The short answer

A Shopping Ads agency should manage the commercial system behind the ads, not just the campaign settings inside Google Ads.

For ecommerce, that means feed quality, Merchant Center health, product segmentation, budget allocation, PMax versus Standard Shopping decisions, product-page feedback, and reporting that shows what is happening below the campaign level.

If the agency only sends a monthly ROAS number, you are not getting much agency.

What makes Shopping different

Search campaigns are built around keywords and ads. Shopping campaigns are built around product data.

That changes the job. A Shopping agency has to understand how product titles, attributes, images, prices, availability, product types, and custom labels affect the way products enter auctions and absorb spend.

This is why a general PPC agency can be decent at Search but weak at Shopping. Shopping needs paid media judgement and ecommerce operations judgement sitting in the same room.

Google's Shopping documentation is plain about the mechanics: Shopping ads promote your Merchant Center product inventory through Shopping or Performance Max campaigns. In other words, the campaign is only one part of the system. The product data and Merchant Center setup are not side quests.

That is why the best Shopping agencies often sound a bit like merchandisers, analysts, and paid media strategists at the same time. They ask about margin, stock, category strategy, pricing, promotions, and product-page conversion because those inputs decide whether ad spend is worth scaling.

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What the agency should own

A proper Shopping Ads agency should own:

The agency may not personally edit every feed field if a developer or feed app is involved. But it should know what needs changing and why.

Product segmentation

This is where many accounts stay too blunt.

Not every product deserves the same target, budget, or patience. A sensible structure should consider margin, stock depth, price point, category, seasonality, return rate, conversion rate, and whether the product helps acquire new customers.

Example: a brand might have one category that looks weaker on ROAS but introduces profitable repeat customers. Another category might look strong on revenue but carry thin margin. A good agency does not flatten those products into one blended target and call it optimisation.

In practice, segmentation often starts with a messy commercial conversation:

Those answers should influence campaign structure and reporting. If the agency never asks those questions, it is probably optimising for the platform view rather than the business view.

Feed work

Feed work should be specific.

Weak version: "We will optimise your product feed."

Better version: "Your top 80 products need clearer product-type taxonomy, custom labels for margin bands, title rewrites for category terms, and a check on missing GTINs."

Good feed work is not busywork. It gives Google better data and gives the account better control.

Merchant Center

Merchant Center is where hidden Shopping problems often live.

An agency should review diagnostics, disapprovals, limited products, price mismatches, shipping warnings, returns settings, policy issues, product ratings, and promotion eligibility.

This matters because campaign changes cannot fix products that are not properly eligible or trusted.

PMax decisions

Many ecommerce brands now run Shopping through Performance Max. That is not automatically wrong, but it should be a decision.

An agency should be able to explain:

If everything is simply put into one PMax campaign, you may be buying convenience rather than strategy.

Reporting that matters

Shopping reports should answer useful questions:

The report should lead to action. A graph without a decision attached is just decoration.

Good reporting should also separate "what happened" from "what we are doing about it". A useful Shopping report might say: "Category A increased revenue, but margin-adjusted return fell because spend shifted into lower-margin variants. Next action: split those variants by custom label and reduce the target for the weaker margin band."

That is a different level of usefulness from: "Shopping ROAS was 4.2x this month."

The more product-heavy the account, the more the reporting needs to move below campaign level. Campaign-level averages are where detail goes to hide.

When to hire a specialist

Hire a Shopping Ads agency when the account has real product complexity, meaningful spend, Merchant Center issues, PMax opacity, weak feed data, or no clear product-level view of performance.

If spend is tiny and the catalogue is simple, you may not need a specialist yet. But once Shopping is a major channel, the cost of vague management gets expensive quickly.

Questions to ask before hiring

Ask the agency:

The best answers will be specific. If the answer to every question is "the algorithm will learn", keep looking.

The agency operating rhythm

Shopping management should have a rhythm. If the only work happens once a month before a report, the account will drift.

A sensible weekly rhythm might include Merchant Center checks, product waste review, budget pacing, high-spend product checks, and recent feed or stock changes.

A monthly rhythm should go deeper:

This rhythm does not need to be overcomplicated. It just needs to stop Shopping from becoming a campaign that nobody really owns.

How the agency should work with your ecommerce team

Shopping performance often depends on people outside the ad account.

The agency may need product managers for margin and stock context, developers or feed tools for data changes, merchandisers for category priorities, and ecommerce managers for landing page or promotion decisions.

This is why a good Shopping agency should be clear about what it can do directly and what it needs from the business. If the feed is controlled by Shopify, a feed app, a developer, or an ERP connection, the agency should still be able to write precise recommendations.

The useful deliverable is not "make feed better". It is something closer to: "Add margin-band custom labels to these product groups, rewrite titles for these categories using this structure, fix missing GTINs for these products, and separate clearance items because they are distorting ROAS."

Specificity is what makes the work happen.

What not to outsource blindly

An agency can manage the system, but the business still needs to own the commercial truth.

Do not outsource decisions like:

Those are business decisions. The agency should bring evidence and recommendations, but the best results usually come when the ecommerce team and agency make those calls together.