If you’re a retailer looking at ecommerce PPC services, the question isn’t which agency has the best case studies. It’s whether they can manage your product feed, explain what Performance Max is actually doing with your budget, and charge you fairly for it. Good ecommerce PPC services combine three things: clean Shopping feed data, sensible campaign structure across Search, Shopping and Performance Max, and honest reporting that doesn’t hide behind a single blended ROAS number. This guide covers what the work actually involves, what fair pricing looks like, and the questions that separate a competent agency from one coasting on automation.
What Google Shopping Campaign Management Actually Involves
“We manage your Google Shopping” is one of the vaguest sentences in this industry, so it’s worth breaking down what the job is meant to cover before you pay anyone for it.
At a basic level, Shopping campaign management means structuring your product catalogue into campaigns and, where relevant, ad groups by margin, category, or performance tier, setting bids or bid strategies against each, and reviewing performance regularly enough to catch waste before it eats your budget. That sounds simple. In practice it’s mostly ongoing maintenance: checking Merchant Center for disapprovals, updating negative keywords, testing new asset combinations, and adjusting for seasonal stock changes.
A google shopping ads agency worth paying should also be doing the less glamorous work: auditing your conversion tracking, checking your product titles actually match what shoppers search for, and flagging when a client’s own website changes (a new checkout flow, a pricing update) break something upstream. If an agency’s pitch is entirely about creative and strategy with no mention of feed hygiene or tracking, that’s a gap worth asking about directly.
Feed Quality and Why It Decides Your Results
This is the part most retailers underestimate, and it’s also where a genuinely good ecommerce ppc services provider earns their fee.
Your Shopping ads are only as good as your product feed. Google’s Merchant Center rejects listings for missing or malformed required attributes, price or availability mismatches between your feed and your live website, and low-quality images, and any of these can pull a product out of Shopping entirely, along with its impressions. Google’s own product data guidance notes that retailers who add correct GTINs (the standard barcode identifiers) to their feed see a meaningful uplift in clicks on average, which shows how much performance sits in data quality rather than bidding cleverness.
Two feed changes worth knowing about if your agency hasn’t mentioned them: Google has started warning merchants in Merchant Center about a new minimum image resolution of 500 by 500 pixels, which becomes enforced from 31 January 2027, so catalogues still running smaller images will need cleaning up well before then. Google also recommends 1,500 by 1,500 pixels or larger for the best placement quality across formats, not the “800px” figure some older guides still quote.
A weak agency treats the feed as a one-off setup task. A strong one treats it as a living document: checking for disapprovals weekly, correcting titles that don’t match real search behaviour, and fixing price mismatches before Google’s system does it for them by suspending the listing.
Performance Max and Its Reporting Limits
Performance Max (PMax) has become the default Shopping campaign type for most UK retailers, and it’s worth understanding both what it does well and where it genuinely limits what an agency, or you, can see.
PMax uses Google’s automated bidding and asset combination system across Search, Shopping, Display, YouTube, Gmail and Discover from a single campaign, rather than separate campaigns per channel. Google has improved reporting significantly through 2025 and into 2026: channel-level performance reporting, search terms reports, and campaign-level negative keywords (now supporting up to around 10,000) have all been added since PMax’s early, near opaque years.
That said, real limits remain. There’s still no ad-group-style segmentation inside a PMax campaign, so you can’t isolate performance the way you could in a traditional Search campaign. Search query visibility on Search Partner Network inventory (as opposed to Google.com itself) still doesn’t exist in native reporting, which matters if a chunk of your PMax spend is landing outside Google’s own search results. And while asset-level reporting now shows impressions and cost per individual asset, you still can’t see which specific combination of headline, image and description drove a given result, since Google tests those combinations internally.
The practical takeaway: any agency who tells you PMax is “fully transparent now” is overselling the 2026 updates. The right expectation is that PMax reporting has genuinely improved, but it’s still less granular than Search campaign reporting, and a good agency should be honest about that rather than presenting a single ROAS figure as the whole picture.
PPC for Ecommerce UK: Realistic Agency Fee Structures
Understanding how agencies charge for ppc for ecommerce uk work helps you compare quotes properly instead of just picking the lowest number.
Flat monthly retainer. You pay a fixed fee regardless of ad spend. In the UK, professional Shopping and Search management typically starts around £1,000 to £1,500 a month for a smaller account, rising to £2,500 to £6,000 for mid-market retailers running multiple campaign types, and £5,000 or more for complex, multi-market accounts. The advantage is predictability, and it removes any incentive for the agency to push you to spend more than makes sense.
Percentage of ad spend. The agency charges a slice of your monthly media budget, most commonly between 10% and 20% for smaller UK budgets, often sliding down to 5% to 10% once spend passes roughly £15,000 to £20,000 a month. At £10,000 monthly spend and a 15% fee, that’s £1,500 in management costs. The risk here is obvious: a percentage fee gives the agency a financial reason to grow your spend, not necessarily your profit.
Hybrid. A smaller base retainer plus a reduced percentage, often applied only above a spend threshold. This is common for mid-market accounts because it balances predictable income for the agency against fair scaling as your account grows.
Whichever model you’re quoted, ask for a minimum monthly fee in writing, and ask what happens if your spend drops. A contract that only specifies a percentage, with no floor, can leave an agency under-resourced on a quiet month, which usually shows up as neglected campaigns rather than a formal complaint.
