Google Shopping for a health store, by the season
How Dizian Digital runs Google Shopping and Merchant Centre for Urban Herbalist, a natural health store and naturopathic clinic in Orakei Bay Village, Auckland. A clean product feed, Google's health rules respected, and Shopping campaigns that follow what people search for through the year.
- Healthcare and
e-commerce - Auckland,
New Zealand - Google Shopping and
Merchant Centre
From this project: the store and how its Google Shopping is run, drawn from the case study below.
Process
Health products in Google Shopping, inside the rules
Urban Herbalist is owned by pharmacist Khalid Ghanima. The Orakei Bay Village store sells supplements and natural skincare from a wide range of practitioner brands, and the clinic offers practitioner consults and functional testing. The Shopify store sells the range online across New Zealand.
Every product in the Shopify store flows into Google Merchant Centre, and from there into Shopping ads. For a health store, that is where most of the work sits. Three things shape it:
Google's healthcare policies. Merchant Centre checks every product in the feed against Google's healthcare and medicines rules. Products can be flagged for the claims they make, for prescription-only ingredients or for supplements Google does not allow, and a flagged product cannot show in Shopping ads.
A long range, a short list of sellers. A health store stocks far more products than it can profitably advertise at once. Spreading the Shopping budget across all of them pays for clicks on products nobody is looking for that month.
Demand moves with the seasons. What people search for in a New Zealand winter is not what they search for in summer. The feed and the campaigns have to keep up with that, along with a real shop that local customers visit.
The job was to put the right products in front of shoppers at the right time of year, without breaking Google's rules.
Get a free Google Ads auditProcess
Project information
We run Merchant Centre and Google Shopping as one job for the online store and the shop in Orakei Bay Village. The feed decides which products can show; the campaigns decide which of them get the budget, and that changes with the season.
Google Merchant Centre and the product feed
- Product feed synced from Shopify into Merchant Centre, with online offers and in-store offers for the Orakei Bay Village shop.
- Products flagged under Google's healthcare policies identified and kept out of the Shopping campaigns, so budget only goes to products that can show.
- Stock and prices flow from Shopify, so out-of-stock lines drop out of Shopping ads on their own.
- Prices in the ads checked against the live product pages, so what Shopping shows matches the store.
Google Shopping and Performance Max, by the season
- New Zealand search demand pulled for the brands and products the store stocks, month by month and for each quarter.
- Shopping budget concentrated on a short list of products with clear demand and a clean policy record, through Performance Max campaigns built around single product lines.
- Budget moved out of a broad Dynamic Search campaign and into the Shopping campaigns that were selling.
- Conversion tracking checked end to end in GA4, from product view to purchase, so Google bids on real orders.
The shop on Google
- In-store offers in Merchant Centre connect the feed to the Orakei Bay Village shop, so Google knows what is available locally as well as online.
- Google Business Profile kept accurate: listed as a vitamin and supplements store and a naturopathic practitioner, with delivery and pickup set.
- Google Ads reports store visits from people who saw the ads, alongside online sales.
The same Shopping budget now goes to what is in season and stays away from what is not.
Client testimonial
“Awesome service and great results. Alex is really knowledgeable and helpful. Makes everything easy for us to understand with no hassles.”
Khalid GhanimaDirector, Urban Herbalist
Outcome
Results
The Shopping budget did not need to grow. What it was spent on changed.
A stronger return on ad spend. Once the budget followed the season, each dollar of Shopping spend brought back more in sales.
More sales without a bigger budget. The winter months brought in clearly more orders than the year before, on similar spend.
A cleaner feed. Policy flags and stock changes are handled in Merchant Centre before they cost money in the campaigns.
Return on ad spend by month
Last yearThis year
Same spend, more sales
Last yearThis year
Individual results vary with market, budget and starting position, and past performance is not a guarantee of future results.
The charts come from Urban Herbalist's own Google Ads account, with sales checked against Google Analytics 4. GA4 counts purchases separately and rose in step with Google Ads, so the lift is real orders rather than a change in tracking.
Health stores, pharmacies and clinics all meet the same rules in Merchant Centre. In healthcare marketing on Google, the ones that do well keep the feed clean, plan Shopping around the seasons and keep their Google Business Profile in step.
Selling health products through Google Shopping? Get a free Google Ads audit below.
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Alex Yeldizian
Managing Director
Dizian is run by Alex Yeldizian: one point of contact, backed by specialists and AI-enabled ways of working. 14 years in Melbourne.
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