Hi there,
Thanks for reaching out! I've had a look over the situation with your printing store's Google Ads, and it's a really common problem, so don't worry, you're not alone. Trying to manage a massive, growing list of products on a tight budget feels like an impossible task. The good news is that the issue you're seeing – those "below average" keyword ranks – is a direct symptom of the structure you've set up, and it's something we can fix. You've correctly identified that giving each of your hundreds of products its own ad group is impractical. The solution isn't more manual work; it's to switch to a smarter, more automated approach that's literally designed for businesses like yours.
I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance on this. Let's walk through why the current setup is holding you back and lay out a clear plan to get things moving in the right direction.
TLDR;
- Your current ad structure of lumping many products into one ad group is the direct cause of "below average" ad rank. It destroys ad relevance, which is the most important factor in Google Ads.
- This low relevance means you pay more for each click and get shown less often, effectively wasting your budget. The keywords aren't the problem; the ad-to-landing-page experience is.
- Stop trying to manually manage every product. The solution for a large, changing inventory is to use Google's automated campaign types: Performance Max (PMax) and Dynamic Search Ads (DSA).
- The absolute foundation for success is a well-optimised Google Merchant Center product feed. This is non-negotiable and will become your most powerful marketing tool.
- This letter includes an interactive calculator to help you estimate your potential Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) and a flowchart visualising why your current user journey is failing.
We'll need to look at why your current approach isn't working...
Right now, you're fighting a losing battle against the core principle of Google Ads: relevance. When a user types a specific search into Google, say "A4 silk finish 150gsm flyers cheap", they are sending a very clear signal of intent. They want flyers, with a silk finish, of a specific paper weight, and they're price-conscious. Google's entire business model is built on matching that specific intent with the most relevant possible result. A highly relevant ad gets a higher Ad Rank and a lower cost-per-click (CPC). An irrelevant ad gets penalised with a low Ad Rank and a higher CPC, or it just doesn't get shown at all.
Your current setup, where a customer searching for those specific flyers clicks an ad and lands on your homepage, breaks this principle completely. Your ad can't possibly be specific enough because it has to cater to hundreds of different potential searches, and your homepage isn't the specific product they asked for. In Google's eyes, this is a poor user experience. The user has to do more work—navigating menus, using your search bar—to find what they were looking for. Many won't bother; they'll just hit the back button. This signals to Google that your result wasn't a good match.
This is what "below average" rank means. It's Google telling you that one or more of the three core components of Quality Score are weak:
- Expected Click-Through Rate (CTR): Google predicts your generic ad is less likely to be clicked for a specific search compared to a competitor's ad that says "A4 Silk Finish Flyers - Order Now!".
- Ad Relevance: Your ad copy is too broad to be truly relevant to the user's specific keyword.
- Landing Page Experience: Your homepage is not considered a relevant landing page for a specific product search.
When these are low, your Quality Score plummets. A low Quality Score means you have to bid much higher than your competitors just to get the same ad position. You're essentially paying a "relevance tax" on every single click. You could have the best printing service in the country, but if the ad journey is broken, you're just burning cash. It's not about having a big budget; it's about making the budget you have work efficiently, and that starts with relevance.
Let's visualise the difference between the journey you're creating now and the one that actually leads to sales.
Current Path (Low Relevance)
Ideal Path (High Relevance)
I'd say you need to reconsider the idea of 'low search volume'...
You mentioned that many of your products don't have enough search volume to justify their own ad groups. This is a classic trap. While a single niche product, like "die-cut holographic stickers with a matte finish," might only get a handful of searches per month, think about the collective power of all your niche products. You might have hundreds of these "low volume" products. Added together, the search volume for all these specific, long-tail keywords is often far greater, and more valuable, than the volume for broad, generic terms like "printing services."
People who search with specific, long-tail keywords are not just browsing; they know exactly what they want. They are much further down the buying funnel and are significantly more likely to convert if you can just put the right product in front of them. The problem isn't that the volume doesn't exist; it's that the manual effort to create thousands of ad groups to capture it is impossible for a small team. You'd need to be adding new ad groups and ads every week as you add new products. It's just not sustainable.
This is where we stop thinking like a manual account manager and start thinking like a system. We need a way to automatically connect every single one of your products to a potential customer searching for it. And thankfully, Google has built the exact tools to do this.
You probably should build a new, scalable ad structure...
