Google Ads Management
Smart Bidding chases whatever number you feed it, and almost every account feeds it revenue. So budget drifts toward whatever converts most easily rather than whatever makes money, while platform defaults quietly buy back traffic you already owned. We rebuild the account around margin.
From £1,000/month. Ad spend paid direct to Google, never marked up.
Three-month minimum, then rolling.
These are the leaks we find in almost every ecommerce account we audit. None of them look like a problem in the interface, because in each case the platform is doing exactly what it was set up to do.
01
Most accounts run one ROAS target across a campaign or the whole account, which treats a 60% margin product and a 15% margin product as though they were the same thing. We set a target per SKU, derived from its actual margin, so the platform is told what each product is genuinely worth to you rather than what it sells for.
02
Smart Bidding optimises to whatever value you pass it. Pass revenue and it will chase your lowest-margin products very efficiently. We pass margin-adjusted conversion values instead. This needs your cost of goods and it is the single highest-impact change on most accounts.
03
Left alone, PMax will spend against your own brand searches and report a spectacular return on traffic that was already yours. Brand exclusions and a separate brand campaign make the acquisition numbers visible for the first time.
04
Shopping performance is decided mostly in the product feed. Titles written for search rather than for your website, correct product types, GTINs present, custom labels for margin and stock. Most accounts have more to gain here than in any bid adjustment.
05
Auto-applied recommendations, Search Partners, display expansion. Each is enabled by default and each spends on inventory you did not choose. Switching them off is unglamorous and frequently the fastest saving in the account.
06
Enhanced conversions, server-side tagging and Consent Mode configured properly for UK and EU traffic. Smart Bidding is only as good as the conversion data underneath it, and most accounts are bidding on partial signal without knowing.
07
If you also sell on Amazon, some of your Google spend is driving sales that land there instead. We connect the two so you can see it rather than guess at it. Most agencies running only one channel never look.
Almost every decision Google makes about your products is read from your product feed. Shopping eligibility, Performance Max targeting, what the algorithm believes each item is and who it should show it to. Bids adjust what you pay. The feed decides whether you are in the auction at all.
Most feeds are whatever the Shopify or WooCommerce app exported on the day it was installed. Titles written for a product page rather than for search, missing GTINs, product types left at defaults, no custom labels for margin, stock or seasonality. Fixing that usually moves more revenue than any bid strategy will.
It matters more each year, because the feed is no longer read only by Google. AI assistants answering shopping questions read structured product data too. A feed built properly is the same asset working across search, Shopping, Performance Max and the answer engines your customers are starting to ask instead. A feed left at defaults is invisible to all of them at once.
Feed work is included in the fee. It is not a bolt-on, because on most ecommerce accounts it is the job.
Margin-based bidding needs accurate conversion values arriving reliably. Most accounts are bidding on partial signal without knowing it: consent handling that drops conversions across UK and EU traffic, browser restrictions eating client-side tags, values passed without cost of goods attached.
Standard work is included. Enhanced conversions, server-side tagging through a cloud container, Consent Mode configured properly, conversion values carrying margin rather than revenue.
Where a business needs more than that, we build custom server-to-server tracking so conversions are sent from your systems rather than from a browser that may never fire. That is quoted separately, because it is engineering rather than account management and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.
In week one we agree a baseline and the number we are judged on. It is not ROAS, because ROAS improves the moment you retreat to brand terms and retargeting, and it will keep improving while your profit falls.
We report contribution after ad spend: revenue less cost of goods, less all advertising, less transaction fees. If that is not moving, the engagement is not working, whatever the platform is reporting.
The question worth asking any agency
Ask what happens to your reported ROAS if they shift budget into brand search and retargeting. The honest answer is that it goes up while your business gets no new customers.
Agreeing the measure before anything is changed is the only real protection against that, and it costs nothing to insist on.
Brands who have asked not to be named. Figures are their own platform data, from the year before we started to total revenue since.
Client since May 2021
Google Shopping rebuilt, Meta prospecting and retargeting added, site conversion rate doubled, seasonal budget scaling. Still running four years later.