Google Shopping Feed Management: What “Managed” Should Mean
If google shopping feed management is listed as a service line on an agency’s website, it’s worth pinning down exactly what that includes before you sign anything, because the phrase covers a wide range of actual effort.
At minimum, it should mean: regular checks of Merchant Center for disapprovals and warnings, correcting or standardising titles and descriptions so they match real search terms rather than internal product codes, keeping GTINs, brand, and category attributes accurate, and fixing price or stock mismatches quickly so listings aren’t suspended. Anything beyond that, like custom feed rules for seasonal promotions or supplemental feeds for different markets, is a genuine value-add worth asking about if you sell across more than one country.
Ask your prospective agency how often they check the feed, not just whether they “manage” it. Weekly checks with automated disapproval alerts are a reasonable standard; if an agency only looks at the feed when something visibly breaks, that’s reactive management, not proactive.
Benchmark Cost-Per-Click Ranges by Retail Category
Cost-per-click figures move constantly and vary by competition, season, and account quality, so treat these as a general starting point rather than a fixed target, and check current figures against your own account once you have data.
| Retail category | Typical Shopping CPC range (approx, GBP) | Notes |
| Food and grocery | £0.35 to £0.55 | Lower margins, high volume; efficiency matters more than CPC alone |
| Fashion and apparel | £0.40 to £0.75 | Wide range depending on brand competition and season |
| Home and furniture | £0.55 to £0.95 | Higher average order value often offsets higher CPC |
| Jewellery and accessories | £0.55 to £1.00 | Lower conversion volume but strong margins can still justify spend |
| Electronics | £0.80 to £1.20 | High competition, thinner margins, needs disciplined ROAS targets |
| Industrial and B2B goods | £0.90 to £1.50 | Smaller search volume but high-value orders |
Global Shopping CPC averages sit around £0.50 (roughly $0.66) according to 2026 industry benchmark reports, with European retail data specifically showing Shopping running cheaper than both Search and Performance Max on a blended basis. These figures shift with currency movements and seasonal competition, particularly around November and December, so use them as a sense check on agency quotes rather than a guarantee of what you’ll pay.
Questions That Expose a Weak Agency
Most agency pitches sound similar on the surface. These questions tend to separate the ones who genuinely run accounts well from the ones who don’t.
- “Can I see a real client’s Performance Max channel report, with names removed?” If they can’t produce one, they may not be checking channel-level data themselves.
- “How often do you check the Merchant Center for disapproval?” Weekly or automated is a reasonable answer; “we check when something breaks” is a red flag.
- “What’s your minimum monthly fee if my spending drops?” A vague answer here often means the contract has no floor, which puts your account at risk of being deprioritised.
- “Walk me through a time PMax underperformed and what you did about it.” Anyone who says PMax always works is either inexperienced or not being straight with you.
- “Do you get paid more if I spend more?” If they’re on a percentage model, ask directly whether that shapes their spend recommendations.
- “Who actually manages my account day to day?” Some agencies sell senior strategists on the pitch and hand the account to a junior afterwards; it’s fair to ask who you’ll actually be working with.
- “What does your reporting look like beyond ROAS?” A single blended ROAS number can hide a mix of a few very profitable products and several loss-making ones.
FAQs
What do ecommerce PPC services usually include?
They typically cover Google Shopping and Search campaign setup and management, Performance Max structuring, product feed optimisation in Google Merchant Center, conversion tracking checks, and regular performance reporting. The exact scope varies a lot between agencies, so it’s worth getting it written down rather than assumed.
How much do PPC agencies charge for ecommerce in the UK?
Flat retainers typically run from around £1,000 to £1,500 a month for smaller accounts up to £5,000 or more for complex, multi-market retailers. Percentage-of-spend models usually charge 10% to 20% of monthly ad budget, often sliding lower as spend increases past roughly £15,000 to £20,000 a month.
Is a percentage of ad spend or a flat retainer better?
Neither is universally better, but a flat retainer removes any incentive for the agency to push your spend up rather than your profit. Percentage models can work well for larger, growing accounts as long as the contract includes a sensible minimum fee to protect service quality on quieter months.
Why do Google keep changing Performance Max reporting?
Google has faced consistent criticism since PMax launched in 2021 for offering far less visibility than traditional Search campaigns. The 2025 and 2026 updates, including channel-level reporting and expanded search terms visibility, are a direct response to that pressure, though genuine gaps like asset-combination reporting still remain.
How important is product feed quality compared to bidding strategy?
Feed quality usually matters more, because a disapproved or poorly titled product simply won’t show, no matter how well the bidding is set up. Agencies who focus heavily on bid strategy while neglecting feed hygiene are optimising the smaller lever.
What’s a good cost-per-click for Google Shopping?
It depends entirely on your category and margin; a £1.20 CPC can be excellent for a high-margin electronics retailer and poor for a low-margin grocery seller. Compare your own CPC against category benchmarks and your actual conversion rate and margin, not a single industry-wide number.
Should I ask for a contract with no minimum term?
It’s reasonable to ask, and many UK agencies now offer rolling monthly terms after an initial setup period of one to three months. Be cautious of any agency insisting on a long lock-in with no clear performance review point built in.
Can I run Performance Max and Search campaigns at the same time?
Yes, and it’s common practice, particularly to protect branded search terms from being absorbed into PMax’s broader targeting. Google added brand exclusion controls in 2026 specifically so retailers can keep PMax focused on non-brand traffic while a dedicated Search campaign handles branded terms.
