no conversions after 50-100 clicks, go back and recheck your conversion tracking. Do not make campaign changes yet - verify the tracking first.

A good first week looks like this: feed is mostly approved, impressions are live, the campaign has clicks, and your conversion tag is firing. That is the baseline. Everything else is optimisation.

After launch: what actually moves the needle

Getting the campaign live is step one. The real work starts after.

For most Google Shopping accounts, the biggest lever is the feed - not the bids and not the campaign structure. Product titles, custom labels, and feed quality affect how Google matches your products to search queries. A feed with strong titles and the right attributes will outperform a feed with weak titles at the same bid level, every time.

We manage Google Shopping campaigns for 200+ ecom brands across the US, Europe, and beyond. If you want to know what is wrong with your setup before you have to learn it from three months of wasted budget, start with a real audit. We pull your Merchant Center data live and tell you what needs fixing before we propose anything.