Year before we started
First full year
Total since
Client since April 2022
Launched with no digital presence at all. Google Ads, Meta, Amazon and eBay built from zero in a single quarter, with seasonal inventory and budget forecasting from the start.
At launch
First full year
Total since
Client since January 2022
German market entry from a standing start. Shopping localised rather than translated, Meta EU built from audience research, Amazon.de listings and PPC, margin modelling behind the pricing.
Year before we started
First full year
Total since
Client outcomes under specific conditions, not a forecast for your brand. Figures are cumulative revenue since engagement, taken from the clients’ own platform reporting.
Week 1
Structure, search terms, feed and measurement reviewed. Cost of goods collected. Contribution baseline agreed in writing. Nothing changes in the account until that is signed off.
Weeks 2 to 4
Brand separated out, defaults switched off, negatives applied, feed rebuilt, conversion tracking repaired. Expect some volatility while Smart Bidding relearns on cleaner data.
Weeks 6–12
Creative testing cadence established, CRO programme running, prospecting scaled against blended contribution rather than channel ROAS. First full review at day 90 against the week-two baseline.
Weeks 5 to 8
Margin-adjusted conversion values fed back into the platform, budget shifted toward the products that actually contribute. First contribution review against baseline at day 60.
Google Ads on its own. If other channels need running too, the programme is better value and the table shows where it lands.
Most brands who start with one channel add a second within six months, usually once the audit shows the problem was never confined to one platform. If that is likely to be you, starting with two is cheaper than moving twice.
Custom server-to-server tracking is quoted separately. Everything else above is included.
Vaseem Shaikh has spent fifteen years running paid media for ecommerce brands. Before that he spent five years researching artificial intelligence, genetic algorithms and machine learning at IIM Ahmedabad, work he has published and now applies directly to how bids and budgets are set.
That research background is the reason accounts here run to a profit target per SKU rather than a single number across a campaign. It is slower to set up and it is the difference between an account that grows and one that grows profitably.
He leads a team of specialists across advertising, content, account health and analytics. You speak to him during the audit, and he stays involved in the account afterwards.
Google Ads Advisors is an invited research community Google consults on products and reporting ahead of general release. It is not a partner tier or a certification.
Vaseem Shaikh
Founder, Signal Over Noise
It works when
It does not when
Not always, but understand the incentive. Reps are measured on account spend growth, not on your profit, and the recommendations follow from that. Broad match with Smart Bidding does work in some accounts, usually mature ones with clean conversion data and disciplined negatives. Applied to an account without those, it spends fast and learns slowly.
Usually yes, with brand excluded and separate campaigns for the products you care about. The problem is rarely PMax itself. It is PMax running unconstrained across the whole catalogue, absorbing brand traffic and reporting it as acquisition.
No. Percentage pricing pays an agency more for spending more of your money, which is the opposite of the job. Flat fee, so recommending you cut spend costs us nothing.
Because without it we can only optimise to revenue, and revenue-optimised bidding will push budget toward whichever products convert most easily rather than whichever ones make you money. Margin-adjusted conversion values are the difference between an account that grows and one that grows profitably. If you would rather not share the data, we can work to a target ROAS you set, but the ceiling is lower and we will say so.
Often for a few weeks, yes. Changing campaign structure and conversion values resets what Smart Bidding has learned, and it has to relearn. We would rather you heard that now than in week three. Anyone promising improvement from day one is either not restructuring or not telling you what they are doing.
It changes the measurement. Some of your Google spend is driving sales that complete on Amazon, which Google will never record and you will wrongly read as poor performance. We connect the two so the decision is made on the blended number. That is the practical benefit of one team seeing both, and it is covered in the full programme.
Account structure, wasted spend, feed health, measurement and brand cannibalisation, with a ranked list of what to fix first. Written down, about five working days, no charge.
You keep it either way. Hand it to your current agency if you want to.
Start a project
Tell us about your brand. You get a written audit of your advertising, site and marketplace position, ranked by what each fix is worth.
No charge. About five working days. We reply within one working day, Monday to Friday, 9:00 to 18:00 UK.
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Ahmedabad, India
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