Stop Wasting 20% of Your Google Ads Budget (Ecom Audit)

I know that when it comes to Google Ads and getting more sales for your e-commerce brand, sometimes it can be hard to really know what are the exact optimization options that you should be completing that is really going to increase your sales and your profitability. And that's why in this video I've asked Brent Neal to come on. And Brent Neal is one of our internal Defined Digital Academy coaches for our on-demand program. So what you're going to see in this video, rather than another talking head video, we're going to give you a behind-the-scenes look at how we view Google Ads, what considerations we take, and more importantly, how we strategically think about the optimizations that we're gonna make in order to improve an account that we were reviewing for Google Ads. So I know many of you have been asking for more of these optimization videos, so hopefully sit back and enjoy, and I know that this will give you great value for you and your business.

All right, welcome. In this video, we're gonna be doing a live review of e-commerce account, and I've got Brent, who's one of our on-demand coaches. Especially specializes in e-commerce. I'm going to hand it over to him really, really quickly. But what we're going to do before we get to that is just want to give you a bit of a background. This is an e-commerce brand that's selling into the US market. They sell iPhone cases. Current numbers are they're only achieving about a 1.4 in Dashboard ROAS, and they need to be getting above a 2, and they want to be spending over $10,000 a month. So what we're going to be doing is I'm going to hand it over to Brent, and he's going to take you through the process that we go through to try and isolate what the issues are. Why they're not seeing the results they need to see, and then obviously give some really clear recommendations. So Brent, I'll hand it over to you and then I'll jump in and ask some questions as we're going along.

Awesome, thanks for the introduction. So yeah, to give a bit of a recap on the account, um, their, their goal is to scale, essentially spend more, gain more market dominance, but they don't want to essentially compromise on a lot of their, their ROAS goals. So everything that we've gone through in terms of this audit isn't just looking at, oh, you need to update your ad copy, or, you know, these are some minor tweaks that you need to look at. It's going to be looking at the overall structure. Anything that's going to be ROAS related, it's very rarely something to do with like a, you know, a product title or something like that. So it usually comes down to what's the general structure, where are we putting our spend in our budget in that account, and is it being spent well? So what I'll do, share the screen.

And while he's sharing that screen, I'll just make that point. Uh, I know you've heard me say this a lot now, when it comes to really breaking through and getting— especially when it's when you want to scale, it's really about getting your structure right. And when we talk about getting your structure the way that think about it is really making sure that you're getting Google spending the money where we need it to spend so that we can turn the tap off where it's not performing, but then also we can turn that cash flow tap on where we need it to perform. So when we talk about structure, this is the really big thing that we, we look at. It's not saying that things like ad copy and product titles and all those things are not important, but when we're talking about what's really going to move the needle, we're finding more and more and more it always comes down to the structure that you're using inside of your account. So Brent, I'll hand it back to you.

