I worked with a retailer recently on a wider project that went well. The rebuild delivered, the site performed, the results were real. But one part of it never got off the ground, because the client flat out refused to engage with it: Google Merchant Center.
Not in those words, obviously. Nobody says "I won't do the thing that would grow my revenue." But that's what refusing to commit to Merchant Center actually meant in practice. Alongside it sat two smaller symptoms of the same reluctance. Analytics was running on a free, lightweight tracking tool instead of Google Analytics, because it was already installed and nobody saw the point in changing it. And the Google Ads campaign was built almost entirely on exact match keywords, a handful of very narrow, very specific phrases and nothing broader feeding in behind them.
None of this was unusual. I see some version of it often. What made it worth writing about is that the fix was ready, tested, and sitting there. The only missing ingredient was a willingness to say yes.
Two smaller symptoms of the same reluctance
Take analytics first. A free, lightweight tracking tool might tell you how many people visited the site. It won't tell you what they did once they got there, which products they looked at before leaving, or which channel actually drove the sale rather than just happening to be the last thing they clicked. Without proper tracking, every marketing decision becomes a guess dressed up as a strategy.
Paid search told the same story from a different angle. The whole Google Ads campaign sat on a handful of exact match keywords, tightly worded product searches with almost no reach beyond people who already knew precisely what they wanted and typed it in exactly that way. It looked tidy on the account dashboard. It also meant the campaign was invisible to the much larger pool of shoppers still searching more broadly, still discovering what they wanted, still open to being won over.
Both of these are fixable in an afternoon. Neither is where the real cost sat.
The part that actually mattered: Google Merchant Center
This is where the reluctance had the biggest commercial cost, because it wasn't a minor gap, it was an entire sales channel switched off by choice.
The original product feed wasn't working. Missing GTINs, thin titles, incomplete categorisation, and Google was rejecting large parts of the catalogue because of it. I resolved every issue, checked it, and had it sitting ready and approved in Merchant Center. All that was needed was a decision to commit even a small test budget to a Shopping campaign. That decision never came.
Weeks turned into months, and a fully corrected, fully approved feed sat there doing nothing, because nobody was willing to risk even a modest amount to switch it on. That's not a technical failure, it's a decision failure, and it's a far more common one than people admit. Shopping ads show the shopper an image, the price and the store name before they ever click, and they convert noticeably better than text ads alone. Having that ready and still hesitating on even the smallest spend is one of the more expensive shortcuts I see retailers take, and it's the one I've written before about here: why spending more on ads never fixes a broken foundation underneath them.
What it actually cost
The honest answer is money, and time that can't be got back.
An entire channel, Shopping ads, sat ready and approved, waiting on nothing more than a small test budget that nobody was willing to commit. That's the single biggest gap in the whole project, because it's the one part where the work was already done and the only barrier left was a decision. Alongside it, budget was spent against Google Ads campaigns nobody could properly assess, because the analytics behind them wasn't trustworthy, and the exact match keyword strategy meant a large share of relevant searches never triggered an ad at all, so genuine demand went straight to competitors instead.
None of this was one dramatic failure. It was a slow leak, the kind that's easy to ignore month to month and very expensive to look back on after a year.
The fix is rarely complicated, it's just avoided
What frustrates me most about situations like this is how straightforward the technical fix usually is. Correcting a product feed and getting it approved in Merchant Center is methodical, unglamorous, and genuinely fixable, and in this case it had already been done. Setting up Google Analytics properly is a day's work, not a project. The harder part was never the technical work. It was getting agreement to commit even a small, low risk budget to a channel that was fully ready to perform.
The businesses that get this right aren't necessarily bigger or better resourced. They're the ones willing to back the groundwork once it's been done properly, rather than leaving it sitting unused out of caution. Merchant Center, analytics, keyword strategy, none of it is exciting. All of it is the difference between advertising that compounds over time and advertising that just spends money.
If you've had a product feed corrected and approved but never switched on, or you're not sure whether your own analytics or Google Ads account would hold up to a proper look, that's worth checking now rather than another year down the line.
Get in touch if you'd like me to take an honest look at where your foundations stand. Sometimes the most valuable thing I can tell a business owner is exactly what isn't working, and why.