Hiring a Google Shopping Ads Agency: The Feed Comes Before the Bid
A Google Shopping agency for a store spending $5,000 to $100,000 a month on ads will usually charge a flat monthly fee or a percentage of spend, and the fee matters less than one thing you can test before you sign: whether they diagnose your product feed before they touch a bid. My own fee is published — Google Ads management for ecommerce starts at $1,500 a month for one platform, against a minimum ad spend of $5,000 a month.
I read the pages ranking for “google shopping ads agency” before writing this. They are agency service pages, and they all say the same true thing: the feed matters. Not one of the top three states a price, says who should not hire them, or gives you a way to check whether the agency on the other end of the call will actually do the feed work it describes. That is what this post is for.
On this page
- What does a Google Shopping agency cost?
- What does a Shopping specialist do that a generalist does not?
- Why the feed comes before the bid
- How do I check my own feed before I hire anyone?
- What should the first two weeks look like?
- Who should not hire a Shopping agency
- The questions to ask on the first call
What does a Google Shopping agency cost?
Expect a flat fee from around $1,500 a month for one channel at the lower end of this spend range, or a percentage of ad spend, sometimes with a minimum. Mine is flat: $1,500 a month for one platform, additional channels at $500 each, with a $5,000 monthly ad spend minimum. The full breakdown, including the tiers above it, is on the pricing section of the home page.
The number to calculate is not the fee. It is the fee as a share of what you spend. A $1,500 fee on $5,000 of spend is 30% overhead on top of the media. The same fee on $20,000 is 7.5%. That sum is why the spend minimum exists, and why a store at $2,000 a month should not be paying anybody a management fee for Shopping.
| Pricing model | What it rewards | Where it goes wrong |
|---|---|---|
| Flat monthly fee | Efficiency. The agency earns the same whether your budget goes up or down, so cutting waste costs them nothing. | Scope creep. Pin down what is included, especially feed work, or it becomes an extra later. |
| Percentage of ad spend | Growth in spend. Simple to understand and scales with the account. | Every recommendation to raise the budget also raises the agency’s revenue. Not a sign of bad faith, but a thumb on the scale. |
| Percentage of revenue or performance fee | Results, on paper. | Arguments about attribution. Whose sale was it — Shopping, email, or the customer who was coming back anyway? |
| Setup fee plus retainer | Front‑loaded feed and account work. | Paying for a rebuild you may not need. Ask what the setup fee buys that the retainer does not. |
I went through the percentage question in more detail in what PPC management should cost. The short version: neither model is dishonest, but only one of them pays the agency more when you spend more.
What does a Shopping specialist do that a generalist does not?
A Shopping specialist starts in Merchant Center, and a generalist starts in the campaign settings. That is the whole difference, and it follows from how Shopping works.
Search ads run on keywords you choose. Shopping ads do not. Google’s own help page is direct about it: Shopping ads use your Merchant Center product data, not keywords, to decide where your ads show. Your product titles, descriptions, categories and identifiers are the targeting. A generalist who treats Shopping like Search will spend weeks adjusting bids on a campaign whose real problem is that half the catalog is described in words nobody searches for.
Most Shopping inventory now runs through Performance Max rather than a standalone Shopping campaign, which makes the point sharper, not weaker. Performance Max gives you less control over where the budget goes, so the feed is one of the few inputs you still own. I wrote about that trade in Performance Max for ecommerce.
Why the feed comes before the bid
The feed comes first because a bid can only buy more of the searches the feed already matches. If a product is disapproved, no bid shows it. If its title leaves out the words shoppers use, a higher bid buys more of the wrong searches. If the Google product category is wrong, you compete in the wrong auctions.
Those are all fields defined in the Merchant Center product data specification, and they are fixed in the feed, not in Google Ads. An agency that opens with bid strategy is working on the last lever in the chain. Sometimes it is the right lever. It is rarely the first one.
The practical test: ask any agency you are talking to what they would look at first. If the answer is the bid strategy, the budget or the campaign structure, ask what they would check in Merchant Center before any of that. If there is no answer, you have learned what you needed to.
How do I check my own feed before I hire anyone?
You can run a useful feed check yourself in about ten minutes, and it tells you whether you need an agency, a feed fix, or neither. Three places to look.