Yeah, no, exactly right. It comes out of budget distribution. That's probably the best way of looking at it. So just to give this here as like a bit of a high-level goal, as a bit of a reminder as to what we're trying to go for. So $10K a month spend is what we're trying to work towards. We're sitting around about that at the moment, but we want to be hitting this and above with a more profitable ROAS. So 2x is our main go-to. So what I've done is with the action points and the auto notes, I've made this as practical as I possibly can, as opposed to showing all these individual bullet points. We've got some of the urgent things that we need to work on. So some things that are really holding us back from that goal right now. Some of the things that are important, but they're not necessarily holding us back right now. They're just going to help us move in the right, right direction moving forward. And then what are some of the things in the account right now that are working or what's been done well, something that we wouldn't change at all. So breaking down from the urgent stuff, this is something that anyone that is very in tune with either PPC or their own Google Ad accounts, whether you're a business owner managing your own Google Ad account, you might have heard this before, which is a product labelizer strategy. The whole idea is that you're looking at individual product performance and you're identifying a performance label based on that individual product performance over a set period of time. So we define what our KPIs are, what sort of lookback period we want to have, and then essentially the script will categorize that product into 5 different buckets as to where it sits, which we'll go through actually right now. So this is just the free version of the Flowboost Labelizer, which is probably my favorite labelizer that I'll be using. Definitely the most accurate, but the free version will only give you so much information. Paid versions will give you more. But this is a great example and introduction as to how this all works. So over here we've got our 5 different performance buckets. So we've got near index, over index, index, null index, and then under index. And for those who probably haven't guessed already, index is our KPI that we're trying to go for. It's like our north star KPI. So for these guys, 2x ROAS is our north star. We're trying to aim towards it as much as we possibly can. So when we are looking at which ones are over or above or however it might, you know, look, probably near index is the, the most important thing to, to point out. These are products that actually we'll start from the highest down to the lowest. So we've got over index, which are products that consistently perform really, really well. They've got not just a, a high volume of purchases, but they've also had a high volume of clicks and traffic. So it's like a very consistently sort of proven track record. Index is the same sort of thing, but that is a little bit closer to the KPI. So over index is above, index is around about the same. And then near index is where we've got products that have either at or above the index. So our 2x ROAS target, but they just don't have enough click data or conversion or track record essentially to put them into the other two champion buckets here. So what we really want to do here is we want to look at how can we push most of our budget towards these two here, the ones that consistently perform over a 2x ROAS. How can we find how many more of these products here, which is 559, you know, products? How can we find more of these products that we can push into these two buckets here, which have a higher budget per product? And then most importantly, how do we pull budget away from the products that just don't perform at all? So being under-indexed. So for these products, you've got 1.5K products. We've spent $9,000, I believe it was over the last 90-day period, and we've only generated $27 in return. So very much a negative ROAS. What we essentially want to do in the quickest, easiest fix here is you want to exclude these products from most of our targeting, especially from our scaling campaigns as well, the ones that have most of our budget. And then the noindex are basically products that just, yeah, that's where the majority of your products are going to be. So we've got 11,000 SKUs in there, but they just don't have nearly enough data to be able to move into the other buckets. Um, so it's on base.

And this is what we're talking about right at the start, is that straight away we go you know, we could sit there and you could tweak these product titles, you could tweak it, all of these things to try to make them work. But fundamentally we just go over the last 90 days, what's that? $12,500 has been spent for less than $30 return. So we go straight away glaring. If we just removed that spending and did nothing else, we would probably already be at that benchmark of, I haven't worked out the exact math, but be getting pretty close to that, that 2 ROAS that this client needs.

Hey there, we are going to be back into this optimization video very, very quickly, but I just did want to let you know that this video was brought to you by Define Digital. Academy, and especially our On Demand program. On Demand is the newest program that we launched specifically for businesses, and On Demand is a done-with-you management program. And I really, really want to reinforce it's done with you. So if you've been burned by agencies or burned by bad advice and you just need to know the exact steps that you need to take in order to see greater success with your Google Ads campaigns and your business, I invite you to apply for On Demand. I do want to stress that On Demand is very much targeted at businesses who are already spending at least $5,000 a month inside of Google Ads. And we've got some businesses who are spending well over 6 figures a month that are using our strategic coaching, one-on-one coaching, in order to grow their business. If you'd like to find out more about On Demand, why don't you just follow that link in the description below. You can get more information about the program, and they'll also let you know how you can apply. But right now, let's jump back into the interview with Brent, who I might add is one of our On Demand coaches.

Yep, theoretically, exactly right. Of course, how you go about rolling this out will be, yes, the biggest sort of caveat to everything. But yes, exactly. Like, it's just all about, you know, structuring where you put in your budget. So 20% of the spend, uh, this is just a note that I put in here. So 20% of the spend is going towards the underindexed products. So what we really want to do is we want to exclude those specific products from especially any campaign that is scaling or our top spending campaigns. 90% of the time where I generally find works is if you have a smaller budget campaign or small budget allocation for the underindexed product. You could have products that are seasonal, you could have products that perform well, but they overspent and they didn't deliver, so they just temporarily dropped down into that category. But it's not to say that they're underperforming, it's just that they had a bit of a bad streak or, you know, Google was out of the room and essentially did that, that product dirty. So we still want to have some level of spend allocation going towards that, but just much more reduced. But that exactly right there is the quickest and easiest way for us to be able to increase that ROAS. Whilst being able to maintain a level of spend that we currently have in the account. So that's the main point right there. And this is really going back to the initial point as to what we mentioned as well, Aaron, which is in order to increase your ROAS, the biggest impact is really going to come down to budget distribution and making sure that you're pushing the right allocation of your budget to the right specific subset of products, campaign types, etc.

