Google Ads for direct-to-consumer ecommerce: what it costs, whether it is worth running at your margin, and how to audit an account you inherited. Written from live accounts rather than case studies collected second hand. The posts here cover the questions that come up before anyone opens the interface — what return you actually have to beat, which is a function of your gross margin and nothing else; what the three layers of cost are, only one of which is the number people ask about; and what a starter negative keyword list is really for. There is also an audit walkthrough that begins with the tracking rather than the campaigns, because Smart Bidding does exactly what the conversion data tells it to and bad data does not produce mild underperformance, it produces confident spending in the wrong places. Shopping and Performance Max get their own treatment, since a feed is a budget rather than a checklist and most accounts never look at which products are absorbing the spend. Where a post states a number it is either arithmetic you can check or it comes out of an account named on the results page. Nothing here is a benchmark borrowed from someone else’s blog.
Performance Max is one Google Ads campaign that buys every kind of Google inventory at once. The useful question for a store is not what it is, but where the money went and how much of it bought customers you already had.
Every pricing guide quotes a range and none of them quotes its own price. Here is mine, the three fee models and what each one pays an agency to do, and the sum that tells you whether you can afford any of it.
Every roundup ranking PPC agencies leaves out the two things a buyer needs: what each one charges, and who each one is wrong for. Here is both, mine included.
Every page ranking for this question answers it for a business that sells leads. For a store it is a division problem, and you can do it in about two minutes.
Every page ranking for this question prices a lead. A store does not buy leads, it buys orders against a margin. Here are the three costs, with published numbers.
Every guide explains negative match types and tells you to read the search terms report. None of them hands you the list. Here is the list, and where to put it.
Every feed guide hands you the same list of attributes. None of them tells you which of your products to fix first, or how to know afterwards whether it worked.
The order I actually work in when taking over an ecommerce Google Ads account, ranked by what tends to be costing the most money.
