“Raise the budget” is not the answer. Almost never.

Move off Google’s own CSS

In Italy, as in twenty other European countries, Shopping campaigns have to run through a Comparison Shopping Service. For almost every merchant that service is Google’s own, because it is the default and nobody ever changes it. Here is what the default costs you: before your bid reaches the auction, the service keeps a fixed percentage of it. Bid one euro and less than one euro competes. This is not a suspicion. Google writes it in its own documentation, and it goes back to the remedy the European Commission imposed.

With a third-party CSS that deduction is gone and the whole bid competes. No campaign gets touched and nothing gets rewritten: you change one link upstream of the Merchant Center. Across the e-commerce accounts we run, Shopping and Performance Max together take between 80% and 99% of monthly spend, so the change lands on all of that budget at once.

Google’s own documentation: “Google Shopping ensures profitability by deducting a fixed percentage margin from each merchant bid before entering it into the auction”. Google does not publish the percentage. Industry estimates put it between 16% and 20%, which makes it an order of magnitude and not a promise — anyone selling it to you as a firm number is selling you something else.

Product titles get rewritten in the Merchant Center

Shopping has no keywords. The product title is the keyword, and it decides whether you enter the auction on a given search at all. That makes it the only lever that works on getting into the auction instead of on the price you pay — and in most accounts it sits untouched, because everyone assumes that changing titles means opening up the store.

It does not. A supplemental feed, in practice a spreadsheet connected to the Merchant Center, overwrites the titles without touching Shopify or PrestaShop, without developers and without waiting for the next release. You try it, you measure it, and if it reads worse you are back where you started in an afternoon.

In a fashion catalog of roughly ten thousand items, out of 500 titles we sampled 423 did not contain the brand name and 18 were nothing but a product code. One of them was a garment priced above three thousand euros whose listing never told Google what label it was.

The “Paid & organic” report

You link Search Console to Google Ads: five minutes. What you get back is the only place where a single query shows you paid clicks, what they cost, organic clicks, organic position and the combined total, all on the same row. As long as those two worlds live in separate tabs, the overlap between SEO and Ads stays a matter of opinion.

Three lists come out of it, and each one is a different decision. You rank first organically and you are also paying for that query: lower the bid and watch the combined clicks. If they hold, you have freed up budget. If they fall, you have learned those paid clicks were additional rather than a substitute. You pay for a query where you do not exist organically: that is the most precise SEO brief anyone could write, with the monthly cost of leaving it alone already in it. You rank first organically and run no ads on a query that converts: you are handing the top half of the page to somebody else.

It also settles the oldest argument in the trade: “are my brand ads cannibalizing my organic traffic?”. It stops being an opinion and becomes a row in a table.

Exclude the customers you already have

Since this year Performance Max lets you genuinely exclude your own customer lists from the campaign’s inventory. Before, you could only hand them over as a “signal”: a hint the algorithm was free to ignore, and often did. Now it is a real exclusion, and it sits in the campaign settings.

It does two things at once. It moves budget toward people who do not know you yet, which is why you opened the campaign in the first place. And it works as a free incrementality test: how far the reported ROAS drops once you take out your existing customers tells you how much of that ROAS was simply repeat business, revenue that was coming anyway.

The textbook case is the store that sells well to its regulars: Google claims more than half of the shop’s revenue, while the median repurchase falls somewhere around six weeks. When a customer comes back every six weeks, a large share of those conversions was never won by the advertising.

The point

None of the four is a secret. They are documented, public and free. All they cost is the time of somebody who opens the account and goes looking. That is why “raise the budget” is almost never the answer: before you spend more, there is usually something else to do first.