Marketing & Agency

How to Choose a Google Ads Agency for Ecommerce

The short version: look for someone who can talk fluently about your product feed and your conversion tracking, not just your keyword list. Google Ads for a Shopify store is a Merchant Center problem and a tracking problem as much as it's a bidding problem, and a lot of agencies that are genuinely good at lead-gen PPC have never had to deal with either.

Why "we do PPC" isn't a useful filter

Plenty of agencies run Google Ads well for lawyers, SaaS companies and local services. That doesn't automatically transfer to ecommerce. Lead-gen accounts optimize toward a form fill or a phone call, usually with a handful of high-value keywords and a sales team downstream to close the deal. Ecommerce accounts optimize toward a purchase, often across hundreds or thousands of SKUs, with Shopping and Performance Max campaigns doing most of the volume and Search filling in around them. The skills overlap, but the day-to-day work — feed hygiene, product-level bid strategy, seasonal inventory shifts — is different enough that "we run Google Ads" on its own tells you very little.

Search vs Shopping/PMax expertise

For most ecommerce stores, Shopping and Performance Max campaigns carry more of the spend and more of the revenue than standard text-based Search campaigns. Ask directly how they split budget and thinking between the two. An agency that only talks about keywords, match types and search terms is describing Search-campaign management — useful, but not the whole job. You want to hear them talk about product groups, priority tiers between Shopping and PMax to avoid cannibalization, and how they handle PMax's more limited visibility into what's actually driving results, since PMax deliberately gives advertisers less granular reporting than Search does.

Merchant Center and feed competence

Shopping and PMax campaigns run entirely on your product feed — titles, images, GTINs, categories, availability, price. A feed with disapproved items, mismatched pricing, or thin product data quietly caps how well those campaigns can perform, no matter how well the bidding is managed. A competent agency should be able to explain, without prompting, how they audit feed health, how they handle Merchant Center disapprovals and policy flags, and whether they touch product titles and structured data directly or leave that entirely to you. If nobody on the team has opened Merchant Center diagnostics before, that's worth knowing up front.

Conversion tracking and Enhanced Conversions

Google's automated bidding is only as good as the conversion data it's optimizing against. Ask specifically whether they set up and maintain Enhanced Conversions — Google's method for matching conversions using hashed customer data when cookies alone fall short — and how they handle Consent Mode for EU and UK traffic. If your reported Google Ads conversions and your actual Shopify orders drift apart, an agency that understands tracking should be able to explain why, rather than just reporting the platform number at face value. This is also where the line between "runs your ads" and "understands your tracking" usually shows itself — plenty of agencies are fine at the first and weak at the second.

Attribution literacy

Google Ads reports conversions using its own attribution model and its own view of the customer journey, which usually doesn't match what actually shipped in Shopify — some of that gap is normal and explainable, not a red flag on its own. What matters is whether the agency can talk about it honestly: how they reconcile Google Ads numbers against Shopify revenue, how they think about assisted conversions and cross-channel credit, and whether they treat platform-reported ROAS as gospel or as one input among several. An agency that can't explain why its own reported numbers don't match your order data is either new to ecommerce or hasn't looked closely.

Account ownership, reporting, and contract terms

Ownership. The Google Ads account, Merchant Center account, and any conversion tracking setup should be owned by you, with the agency added as a user. If an agency insists on building everything under their own manager account with no practical way for you to take it with you, that's a switching-cost tactic, not a technical requirement.

Reporting. Good reporting explains what changed and why, tied to your actual revenue — not a screenshot of the Google Ads dashboard with a green ROAS number circled. Ask to see a real (anonymized) example of a monthly report before you sign anything.

Contract terms. Understand the notice period, what happens to the account on termination, and whether fees are flat, percentage of spend, or performance-based. None of these structures is inherently wrong, but you should know which one you're signing before spend starts, not after.

Red flags worth taking seriously

Guaranteed ROAS numbers before they've seen your account, your margins, or your historical data.
No mention of Merchant Center or the product feed anywhere in the pitch.
Reluctance to give you admin-level access to your own ad accounts.
Reporting that only shows platform metrics, never reconciled against your Shopify revenue.
A generic proposal that could apply to any client, with your store name swapped in.

If you're also evaluating Meta

Most of this reasoning applies to Meta Ads too, but the specifics differ — Meta doesn't have a Merchant Center equivalent in the same sense, and its tracking questions center on the Pixel and Conversions API rather than Enhanced Conversions. If you're hiring for both channels, or trying to decide which one to prioritize first, see how to choose a Meta Ads agency as the companion piece to this one, and where to put your budget between the two if you haven't decided yet.

Common questions

Does the agency need Shopify-specific experience, or is general ecommerce experience enough?

General ecommerce experience gets you most of the way there — the core Search/Shopping/PMax mechanics don't change by platform. But Shopify-specific experience matters for the parts that touch your stack directly: how the feed gets built and refreshed, how conversion tracking is wired to checkout, and how Shopify's own reporting differs from what Google Ads shows. An agency that's only worked on Magento or custom carts will have a learning curve on those specifics.

Should I ask to see results from their other clients?

Ask, but expect limits. Reputable agencies usually can't hand over screenshots of another client's account without permission, and confidentiality clauses are normal in this industry. What you can reasonably ask for is a description of the account (spend level, vertical, timeframe) and what changed, without exact numbers if they're not able to share them. Be skeptical of anyone who freely shows you a competitor's private dashboard — it means they'd do the same with yours.

Is a 12-month contract normal for a Google Ads agency?

Long lock-ins are common but not universal, and they're more of a business-model signal than a competence signal. Some agencies genuinely need a few months of runway before Search and Shopping data stabilizes enough to show a fair result, which is a reasonable reason to ask for a minimum term. A 12-month contract with no exit clause and no defined checkpoint to review results is a different thing — that's a retention mechanism, not a reflection of how long good work takes.

What's the difference between a Google Ads agency and a Google Shopping agency?

In practice, not much — "Shopping agency" is usually a positioning choice rather than a separate skill set, since Shopping and Performance Max both run through the same Merchant Center feed that Search campaigns often reference too. The more useful question is whether whoever you're talking to can speak fluently about feed structure and product data, not just keyword bidding, regardless of what they call themselves.

Want us to run this evaluation for you?

If you'd rather skip the vetting process, we manage Google Ads and Shopping/PMax for Shopify stores directly, with tracking reconciled against real Shopify revenue rather than platform-reported numbers.

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