To fix this, we need to completely rebuild your campaign strategy around your product inventory. The centerpiece of this new strategy will be a Google Merchant Center (GMC) product feed. If you don't have one already, this is your absolute top priority. A product feed is essentially a spreadsheet (or an XML file) that lists every single one of your products with all their attributes: product title, description, price, image link, the URL of the actual product page, and so on. Most eCommerce platforms like Shopify or WooCommerce can generate this for you automatically.
Once you have this feed, you unlock Google's most powerful campaign types for businesses with large inventories.
1. Performance Max (PMax) - Your New Workhorse
PMax is an all-in-one campaign type that uses your product feed and other assets you provide (like logos, headlines, and videos) to run ads across Google's entire network—Search, Shopping, Display, YouTube, Discover, and Gmail. You don't create ad groups for each product. Instead, you feed your entire product catalog to the PMax campaign, and Google's machine learning does the heavy lifting.
When someone searches for "A4 silk finish flyers," PMax can:
- Automatically generate a Shopping ad using the flyer's image, price, and title from your feed.
- Automatically generate a text ad on the Search network with a dynamic headline that matches the search term.
- Crucially, it will automatically link both ads directly to the correct product page for A4 silk finish flyers on your website.
This single campaign type solves your entire relevance and scalability problem in one go. It ensures that every search is met with a hyper-relevant ad that goes to the correct page. It's the perfect solution for your business model of having many products with more being added weekly. As soon as you update your product feed with new items, PMax can start advertising them without you needing to lift a finger in the ads account.
2. Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) - The Long-Tail Catcher
DSA is another fantastic tool for you, which you can run alongside or instead of PMax to start. DSA campaigns don't use keywords. Instead, you tell Google which pages of your website you want to advertise (e.g., your entire site, or just specific categories like "Business Cards" or "Banners"). Google then "crawls" these pages to understand what they're about.
When a user's search is relevant to one of your pages, Google automatically generates an ad with a dynamic headline tailored to that specific search and points the user directly to the most relevant page on your site. For example, if someone searches for "cheap plastic loyalty card printing," and you have a page for that, DSA could create an ad with the headline "Cheap Plastic Loyalty Cards" and send the user straight there. You only write the description lines.
This is an incredibly effective way to capture all those long-tail searches for your niche products that you could never possibly think to add as keywords manually. It fills in all the gaps and ensures you have coverage across your entire inventory.
A sensible new structure could look like this:
| Campaign | Type | Targeting Method | Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|
| Main Campaign - All Products | Performance Max (PMax) | Product Feed (via GMC) | Your primary, always-on campaign to advertise all products across all of Google's networks. The core of your new strategy. |
| Popular Products - High Control | Standard Search | Keywords (Manual) | Keep your two existing, successful ad groups here. This gives you precise control over bidding and ad copy for your bestsellers. |
| Long-Tail & Site Categories | Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) | Website Content (via Google Index) | A supplementary campaign to catch any niche, long-tail searches that PMax might miss. Structure ad groups by site category. |
You'll need to treat your product feed as your most important asset...
As you can see, both PMax and DSA rely heavily on the data you provide—either through your product feed or on your website itself. For this reason, optimising your product data is no longer an afterthought; it's the single most impactful activity you can undertake to improve your ad performance. A poorly optimised feed will lead to poor performance, no matter how clever the campaign setup is.
Here are the key areas to focus on:
- Product Titles: This is the most important element. Don't just put "Business Card." Be descriptive. A good format is `Main Product Name - Key Attribute 1 - Key Attribute 2 - Material | Your Brand`. For example: "Premium Business Cards - Double Sided - 450gsm Silk Finish | ABC Print Shop". This title is rich with keywords that PMax and Google Shopping can use to match to user searches.
- Product Descriptions: Use this space to elaborate on the product's features and benefits. Write for humans, but naturally include keywords that potential customers might use. Talk about use cases, quality, and what makes your product special. Don't just copy-paste a single sentence.
- High-Quality Images: For Shopping ads in particular, the image is everything. It's the first thing a user sees. Make sure your images are clear, well-lit, and accurately represent the product. For printing, mockups showing the final product in use can be very effective.
- Accurate Pricing and Stock: Ensure the price and availability in your feed always match your website. Mismatches will get your products disapproved in GMC.
- Categorisation: Use the `google_product_category` attribute to tell Google exactly what you're selling. This helps their algorithm understand your products better and show them to more relevant audiences. Be as specific as possible.
Spending a few hours a week improving your product feed will pay much higher dividends than tinkering with keywords in a manual campaign. It's the foundational work that makes the entire automated system run effectively.
You probably should set a realistic budget and track what matters...