And I'll just add in there too, and that's why at Define Digital Academy we use this, we call it a traffic light audit system. So your green, orange, I mentioned red traffic light, which Brent spoke about at the start, is because a lot of the time is, especially in those green things, we look at a lot of the quick wins is find out what's working and then work out how we can put more money where we are currently seeing the best results. A lot of times when people are looking at auditing an account or improving performance, it's always about trying to fix what's going wrong. Now, we definitely want to fix what's going wrong, but it's also, don't forget that one of the quickest ways to see in performance is putting more money in the buckets or in the products or in the keywords or whatever the situation would be, we're actually getting good results. And that's why we, we like to use that, that, that, that Traffic Lock audit system.

Yeah, and it's actually kind of funny how many accounts that you audit, and whilst that theory is so simple— reduce spend on underperformers, increase spend on performers— it's very rarely sort of adopted correctly in accounts. So it is, it is quite simple, but yeah, again, simple things done right.

And that's why we love using tools like the Product Labelizer, because it just gives it to you, gives you all of those products, especially when you're using a a lot of different product variants like this store does, it summarizes all that data so that, so that, you know, it takes a lot of time so you can see it, you know, that big overall picture. Okay, and straight away one report you better see, look, this is where a big problem is.

Yeah, exactly. And the final thing to mention there as well is anyone that does want to test this strategy for their account, first of all, make sure you don't rush this. Make sure it's a structure that makes sense for your business. So if you go to Flowboost, their website, you should be able to find the free version there. And there is a little walkthrough on how exactly to set it up. So yeah, for those who aren't so comfortable with it all, yeah, it's all there. But the whole idea behind this is it's very dynamic. So it's going to update your product buckets and your labels based on real-time performance. So you don't have to sit here and manually change any products over. If there's, say, a product that, yeah, new iPhone release, for example, where you go from a product that has no index, but because it's in such high demand, a big portion of that budget will go towards that new iPhone case and then it will push into any of these performance buckets here or down here depending on how that performance has been. So it'll automatically update everything and it's very seamless. It's very hands-off in its approach and that's why it's really important to set up the right way the first time. Otherwise, yeah, you're going to be making a lot of adjustments over the course of time. Cool. Cool. So moving away from the general budget distribution side of things, another big issue that the account has seen is a rise in CPCs. And your rise in CPC is probably the biggest question mark of especially 2025. And it looks like it's going to be still a massive conversation in 2026, which is how can you decrease your advertising costs? More importantly, is there anything that you're doing that's essentially creating this higher CPC or is it really coming down to competition? It's pretty straightforward with this screenshot. So what we've got here is the yellow line is our average target ROAS. So we can see that in this week here, we had a slight decrease in our ROAS, and their budget has remained around about the same. I haven't really made any budget allocations or anything that justifies this massive decrease in clicks being the blue line. So what's really happened here is they've had a decrease in target ROAS, but then the average cost per click has jumped up almost double, probably around 50% or 70% higher.. And because of that, with the same budget, if we look at Arise and CPC, the same budget, we actually have to have less clicks. So essentially what's happened is they've decreased their TROAS and Google's seen that as a bit more of an opportunity to be bidding a lot more aggressively for the exact same products and basically the exact same auctions as well. So they're not necessarily securing better positioning or a better traffic, should I say. They, this is most likely the traffic they're always going to get., but because they've, you know, loosened the reins a little bit, Google has bid a fair bit more aggressively in that auction. And you can see I haven't got a screenshot here, but the search impression share, for example, you can just see it's, it's, you know, dropped or even just impressions in general, it's just dropped massively. So it's the same subset of category, uh, products. There's no difference there. It's quite literally just one adjustment to your TROAS can cause a change like this. So the immediate recommendation here is if you make a change and it doesn't work out in your favor, revert the change, go back to what was working beforehand. May not work immediately, but for these guys, I think it was like a 200% ROAS is what it was before. And then they decreased it to about 180. Look at reverting that to 200, let it sit for about 14 days and see if that recovers anything.

And we really like this longer term view because especially inside of it where you can see the average target ROAS, you can actually see that target line. Do it like what Brent's done here. Break it out to a weekly view rather than the daily view where it's up and down. Break it out to weekly so you can see a long clearer picture.. And once again, straight away you can see that mark changes made and you can see that the end result in CPCs and ROAS.

