Google is a CPG channel. It just isn’t a search channel.
Almost every consumer goods founder we speak to has the same story about Google. They ran a search campaign, discovered there was barely any non-brand volume for what they sell, spent a few thousand pounds finding out, and moved the budget to Meta.
The diagnosis was right. The conclusion was wrong.
Nobody wakes up and searches for a bone broth brand they have never heard of. Nobody types in the name of a snack that launched last year. If your category is new, or your product is an impulse buy, or your brand is the thing being discovered rather than the thing being compared, then search is never going to be the engine. That is simply true.
The problem is what gets abandoned alongside it. Shopping, Performance Max, Demand Gen and YouTube all sit inside the same account, and all of them behave completely differently from search. Walking away from Google because search volume is thin is like walking away from a supermarket because you didn’t like the bread.
Here is what actually works for consumer goods brands on Google, in the order we would fix it.
Your product feed is the campaign
For most CPG brands, the single largest gain available on Google is not in the campaign settings at all. It is in the feed.
Consumer goods feeds are consistently the weakest we audit, for a structural reason: own-brand food, drink and supplement products often have no manufacturer data behind them. There is no GTIN because the brand is the manufacturer. There is no established product taxonomy because the category may be three years old. So the feed gets built from whatever the Shopify product title happens to say, and the Shopify product title says “Chicken Bone Broth”.
That title is missing everything a shopper filters on and everything Shopping matches against. Format, size, pack count, flavour, dietary claim. Compare:
Chicken Bone Broth
Chicken Bone Broth Powder, 30 Servings, 300g Pouch, Grass Fed, Gluten Free
The second version becomes eligible for a far wider range of queries, wins more comparison impressions, and gets clicked by people who already know what they are buying. Nothing about the media strategy changed.
The rest of the feed checklist for consumer goods:
- Populate GTINs where they exist, and set the identifier exists flag correctly where they genuinely do not, rather than leaving the field to fail silently
- Use the product type field with your own category structure, not just Google’s taxonomy
- Fill in size, pack quantity and unit pricing attributes, because these drive filtered comparison surfaces
- Add subscription and multipack variants as their own products, not as hidden options on a single listing
- Keep a clean, honest sale price history so promotion annotations qualify
None of this is glamorous. It is usually worth more than a month of bid optimisation.
Why doesn’t Google Shopping work for low AOV products?
Because the maths doesn’t work, and no amount of campaign management fixes it.
Take a single tub of supplement at £24 with a 45% gross margin. That is £10.80 of contribution before any media cost. If clicks in your category run at 90p and your product page converts at 2.5%, you are paying £36 to acquire an order that generates £10.80. You can trim that with better targeting, but not by a factor of three.
Now sell the same product as a three month supply at £62. Contribution goes to roughly £28. Conversion rate drops, because it is a bigger commitment, but not proportionally. Suddenly the same click cost supports the same campaign.
This is why bundle and multipack construction is a media decision for consumer goods brands, not just a merchandising one. Before we touch a Shopping campaign for a low AOV brand, we want to know what the largest sensible pack is, whether subscription is presented as a first purchase option rather than a post-purchase upsell, and whether there is a starter bundle that pulls in more than one SKU.
If a brand is unwilling to build those, Google Shopping will always be a marginal channel for them, and we would rather say so early than spend six months proving it.
Why first-order ROAS is the wrong target for consumables
This is the one that costs consumer goods brands the most money, and it is entirely fixable.
If someone buys a jar of skincare or a box of protein bars and likes them, they buy again. Sometimes for years. Yet the number being fed back to Google is almost always the value of the first order, which means the bidding system is being told to optimise for the least valuable moment in the customer relationship.
What changes when you fix it:
- Send back a value that reflects realised customer value over 90 or 180 days, so the system can distinguish between a customer worth £24 and one worth £190
- Use the new customer acquisition goal in Performance Max, with a value assigned to new customers, so campaigns stop harvesting people who would have reordered anyway
- Separate subscription conversions and weight them properly, because a first subscription order is worth several times a one-off of the same value
- Judge the account on blended contribution and payback period, not on a platform ROAS figure that was never designed to price a repeat purchase
Brands that make this switch usually find their acceptable first-order ROAS is far lower than they thought, which unlocks volume that was sitting just outside the old target.
