“Can we give the autumn collection more support?”
The Google Ads agency can act on that request. What it cannot know from the sentence is which products qualify, what happens when sizes sell out, or when the launch stops being a launch.
Retail teams and Google Ads agencies work better with a shared product-priority brief: the commercial objective, an identifiable product group, the conditions for support, an owner and a review date. The retailer owns the business trade-off. The agency decides how to implement it in Google Shopping or Performance Max. Both check whether the intended products actually received more opportunity.
That sounds straightforward. The difficulty is keeping the agreement current after the meeting ends.
What Should a Retailer Share with Its Google Ads Agency?
An agency already sees campaign performance. It needs the commercial context behind the next decision: launches, stock pressure, margin constraints, supplier commitments and changes in the range.
Sending every available spreadsheet rarely helps. Give the specialist enough information to identify the products and understand the trade-off. “These products have high stock” is incomplete. “We have eight weeks to sell this seasonal range, the offer can support acquisition costs, and these products still have a healthy size range” is a usable brief.
A small brief can carry the essentials:
| Decision | What the retailer and agency should agree |
|---|---|
| Objective | Give the autumn outerwear launch a fair test |
| Product group | The named collection, with stable product IDs and the relevant market |
| Conditions | Adequate availability and acceptable margin; missing data must be reviewed |
| Timing | Start and end dates, plus the date the campaign setup must be ready |
| Channel action | The agency's proposed treatment, budget and success measures |
| Ownership | Commercial owner, data owner, publication approver and agency operator |
| Review | When to inspect delivery, when to assess sales, and what would stop the test |
The objective can involve a trade-off. A retailer may accept weaker short-term ROAS to learn whether a new range has demand. The agency needs that decision before the account starts missing its usual efficiency target.
This is the practical part of the business data gap in advertising: useful information exists, but it has not yet become an instruction the account can use.
Who Owns the Product Priority, and Who Owns the Campaign?
The retailer should own the reason a product deserves support. The agency should own the channel recommendation and explain its consequences.
| Party | Responsibility |
|---|---|
| Retail leadership and commercial teams | Choose the objective and acceptable trade-offs |
| Ecommerce, category and data owners | Define the products, maintain the inputs and explain exceptions |
| Google Ads agency or in-house specialist | Design campaigns, budgets, bidding, creative, exclusions and tests |
| Named authorized user | Review and publish agreed changes within the team's approval policy |
| Select eligible ads and bids through its auction and automated bidding systems |
One person may hold several responsibilities. What matters is that each decision has an owner.
The agency should challenge a brief when it cannot create a useful test. A group may be too small, the budget too thin, or the launch window too short. The retailer should challenge campaign success that comes from products the business had explicitly deprioritized. That is a working relationship with enough information on both sides.
Turn “Push the Collection” into Ordered Product Rules
A product priority needs a definition that survives changes in the catalog.
Consider an autumn launch. The commercial owner wants support for the collection, provided shoppers can still buy a reasonable selection of variants. A useful rule order is:
- Assign Low to products below the agreed availability guardrail.
- Assign High to eligible products in the launch collection during its approved date window.
- Leave unmatched products at Standard.
In Expanly, the first matching rule determines the product's priority. The order matters: putting the launch first could allow it to win before the availability guardrail is considered. Missing availability also needs deliberate treatment; unknown data is not evidence that stock is healthy.
High, Standard and Low describe commercial intent. High means the business wants a deliberate opportunity. Standard means normal treatment. Low means less support is appropriate under the current conditions. Low does not remove a product from Google Ads by itself.
Expanly evaluates the published rules daily against the available connected data. A product can move between priorities as its data changes without someone editing the rule each morning. The retailer and agency approve the logic and its scope; they do not need to reapprove every product movement generated by that unchanged logic.
The data needs an owner too. A rule can be perfectly consistent with yesterday's stock file and still be wrong for today.
A Custom Label Needs a Campaign Decision Behind It
For its Google Merchant Center destination, Expanly delivers the approved signal through a selected custom-label slot in a supplemental data source. The primary feed continues to supply the product information. Agree which slot Expanly owns before activation so it does not conflict with existing label logic.
Google provides five custom-label attributes, numbered 0–4. Their values are chosen by the advertiser. A label called High has no built-in spending power.
The specialist must decide how the account uses it. In PMax, listing groups determine which feed products are included within an asset group. Creating another listing group or asset group does not give those products a separate budget. Where a cohort needs its own campaign budget, the specialist has to consider a separate campaign and the consequences of splitting the account.
That decision deserves more attention than the label name. Will High products get distinct campaign treatment or only a reporting view? Will Low products be excluded from a particular campaign? Could an overlapping campaign still serve them? Is the group large enough to support the proposed structure?
A good agreement records the action next to the priority. “High means a bounded launch test in this campaign” is actionable. “High means Google should spend more” leaves the important work undone.
Our custom-label workflow explains how Expanly maintains the business signal while feed and campaign specialists retain their roles.
Approve Changes, Then Verify That They Reached Google Ads
Draft edits to Expanly rules stay separate from the published baseline. Preview the proposed logic, inspect representative products and review unexpected movements before an authorized user publishes it.
Publication is one checkpoint. Delivery is another.
The agency should verify a sample of actual offer IDs in Merchant Center and then check that the intended label values are available and used in Google Ads. Processing takes time, so a successful publication should not be treated as proof that the auction used the new label at that instant. Schedule the first delivery check before the commercial event depends on it.
Urgent availability problems still belong in the retailer's commerce and feed processes. A daily priority rule is not an emergency stock switch.
The supplemental priority signal does not need to contain the margin, stock quantities or rule conditions used to produce it. Those detailed inputs can stay in Expanly. This is a boundary of the priority export, not a claim that Google receives no business data through the retailer's other integrations.
Make the Weekly Review About Exceptions
The useful part of the meeting is usually a short list of products whose treatment differs from the plan.
Start with delivery. Did the label arrive, and did the account use it? Then inspect allocation: spend, product impressions, clicks and the share of the selected products receiving exposure. A launch can gain spend while nearly all of it goes to a few familiar products.
Read the figures with the group definition beside them. If High expanded from a small collection to half the catalog, a higher share of spend does not necessarily show that individual launch products received more support. Track the original launch cohort as well as the daily priority view.
Only then discuss sales and efficiency. Allow for conversion lag, and record promotions, price changes and stock events that could explain the result. Keep the product-reporting scope consistent rather than treating product-level figures as a complete account-wide PMax total.
The next action should be specific: fix the feed, narrow a rule, change campaign treatment, keep observing or stop the test. Our CEO reporting framework uses the same sequence to make the decision visible to leadership.
What Useful Collaboration Can Produce
For Reima, working with its digital agency, we used Expanly to bring weather data into product prioritization. An automated rain-gear advertising test across 3,098 US counties, from 11 April to 8 May 2024, recorded 75% higher POAS and a 47% higher conversion rate.
That was a specific retailer, signal and test. It illustrates what becomes possible when commercial context reaches specialists who can act on it. It does not require every retailer to use weather data or imply that weather is a standard Expanly connector.
A retailer can start much closer to home. Bring one upcoming collection to the next agency meeting. Agree which products belong, what can disqualify them, how the campaign will respond and when both sides will review the evidence. Give each part an owner.
The agency then has something concrete to execute, and the retailer has something concrete to evaluate.