Yep, exactly. And this is something that's really important is for Performance Max, you can see this within the overview sort of section for each individual Performance Max campaign. But for standard shopping campaigns, you can't see your average target ROAS unless you are using a portfolio bid strategy. Then you can go through there and you can find out what your adjustments are for your average target ROAS and how that's affected your impressions and XYZ. You can actually do a bit of a side-by-side comparison there. So this is the last point down here is to, you know, be sure, especially for any standard campaigns, you can only do this for standard campaigns, but make sure you use a portfolio bid strategy for your standard campaigns. Yeah, a lot of benefits here is that you're not looking at individual campaign performance based on your TROAS or your bid strategy. You're looking at your overall bid strategy across either multiple campaigns or individual campaigns. So you're also looking at what's the right bid strategy or your right sort of TROAS settings or bid strategy settings overall for your account. So really important to do that if you're using any standard campaigns. Yep.

So, so, so far we've gone looking at the money flow with the product labelizer. Secondly, we've gone in and had a look at their bidding strategies so we can see the trends from there. And now you want to talk about some, once again, structure cannibalization.

Yes, so it's probably the biggest one with the account. And yes, this is a campaign name in the account. It's something that's in a bit of a later point, but it's a journal and it's kind of nice being able to look at everything that's been happening within that campaign just by looking at the campaign name. But it is really confusing. So yeah, this is probably the byproduct as to one of the later points, which is just down here talking about the naming conventions. Yeah, but we've got two campaigns that are targeting the exact same products. So we've got the Performance Max campaign. If I read through here, so you've got PMax feed only, launched on the 26th of the 3rd, last optimization was then. We'll go through to here. We've got the iPhone case MagSafe, and then right down here for the second campaign, we've got the iPhone case MagSafe. One is a shopping campaign, one is a PMax campaign. They both have the exact same TROAS settings, so they're both set to 180%, uh, TROAS. Nothing different between the two. Yeah. So this is quite literally two campaigns that are directly competing with each other. There's no need for it. Maybe there was an idea or something that's been tested behind this, but from at least outside looking in, all I can really see is maybe it's because of the overcomplication of the naming convention, the organisation of the naming convention that you may have accidentally created two campaigns that are targeting the exact same products and competing with each other. So you want to reduce cannibalisation. Simplest action point here, pause one. I would personally, I prefer PMax. I think it's got better optimization points and I think that it's much easier to scale than standard shopping, but you know, pick one and pause off the other.

Now I will just add, and this is in relation to this account, but there is some nuance on it for e-commerce brands with using shop. Like we do have other accounts where we use, say for example, Performance Max and shopping together. And the reason why it works is because the Performance Max is tilted towards search network and it's continued to go down there. And we're checking that channel distribution to make sure that's working. There's other times where we have used Performance Max and Shopping together, but that Shopping is at a higher target ROAS and a significantly higher target ROAS. And that really works with brands where you've got super, super specific attributes that people will search for. So materials, I'm just trying to think of examples. Sizes, applications. Yeah, sizes, all of those things where you go, yes, there's brand there, but there's also these search terms which we know convert. They've got a long history of converting. So you just need to be thinking with the nuance when you're thinking about with your own account is having a search and a— sorry, having a Shopping and a Performance Max both predominantly targeting the Shopping feed, because it's also important to note, I think we said it was well above— was it 90% of the Performance Max spend was on the Shopping Network here?

Yeah, only about 2% of the spend was on other networks.

Yeah. So, so we've effectively got same campaigns, two campaigns targeting the same products on the same networks with the same target ROAS. You need some level of variation there for it to make sense and to be used.

