Too Many Products for Google Shopping?

liamcopy

I run a fishing outdoors store on Shopify. We've got nearly ten thousand products scattered across categories. Everything's enabled in Google Merchant Center right now.

But here's the thing - is that actually helping? Or drowning my campaigns?

Someone shared a killer strat with me. Two campaigns. One with all products at 20% budget. Another with the top 100 products at 80% of budget. Then slowly migrate the best performers from the full feed into the top-tier campaign.

Makes sense. Focus the spend where it's proven. Let the long tail feed itself on small budget scraps.

Anyone else running a massive catalogue? Does flooding the feed hurt performance or is it just wasted spend?

cpaoptimizer

Here's a structure I've landed on after plenty of spreadsheet wrestling.

Start with two campaigns:

One that includes every single product, fed 20% of the total budget.
One that only holds your top 100 best sellers, given the remaining 80%.

Keep an eye on performance in the full catalogue campaign. As products there start showing solid ROAS or conversion rates, gradually shift them into the top‑100 campaign and drop the underperformers out. Over time you're essentially using the wider campaign as a testing ground and the narrow one as your main revenue engine.

This way you don't waste budget on duds early on, but you also don't miss a hidden gem that might only need a bit of exposure. Spreadsheets don't lie - test, move, repeat.

emmareach

from my experience, you're better off starting with just your top sellers. Get a PMax feed-only campaign or a standard Shopping campaign running with those products first. Once that's stabilised and you've got some data, layer in a second campaign for the rest of your catalogue - or even split by category, margin, seasonality, whatever makes sense for your business. That way you're not diluting budget or confusing the algorithm from day one

emailwiz

Make a shopping campaign with your best sellers is a pretty standard strategy. Works for most ecom stores, so worth starting off that way for your fishing store.

buggedout

Start with your top sellers. The "how many" should be dictated by your budget. A good rule of thumb: allocate spend to products with proven conversion data first. Three to five high-performers usually beat spreading thin across twenty unknowns.

olivia-roas

The budget-to-catalog ratio really matters here. With 10k SKUs on a typical fishing store budget, you're probably spreading spend too thin for Google's algorithm to find patterns quickly. The 80/20 split mentioned in the other comments is solid, focus budget on your proven sellers (kayaks, rods, reels, whatever moves) and let the rest run light.

I noticed clevera handles that product movement between campaigns automatically, which would save a lot of manual work when you're rotating top performers in and out of your priority campaign with a catalog this size.

noahcontent

I've tested this approach extensively across multiple accounts, and it works. Here's the framework I follow:

Single Performance Max campaign, All Products feed. No segmentation. No audience exclusions. Let the algorithm feast on the entire catalogue.
Start at 30% of target daily budget (e.g., $300/day if aiming for $1000). set tROAS at 300% from day one.
Avoid any micro‑segmentation - not even by product category or audience. Google's algorithm performs best with maximum data and minimal restrictions.
Give it 3-5 days before evaluating. Then gradually increase budget as recommendations appear. Trust the model.

The old "best-sellers vs. others" campaign structure? It's almost always slower and more fragmented. This single‑feed, no‑fuss setup consistently outperforms for scale.

If someone wants to keep running granular campaigns, they're welcome to chase those poor results and wonder why.

adcraft

Agreed. Done this for most of my ecom clients and it works.

miaaffiliate

Nice strat!