Google Ads for Shopware shops: Setting up the feed, tracking and campaigns

As of October 12, 2026. Applies to Shopware 6.5 to 6.7, notes on Shopware 5 at the end.

If you search for “shopware google ads”, you end up with the Shopware documentation, with plugin pages and with a forum thread in which someone points out that the standard Shopware integration lacks “important events as well as the complete Google Ads implementation”. All three are right, and none of them takes you from start to finish. This guide does that for Google Ads for Shopware shops from version 6.5: connecting the accounts, building the feed via the product comparison, setting up tracking so that Google Ads actually counts orders, and then the campaign. Without an agency, and for the feed, without a plugin too.

What you need for Google Ads in Shopware

You need four things that Shopware does not provide: a Google Ads account, a Google Merchant Center account, conversion tracking that reports order values to Google Ads, and one hour a week for maintenance. Shopware 6 supplies the product feed itself, via the “Product comparison” sales channel, which is included in every edition. And if you later hand the maintenance over to Ginny, you don't need a plugin for that either: Ginny works with your Google Ads and Merchant Center accounts, and nothing is installed in Shopware.

On top of that come the mandatory details without which Merchant Center approves nothing: a verified and claimed shop domain, shipping costs, a return policy, a legal notice and contact details on the website, and a checkout over HTTPS. A properly run Shopware shop has all of this anyway, it just has to be entered in Merchant Center. What Google Ads is in principle and how the auction works is covered in our basics article; here we go straight to the setup.

Shopware 6 supplies the product feed itself, via the “Product comparison” sales channel.

Linking your Google Ads account and Merchant Center

The link runs through two interfaces, and the second one is regularly forgotten: you send the request in Merchant Center, you have to approve it in Google Ads, and only then does product data flow into campaigns.

In Merchant Center, go via the gear icon to Settings, then “Access and services”, then “Apps and services”. There, click “Add service”, select Google Ads, confirm the account and click “Link”. In Google Ads, you then open the tools icon and go to the Data manager. Under “Connected products” you'll find the Google Merchant Center entry, where you click “Manage & link”. The open request sits in the “Received” tab, where you review and approve it. Both steps need admin rights, in Merchant Center for the request, in Google Ads for the approval. If you only have standard access, you won't see the option and will search in vain. Google's own instructions are in the Merchant Center Help.

Only after the approval does Merchant Center appear in Google Ads as a data source for Shopping and Performance Max campaigns. As long as the request is open, you can't create a Shopping campaign, and the error message about it is not much help.

Creating a Google Shopping feed in Shopware 6

In Shopware 6, the feed is created via a dedicated sales channel of the type “Product comparison”, which generates an XML file according to Google's specifications from a dynamic product group and makes it available under a fixed URL. So Google Shopping with Shopware needs no plugin. The process has four steps: create the product group, set up the sales channel, check the template, enter the URL in Merchant Center.

Creating a dynamic product group

The dynamic product group determines which products go into the feed, and it is the right place to exclude incomplete items from the start. You'll find it under Catalogues, then “Dynamic product groups”. For the Google feed, a group with four conditions has proven itself: Active equals yes, price greater than zero, cover image exists, and EAN is not empty. Leave out the fourth condition if you sell private-label products without a GTIN; the template takes care of that later. The preview at the bottom right immediately shows how many products meet the conditions. If it says zero although the products exist, the products are usually not assigned to the storefront sales channel, which you'll select in a moment.

Setting up the “Product comparison” sales channel

The “Product comparison” sales channel is the export channel itself. You create it in the sidebar via the plus next to “Sales Channels” and choose the “Google Shopping (XML)” template there. Then you give it a name and, under storefront sales channel, select your shop, the domain, the currency, the language and the customer group. The customer group decides whether the feed contains gross or net prices; take the end-customer group with gross display, otherwise Google will later reject every item for a price mismatch.

