Between Shopify’s checkout changes breaking tracking, Google tightening its black box around search terms, and new tools rolling out faster than most brands can keep up it’s no surprise even 7-figure stores feel lost.
But here’s the thing: Google hasn’t stopped working. It’s just changed how it works.
At Budai Media, we’ve audited dozens of Google Ads accounts over the past year and the biggest wins didn’t come from bigger budgets. They came from better inputs:
- Cleaner product feeds
- More accurate tracking
- Smarter audience signals
- Sharper campaign control
- And deeper integration with tools like Klaviyo
We sat down with our Google Ads lead, Tamas, to break down exactly what’s working right now in 2025 and what mistakes are quietly killing ROAS for ecommerce brands.
Let’s dive in.
1. Clean Up Your Merchant Center (Google Needs to Understand What You Sell)
If Google doesn’t understand your products properly, it can’t sell them properly. Full stop.
Before touching budgets or campaign settings, start with your product feed, specifically your product types and custom labels inside Merchant Center.
One of our clients at Budai, an automotive accessory store, had been running a PMax campaign meant for product bundles. But when we checked the Merchant Center, we saw individual items were mislabeled as bundles. That meant Google was showing the wrong products, and wasting their entire ad budget.
Before touching budgets or campaign settings, start with your product feed?specifically two fields that brands often confuse: Google Product Category and Product Type.
- Google Product Category is for Google. This is what the algorithm uses to figure out what your product is and where it fits in Google’s taxonomy. It’s not shown to customers, but it directly influences where and how your ads appear. For example, if you’re selling a men’s running shoe and you’ve mistakenly labeled it under Clothing > Men’s Clothing, you’ve already shot yourself in the foot.
- Product Type, on the other hand, is for you. It’s used for internal campaign organization, bidding strategies, and feed management.
Think of it like a custom folder system for your own backend. You can create a deep hierarchy (e.g., Car Accessories > Seat Mods > Ford F-150), which helps you segment products for performance-based bidding.
Fixing these fields is one of the easiest (yet most overlooked) ways to boost Shopping ad performance often without increasing your budget.
2. Check Your Shopify Setup: You Might Be Losing All Your Google Ads Conversions
If you’ve recently stopped seeing transactions or revenue show up in Google Ads, and you’re using Shopify, this might be why.
Shopify’s new Thank You and Order Status page upgrade has quietly broken a lot of Google Ads tracking setups.
Basically, if you’re using Google Ads pixels via legacy methods like checkout.liquid, additional scripts, or a custom pixel, that data is no longer being picked up once the Thank You page is upgraded. And if you haven?t upgraded yet’Shopify is going to force the change anyway.
We ran into this exact problem with a client in the education space. One day, Google Ads stopped showing any revenue. Sales were still happening, but conversions in Google Zero.
Turns out the client had switched to the new post-checkout page layout without updating the tagging setup. And just like that, Google lost all visibility into purchases.
What to do instead?
It’s an easy fix, you just have to switch to using the official Google & YouTube app on Shopify.
It’s the only method that:
- Supports Shopify’s new checkout updates
- Keeps your tracking stable across Ads, GA4, YouTube, and Merchant Center
- Powers enhanced conversions and Customer Match
It takes just a few minutes to install, and it’s 100% future-proof.
Key deadlines:
- Shopify Plus stores: August 28, 2025
- All others: August 26, 2026
Migrate to the Google & Youtube App >>
3. Use GA4 Insights to Train PMax to Find Better Buyers
Performance Max (PMax) campaigns rely heavily on audience signals, and what you feed Google at the start can massively influence how fast (and how profitably) it learns.
One of the most effective ways to guide Google?s algorithm is by using real demographic data from GA4 (Google Analytics 4).
Here’s how it works:
When you create an asset group in PMax, you can add ?signals? that tell Google what type of users are most likely to convert. These can include:
- ? First-party data (like purchase emails or Klaviyo segments)
- ? Search themes
- ? Interests, detailed demographics, or life events related to your customers
- ? Demographics (gender, age, parental status, household income)
So let’s say your GA4 report shows women aged 25-34 convert 3x better than any other group. Instead of hoping Google figures that out eventually, you tell it upfront: Start here.
? But here’s the key:
These are not hard targeting rules.
They’re starting points. Google will still show your ads to other people, but it prioritizes the groups you highlight, especially early on when it’s still learning.
Why this matters:
- Helps PMax learn faster (less wasted spend)
- Increases early conversion rate
- Gives you more control over performance without manual micromanaging
4. Performance Max Is Opening the Black Box
For a long time, Performance Max felt like you were handing Google a suitcase full of ad assets and just hoping for the best.
No insight into where your budget was going. No way to see what was working. And very little control once your campaign was live.
That’s starting to change.
In 2025, Google has begun rolling out a series of long-awaited updates to Performance Max. Some are already live, others are still in beta, but they’re all moving in the right direction, giving advertisers more visibility and control.
- Channel-level reporting inside PMax.
You’ll finally be able to see how your ads are performing across Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Gmail, Discover, and Maps. Instead of wondering where your budget went, you’ll know exactly which channels are driving impressions, clicks, and conversions. If your Shopping placements are doing all the work while Display burns through budget, now you can spot that, and act on it.
- Real search term reporting
This has been a long-standing complaint from advertisers, especially those running Shopping-heavy campaigns. Previously, PMax gave vague “themes” that offered little insight. With this update, you’ll now see the exact search queries triggering your ads. That means you can start adding negative keywords based on actual data, not guesswork, finally putting a stop to irrelevant or low-converting traffic.
- Detailed asset performance metrics.?
Those generic “Good” or “Best” labels on your headlines and creatives are being replaced with real numbers. You’ll soon be able to track impressions, clicks, cost, and conversion value for each asset, whether it’s an image, video, or headline. That means better creative testing, smarter decisions, and no more flying blind.
5. Sync Klaviyo Segments to Google Ads
If you’re using Klaviyo and still uploading customer lists manually to Google Ads, you’re doing it the hard way.
With Klaviyo’s direct integration, you can now sync your dynamic segments like VIP buyers, cart abandoners, or inactive customers, straight into Google Ads. No CSVs. No exports. And your audience stays up to date automatically.
We set this up for a women’s supplement brand we work with. By analyzing their best customers, those with 6+ orders and high average order value, we built a segment in Klaviyo and synced it to Google Ads.
That segment is now used in their PMax campaigns as an audience signal and in remarketing ads. It updates in real time as customer behavior changes.
This setup lets you:
- Show smarter ads to people based on real purchase behavior
- Retarget recent buyers or exclude them from certain campaigns
- Better first-party audience signals for PMax AI training
It’s a better way to connect your email + ads strategy, and a must if you want to scale profitably in a post-cookie world.
Wrapping Up
Getting solid results from Google Shopping or Performance Max doesn’t always require more budget, it just requires better inputs.
If you want to see what that looks like in action, check out how we helped a healthcare brand cut their Google Ads CPC by 73% without increasing their ad spend.
From fixing broken tracking in Shopify to using Klaviyo data and feeding PMax smarter signals, the brands that win in 2025 are the ones who adapt quickly and optimize intentionally.
We’ve helped 200+ ecommerce stores unlock serious growth by fixing the small things that drive big returns, and we can do the same for you.
If you’re doing $100K/month or more and ready to scale, let’s talk.
? Book your free Google Ads audit
Or if you want to do a self-review first, grab our Google Ads Cheatsheet. (The same one we use to audit the set up of 7 – 8 figure Shopify stores.)