How do you stop Performance Max spending everything on your cheapest SKU?
You give it a reason not to.
Left alone, Performance Max will find the path of least resistance, which is almost always the cheapest, best-reviewed, highest-converting product you sell. That looks excellent on a ROAS report and can be quietly unprofitable, particularly if that hero product is a low margin entry item or a loss-leading sample.
The fix is structural. Custom labels in the feed carrying margin band, subscription propensity, stock depth and hero or long-tail status. Then campaign structure built on those labels rather than on Google’s product categories, so budget can be pushed toward the products worth acquiring a customer on and pulled back from the ones that flatter the report.
What about the brand traffic your stockists are bidding on?
If you are in Boots, Holland and Barrett, grocery or Amazon, someone is buying your brand name. Often several someones, sometimes including your own retail partners and their affiliates.
That traffic is people who already know you, already want you, and are converting at a margin that goes to somebody else. Recovering it at direct-to-consumer margin is usually the fastest profit available in a consumer goods account, and it is one of the few places where straightforward brand search work has an immediate and measurable payback.
It needs handling with some care, because trade relationships matter and a heavy-handed approach creates awkward conversations. But the default of ceding your own name entirely is rarely the right answer either.
Where does non-brand search actually live for CPG?
Not on your product. On the problem your product solves.
People do not search for snack brands. They search around gut health, low sugar, high protein, kids’ lunchboxes, perimenopause, hangovers, sleep, iron deficiency, gifting. Each of those is a thin, unglamorous line in a keyword planner. In aggregate they are a real audience, and crucially they are an audience at exactly the moment they are open to a new answer.
The volume alone rarely justifies the spend. What justifies it is what happens next: those visitors become the top of a retargeting ladder that runs across Demand Gen, YouTube and Meta, where the cost of reaching them again is a fraction of the cost of finding them the first time. Treated as a standalone performance channel, problem-led search usually fails. Treated as audience acquisition, it frequently pays.
Can Google create demand, not just capture it?
Yes, just not through search.
Demand Gen and YouTube are the parts of Google that behave like paid social, and they are where consumer goods brands with strong creative should be spending. Short-form video, product-in-use footage, founder content, the same assets already being made for Meta and TikTok. The audience signals available, particularly customer match and lookalike segments built from actual purchasers, are strong, and the inventory is nowhere near as contested as social in most categories.
This is the honest answer to “Google can’t build a category”. It can. Founders just look for it in the wrong campaign type.
Where Google is not the answer
Two situations where we would tell a brand to spend elsewhere first.
If most of your revenue comes through retail distribution, a meaningful share of what your advertising creates will land in a shop you cannot measure. That halo is real, and it is a genuine argument for building the direct channel deliberately before pushing hard on paid media, rather than judging the media on a distorted read.
And if your creative is thin, no channel fixes it. Google will find people faster than a weak proposition can convert them, and the account will look like a media problem when it is a brand and product page problem. We would rather work on that first.
Where affiliate fits alongside
Consumer goods is one of the categories where pay-per-sale partnerships work best, because the products are repeatable, easy to sample, and easy to explain. Subscription boxes, sampling partners, health and wellness publishers, cashback and voucher placements at the second purchase rather than the first.
Run properly, affiliate carries a share of acquisition at a cost you agree in advance, which takes some of the volatility out of a paid media plan while creative and bundle economics are being sorted out. Run badly, it quietly pays commission on customers you had already earned. The difference is entirely in how the programme is structured and policed.
How we work
Positive Sparks runs advertising and affiliate together for consumer brands, across Google, Shopping, Performance Max, Meta, Microsoft, TikTok, Pinterest and LinkedIn, alongside pay-per-sale partnership programmes.
How we get paid: commission based, or working towards it, depending on the stage a brand is at. It means we only do well when the brand does, and it means we are unusually direct about the things above, because a feed we cannot fix or a bundle that does not exist costs us as much as it costs you.
We work with experienced specialists on every account, across beauty, fragrance, food and drink, and supplements.
If you would like us to look at your account and tell you honestly which of the above applies, you can book twenty minutes with Phil here: tidycal.com/philbyrne/20-minute-meeting
