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Merchandising

Merchandising is the work of presenting products so that shoppers notice the right ones and buy them, on a store's shelves or on its website.

How it works

In a physical store, merchandising means shelves and displays. Online, it covers how products are shown on the site: photos, category pages, search and recommendations.

A store that gets its shoppers from Google Ads has one more shelf, and often the first one: the ad. A Shopping ad takes its image, title, price and store name from the product data, and nobody writes a separate ad for each product. Which products reach that shelf depends on the feed, the campaign set-up and the auction, not on the home page.

So merchandising starts in the product data: titles, product types and the labels that sort products by how they perform in ads. Our guide to merchandising when Google picks your shelf develops the idea.

In most stores, Performance Max fills this shelf: it runs in 141 of 146 stores in our data and takes a median 95.7% of their ad budget (GetProfit data, June 2025 – June 2026). The shelf is also narrow. In our study of 1.4 million products, 55.0% of products received no ad budget at all, while the 7.9% that sold took 78.1% of spend.

Example

Example store, not client data.

The tableware shop features 12 dinner sets on its home page. Over a month, 1,200 of its 3,000 products got at least one ad impression. The other 1,800, or 60% of the catalogue, never reached the ad shelf.

Not to be confused with

  • Assortment coverage — the share of the catalogue that gets impressions. It is one result of merchandising in ads, not the work itself.
  • Shelf form — GetProfit’s way of describing the catalogue’s shape: a wide “warehouse” or a narrow “showcase”. It describes what is on the shelf, not how you present it.

Sources

  • Merchandising — Wikipedia: definition; online, it includes image presentation, search and recommendations. Checked 2 October 2026.
  • Ecommerce Merchandising: What It Is and Strategies — Shopify blog, Michael Keenan, January 2024. Checked 2 October 2026.
  • Create a Shopping campaign — Google Ads API: Shopping ads show an image, title, price and store name without a separate ad for each product. Checked 2 October 2026.
  • GetProfit study of 1,404,808 products in 130+ stores over 13 months — products with no ad budget and the share of spend on products that sold.
  • GetProfit data: 146 stores, June 2025 – June 2026 — share of ad budget in Performance Max.