In the product export section you set the file name (such as google-shopping.xml), encoding UTF-8 and file format XML, activate “Product variants” if sizes or colours should run as separate items, select the dynamic product group from before and set the generation interval. For live operation, “Generate via scheduler” belongs activated and the interval set to one day; for this, the Shopware scheduler has to run on the server, i.e. bin/console scheduled-task:run via cron or as a service. Without the scheduler, the file is never regenerated, and weeks later Google still fetches the same state. For first tests you can set the interval to Live; Shopware then rebuilds the feed on every request, which takes minutes for large catalogues and can run into a timeout. The Shopware documentation on the product comparison describes every field.

Field names as in the Shopware admin.

Twig template for the product feed (to copy)

The supplied “Google Shopping (XML)” template is a usable start, but it and most templates from the web have four spots that regularly cause disapprovals in Merchant Center: the price with tiered prices, the availability, missing GTINs and variants without their own title. The following template fixes all four. It consists of a header row, a product row and a footer row, which is exactly what the three template fields in the sales channel are called.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:g="http://base.google.com/ns/1.0">
<channel>
<title>My Shop</title>
<link>https://www.my-shop.com</link>
<description>Product data for Google Merchant Center</description>

<item>
  <g:id>{{ product.productNumber }}</g:id>
  {% if product.parentId %}<g:item_group_id>{{ product.parentId }}</g:item_group_id>{% endif %}
  <title>{{ product.translated.name|escape }}{% for option in product.options %} {{ option.translated.name|escape }}{% endfor %}</title>
  <description>{{ product.translated.description|striptags|escape }}</description>
  <link>{{ seoUrl('frontend.detail.page', {'productId': product.id}) }}</link>
  <g:image_link>{{ product.cover.media.url }}</g:image_link>
  <g:condition>new</g:condition>
  <g:availability>{% if product.availableStock >= product.minPurchase %}in_stock{% elseif product.restockTime %}backorder{% else %}out_of_stock{% endif %}</g:availability>
  {% set price = product.calculatedPrice %}
  {% if product.calculatedPrices.count > 0 %}{% set price = product.calculatedPrices.first %}{% endif %}
  {% if price.listPrice and price.listPrice.price > price.unitPrice %}
  <g:price>{{ price.listPrice.price|number_format(2, '.', '') }} {{ context.currency.isoCode }}</g:price>
  <g:sale_price>{{ price.unitPrice|number_format(2, '.', '') }} {{ context.currency.isoCode }}</g:sale_price>
  {% else %}
  <g:price>{{ price.unitPrice|number_format(2, '.', '') }} {{ context.currency.isoCode }}</g:price>
  {% endif %}
  <g:brand>{{ product.manufacturer.translated.name|escape }}</g:brand>
  {% if product.ean %}<g:gtin>{{ product.ean }}</g:gtin>{% endif %}
  {% if product.manufacturerNumber %}<g:mpn>{{ product.manufacturerNumber }}</g:mpn>{% endif %}
  {% if not product.ean and not product.manufacturerNumber %}<g:identifier_exists>no</g:identifier_exists>{% endif %}
</item>

</channel>
</rss>

What the template does differently from the usual ones: for tiered prices it takes calculatedPrices.first, i.e. the price of the first tier, which a customer pays for a single item. Many circulating templates take .last, which is the cheapest quantity price, and Google compares it with the product page and rejects it. For items without stock but with a restock time, it writes backorder instead of preorder, because preorder is reserved for products that haven't been released yet. For items without an EAN and without a manufacturer number, it sets identifier_exists to no, so Google accepts the item without identifiers instead of flagging it. And for variants it appends the options to the title, so that “Running shoe model X” turns into “Running shoe model X 42 Blue”, “43 Blue” and “44 Blue”, which Google requires anyway. Shipping costs are deliberately not in the feed; they go into Merchant Center, more on that shortly. The code snippets in the Shopware documentation show further fields such as additional images or base prices.

Export URL and access key

After saving, the export URL appears in the sales channel in the API access section next to the API access ID and follows the pattern https://www.my-shop.com/store-api/product-export/ACCESSKEY/google-shopping.xml, with Shopware generating the access key itself. This URL is publicly accessible, and the key is the only thing stopping anyone from downloading your entire catalogue with prices. So treat it like a password and generate a new one if it has been shared anywhere. Open the URL once in your browser: if you see XML with your products, the export is done. If you see an error page, the file hasn't been generated yet or the channel is inactive, more on that below.