- Product status in Merchant Center. Open the products view and look at how many items are approved, limited or not approved. Every disapproved product is one you are paying someone to manage and cannot advertise. The fixes are usually specific and listed next to the product — Google keeps a help page for each one, such as how to fix a missing attribute.
- Which products actually get impressions. In Google Ads, open the products report for the last 30 days and sort by impressions. In most accounts I inherit, a small group of products takes nearly all of them and a long tail gets almost none. That tail is either products nobody wants, or products described so badly Google cannot match them. Only the second kind is fixable, and the titles tell you which is which.
- Your top ten titles, read out loud. Take the ten products you most want to sell and read the feed title, not the product page headline. Would a shopper type those words? If the title is a brand name and a collection name, and the shopper types a material, a size and a product type, the feed is the problem.
If all three come back clean, the feed is not your constraint and you may be looking at a bidding or a margin problem instead. If they do not, fix those before you pay anyone to optimize bids. The fields that matter most, in order, are in my post on Google Shopping feed optimization.
What should the first two weeks look like?
The first two weeks with a good Shopping agency should produce a written diagnosis before any change to bids or budgets. Roughly, in this order:
| Week | What should happen | What you should receive |
|---|---|---|
| Week one | Access to Merchant Center, Google Ads and your store analytics. Review of product statuses, feed source, conversion tracking and where the budget went over the last 90 days. | A short list of what is broken, ranked by how much revenue sits behind it. |
| Week one | A check that the conversion value Google reports matches what your store recorded. | A yes or no. If tracking is wrong, every later decision is made on bad numbers. |
| Week two | Feed fixes on the products carrying the spend: disapprovals, titles, categories, identifiers. | A list of the products changed and the fields changed on each, so the effect can be read. |
| Week two onward | Only then: campaign structure, bid strategy and budget. | A stated reason for each change and the number that will show whether it worked. |
An agency that restructures the whole account in week one is showing you activity. Restructuring is the most visible work and rarely the most valuable. If you want to see what that first-week review covers in full, the Google Ads audit for ecommerce walks through it.
Who should not hire a Shopping agency
Do not hire a Shopping agency if you spend under about $5,000 a month on ads. The fee becomes too large a share of the spend, and the fixes that matter at that size — clean titles, no disapprovals, correct categories — are ones you can make yourself with the ten-minute check above. That is also why my own minimum sits where it does.
Three other cases where an agency, me included, is the wrong answer:
- Your catalog changes faster than anyone can review it. If you add hundreds of products a week, you need a feed tool and rules, not a person editing titles.
- Your margins do not survive paid traffic. If a product makes a few dollars after shipping and returns, no agency will make Shopping profitable for it. That is a pricing conversation, and my post on customer acquisition cost shows the sum.
- You have not listed your products for free yet. Free listings let your products appear on Google at no cost from the same Merchant Center feed. If they are not running, start there. It is the cheapest way to find out whether the feed works before you pay for clicks.
The questions to ask on the first call
Ask these five on the first call. The answers separate someone who runs Shopping from someone who resells it.
| Question | A good answer | A warning sign |
|---|---|---|
| What do you look at first? | Merchant Center: product statuses, feed source, which products get impressions. | Bid strategy, budget, or a new campaign structure. |
| Who edits the feed, and how? | A named person, working in the feed source or a supplemental feed, with changes logged. | “Our tool handles it,” with no one able to say what changed. |
| Is feed work in the fee? | Yes, with a stated scope. | It is quoted separately after you sign. |
| How will I know it worked? | Revenue and return by product group, compared against the weeks before the change. | Clicks, impressions, or a platform ROAS with no check against store revenue. |
| Can I see an account you run, with spend and return? | A real case, with the spend and the result over a stated period. | Percentages with no base, or logos with no numbers. |
On that last question, here is mine. The Lifeguard Store is $159,235 managed over 24 months at a 17.5x blended return. The rest are on the results page, including the one where the organic revenue has not followed the rankings yet. Ask any agency for the same: spend, return, period, and one account that did not go to plan.
Questions people ask
How much does a Google Shopping agency cost?
Is it worth hiring an agency for Google Shopping?
What does a Google Shopping agency actually do?
Can I run Google Shopping ads myself?
Want this run properly?
I am Greg Asuncion, an ecommerce paid media consultant. I run Google Ads, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft for direct‑to‑consumer brands on Shopify — one person, published pricing, and a free audit after a call. Here is how I run Google Ads and Shopping for ecommerce brands.