Shopping CSS
Keep more of every Shopping bid with a CSS.
How it works
When you run Shopping through Google's own comparison shopping service, Google confirms it deducts a fixed percentage margin from your bids before they enter the auction. It does not publish the percentage; CSS providers commonly put it at around 20 per cent. Run the same ads through a third-party CSS and that margin is removed, so your bids buy correspondingly more. Nothing else changes: same campaigns, same feed, same interface.
Producthero and Bidnamic are the partners we use. Bidnamic's CSS is free; Producthero charges a small monthly fee and adds feed tooling.
What we do
Move the account to the CSS, which is a merchant centre change and a day's work if the feed is clean. Audit the feed while we are in there: titles, GTINs, prices, availability, the categories that are wrong. Then run Shopping and PMax on the same value bidding as search, with the warehouse and the lifetime value segments deciding where the budget goes.
For ecommerce we deliberately run a light-touch model. PMax, broad match, maximise conversion value, budget set from what you tell us you can spend. The interesting work is in the data warehouse, where first-order value predicts who is worth chasing.
What you get
The migration. A feed audit with fixes. Before-and-after CPC on the same terms. Ongoing management under the standard pricing.
Partners
Producthero. Bidnamic.
Related: Data warehouse · Tracking
FAQ
Is a CSS a loophole?
No. It is how the EU required Google to run Shopping after the 2017 ruling, and Google publishes the partner list.
Will my ads look different?
A small "by [CSS name]" line appears under them. Shoppers ignore it.
Do you do Meta Shopping too?
We can, with the same feed. The Google side is where we start.