Now, let's address the "small budget" issue. The beauty of the structure we've just discussed is that it makes your budget work much, much harder. By dramatically improving your relevance, your average cost-per-click should decrease, meaning your existing budget can now generate more clicks. More importantly, those clicks will be of a much higher quality, as they'll be landing on the exact product pages they were looking for, leading to a higher conversion rate.
But what should you expect? For eCommerce businesses, which is what your printing store effectively is, the goal isn't just cheap clicks or even cheap sales. The goal is a profitable Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). ROAS is a simple metric: for every £1 you spend on ads, how much revenue do you get back? If you spend £500 and generate £2,500 in sales, your ROAS is 5x (or 500%).
Based on my experience with eCommerce clients, a good starting goal for a well-optimised, feed-driven strategy is often between a 3x and 6x ROAS. I've worked on several campaigns for online stores where achieving returns of over 600% is entirely possible once the account is structured correctly. While printing is a competitive industry, these figures show what's possible. Your profitability will depend heavily on your product margins, of course.
To help you understand the relationship between your spend, revenue, and return, I've built a simple interactive calculator. Play around with the numbers to see how changes in ad spend and revenue affect your overall ROAS.
I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:
To bring it all together, this is the main advice I have for you. It's a clear, step-by-step process to transition from your current, inefficient setup to a scalable, automated system that's built for growth. This isn't a quick fix, it's a fundamental shift in how you should approach Google Ads for your type of business.
| Step | Action | Why It's Important | Key Tip |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Foundation | Set up and fully populate your Google Merchant Center (GMC) account with a product feed containing all your products. | This is the data source for PMax and Shopping Ads. Without a high-quality feed, nothing else works. This is the single most important step. | Use a plugin or app from your website platform (e.g., Shopify, WooCommerce) to automate the feed creation and updates. |
| 2. Optimisation | Optimise your product titles and descriptions in the feed. Make them descriptive and keyword-rich. | This directly improves ad relevance, helping Google match your products to the right searches and lowering your CPCs. | Follow the `Product - Attribute - Material` structure for titles. Don't be afraid to write long, detailed titles. |
| 3. Launch PMax | Create a new Performance Max campaign. Link it to your GMC account and target your entire product feed. | This automates the creation and targeting of ads across Google's entire network, solving your scalability problem. | Start with a "Maximise conversion value" bidding strategy if you have revenue tracking set up, otherwise use "Maximise conversions". |
| 4. Consolidate | Pause your old, large "clumped together" ad group. Keep your two successful ad groups for popular products running in their own separate Search campaign for now. | This eliminates the inefficient part of your account and prevents it from competing with your new, superior PMax campaign. | Don't delete the old campaign, just pause it. You might want to refer back to its data later. |
| 5. Track Everything | Ensure you have Google Ads conversion tracking properly installed on your website to track actual sales and revenue, not just clicks. | You can't optimise what you can't measure. This allows both you and Google's algorithm to make decisions based on real business results (ROAS). | Set up enhanced eCommerce tracking via Google Analytics 4 if possible. This gives you much richer data. |
| 6. Refine & Monitor | Give the PMax campaign at least 4-6 weeks to learn and gather data. Monitor performance through the 'Asset Groups' and 'Listings' tabs. | Machine learning campaigns need time and data to optimise. Making drastic changes too early can reset the learning phase. | Add negative keywords at the account level to prevent wasted spend on irrelevant searches (e.g., "free", "jobs", "how to design"). |
I know this is a lot to take in, and it represents a significant shift from what you're doing now. The move away from manual keyword management towards a feed-based, automated approach can feel daunting at first. However, for a business with a large and constantly changing inventory like a printing store, it is without a doubt the correct strategic path. It allows you to leverage Google's powerful machine learning to do the work of a hundred account managers, ensuring that every single one of your products has a chance to be seen by a potential customer at the exact moment they're ready to buy.
While the steps I've outlined are the blueprint for success, the execution requires expertise. Optimising a product feed effectively, structuring a PMax campaign for the best results, and correctly interpreting the performance data can have a steep learning curve. Getting it right from the start can save you months of wasted ad spend and frustration. This is often where partnering with an expert can make a huge difference, helping you navigate the setup and accelerate your path to profitability.
If you'd like to discuss this in more detail, we offer a completely free, no-obligation initial consultation where we can look at your account together and map out how this strategy would apply specifically to your business. It's a great way to get a second set of expert eyes on your setup and gain some clarity on the next steps.
Regards,
Team @ Lukas Holschuh