Performance Max or Standard Shopping for Shopware shops?

A new Shopware shop starts with a Standard Shopping campaign and switches to Performance Max as soon as the account generates 30 to 50 orders a month through Google Ads. The reason is the data situation: Performance Max optimises fully automatically and needs conversions to learn from. An account without history doesn't provide them, and the campaign then spends the budget according to Google's preferences instead of your sales.

Standard Shopping shows you the search terms, lets you exclude products individually and stagger bids by margin; in short, you see what is happening. Google names 15 conversions in 30 days as the lower limit for a ROAS target, and in our experience it only works stably above that. Until then, the campaign runs with “Maximise clicks” and a maximum CPC limit or with manual bids. As soon as there are enough orders, Performance Max is added, with separate asset groups per product range and with the brand name as an exclusion, so that PMax doesn't grab the searches for your shop that would land with you anyway. What Performance Max does for shops and where its limits are is covered on our page on Performance Max, the basics of the format in the Shopping guide.

How much does Google Ads cost for a Shopware shop?

Google Ads costs the same for a Shopware shop as for any other shop, because the shop system plays no part in the cost per click. Across our clients' Shopping and PMax campaigns, the median is €0.42 per click, with half of the accounts between €0.27 and €0.57. To start, a monthly budget of €500 to €1,500 is realistic. The only Shopware-specific costs are the tools: zero euros for the feed via the product comparison, zero euros for Tag Manager from Shopware 6.7, between €9.99 and €215.99 a month for a tracking extension on older versions, plus a consent tool if needed.

Figures from our clients’ Shopping and PMax campaigns. The shop system plays no part in the cost per click.

The maths behind it, from cost per click via conversion rate to break-even by margin, is laid out with all figures in the guide Google Ads costs. For planning, one number is enough here: with the median values of our accounts, every order won through Google Ads costs around €22 in advertising. If your contribution margin per order is above that, the start pays off. If it is below, basket size or margin need to be on the table before the first campaign.

Running campaigns: what you check every week

After the launch, one hour a week decides the result, and in that hour you check four things: new disapprovals in Merchant Center, search terms without orders, campaigns at their budget limit, and whether the feed is fresh.

In Shopware shops, disapprovals mainly show up after price changes and range changes, because the feed lags up to 24 hours behind. Across our client accounts, the median share of disapproved products is below one percent. When it happens, it rarely hits individual items, usually a whole category, for example after an import with the wrong tax class. Search terms without orders eat around ten percent of the budget even in well-kept accounts, more in neglected ones; sorting the report and adding exclusions once a week is enough to keep it there. For the budget, you look at which campaign carries the status “Limited by budget” and decide per campaign whether it deserves more or needs reworking. And for the feed, you check the date of the last fetch in Merchant Center, because otherwise a stalled scheduler only gets noticed when Google disapproves whole categories because of outdated prices.

What else belongs to a complete account check we have put together as a Google Ads audit with checklist. And if you don't have the weekly hour: Ginny takes over exactly these four checks and looks daily instead of weekly: disapprovals, search terms, budget caps, feed status. Every finding comes as a suggestion with a reason and an estimate of what it gains or saves in euros, and only your click puts it into effect. For Shopware, that means: you install nothing in the shop and need no plugin. Ginny connects to Google Ads and Merchant Center, that is where all the data she needs lives, and that is where she makes changes after your approval.

Frequently asked questions about Google Ads and Shopware

Sources

• Shopware documentation: Product comparison, Code snippets for the product comparison, Google Shopping export, source of the screenshots, Release notes 6.5.8.6 (Consent Mode v2)
• Shopware 5 end of support: endoflife.date, Shopware has removed its own page
• Google: Link Merchant Center and Google Ads, Availability [availability], Price [price], Content API for Shopping sunset, Target ROAS for Shopping campaigns
• Cloudginny: Cost per click, conversion rate, disapproval rate, reach and wasted spend from the Shopping and PMax accounts we manage