Yeah, exactly. And I think going back to the theme of everything as well, the theme of this order specifically is we're trying to increase our ROAS at a $10K spend. If we had, say, an account that was spending $300,000 and we're trying to increase our ROAS, then yeah, we might look into more complex strategies and how we can sort of layer different campaigns and all the different bid strategies. But right now it's kind of like, let's get the foundations right. Yeah, let's just get the fundamentals set up. It's that very typical 20/80 Pareto principle, which is, you know, focusing on the 20% that's generating the 80% of the revenue. And it's not complex strategies, it's just going to be the simple things done right. So that's probably the first one with that. So the main benefit behind this as well is, is is reduce cannibalization. That's always a massive green tick, and there's probably a reason why there's a good chance that the CPC spikes has also come down to the cannibalization between these two campaigns as well. But the second benefit is by consolidating the campaigns, you get more data for each campaign. So you have different levels of learning. You've got your account level, campaign, ad group or asset group, and then ad level. And that's essentially the way that Google will look at which assets or which campaigns perform better and how to go about its bidding for each campaign. The more data points you can have for each campaign, the more benefit you're going to have. So over-segmentation or hyper-segmentation is going to always be a bit more of a holdback where it doesn't need to be done. So you want to always consolidate where possible.

And then also too, if you've got one really solid campaign owning that iPhone case MagSafe, it becomes far easier when you are ready to scale because you're only looking about scaling once inside of one campaign and not worrying about, well, if we increase budget in this campaign, what's going to do to the other campaign where there's a lot of the times we see that this another campaign can drag down that before the total account performance. So it also becomes much easier to scale when we're ready to scale.

Yeah, exactly right. This is probably the most important, uh, product attributes. Actually, it's not probably, it is the most important product attribute. It tells Google exactly what your product is. So Google follows a database of all these specific GTINs, or Global Trade Identification Numbers, I believe it's which is going to be looking at what is the product, what is the specification, what's essentially registered under here. So instead of you having to provide all your assets such as your title, your descriptions, your color, material, size, etc., it's going to tell Google that immediately, which is all automatically going to put you in better auctions against more relevant terms, against more relevant people that are looking for specific things, for use cases that are more relevant to the product. It's like accessing an immediate, you know, sort of dictionary of what that product is. So most of these products don't have a GTIN provided. This could be for one or two reasons. One, it is a unique product. It is something that a manufacturer hasn't actually created a GTIN for and registered a GTIN for. So you can't really do anything about that. But in most cases, especially when we look at very competitive industries like iPhone cases, 90% of the time they will absolutely have GTINs that you'll have to get from your manufacturers or suppliers and you'll need to get that sent over. Or two, it's just, it's not provided essentially. So definitely want to get that in there. Probably like the most important thing for any e-com brand ever.

G10s.

Can you just explain the best way that you would do to add that in? This is mostly going to come down to your product feed. So where you're sending the information from into Google. So you can do it through a supplemental feed if you really need to. It's a bit of a bandaid solution because it's not going to cover future products that you add in there. But if you have a whole lot of products right now and you need to get your G10s immediately added in there, you can use a supplemental feed and you just map it by product ID and then what the G10 value is. Second way is say Shopify, we wanted to add this through your product attributes in Shopify and then it will automatically pull over based on your feed setup as well. So yeah, automatic is always the way to go. Same way that if you're going to send your product title or something like that, then, or your, the gender you're targeting or the color model, whatever, you just want to automate that with your product feed setup.

Okay, great. Did you want to touch on the other elements of the amber light and green lights.

Yes. So just going quickly through to the amber. So these are the things that, like, it's not holding the campaign back now, but these are some of the things that you definitely want to work on in terms of progression of the account over the course of time. The naming convention, I think we can pretty well all agree, is it needs a bit of work. If you can see any of the settings that, for example, in here in a column at the campaign level, don't include it. So you can see that it's T-Rollers, for example. You can see that within your columns in your campaign level view, you can see your target ROAS that you set. You can see that it is standard shopping, still at your shopping, just out of basic naming conventions. But you don't really need to have the budget set in here. You don't need to have your TROAS targets. You don't need to have the launch date. Depending on the industry, everyone's got their own little way of looking at these things. You don't really need your last optimization date here. These are a lot of things that are just going to overcomplicate your general structure.

And it just really comes down to the one of these things where it's And once again, not thinking that if they're changing their campaign names, it's going to have zero effect on their performance. So let's make that really, really clear. But it's purely just about having a nice clean title. So if you do want to do any extra reporting on that, it's all easier to read. And it's all about knowing so that when you take a quick glance at Google Ads inside of the dashboard, or if you're looking, exporting the data out into another tool, you know exactly what that campaign is targeting and what products are inside of there. And then I also see your note about the optimization journal. Yeah, where obviously you could do that. When unbiased, you could do it in Notion, you could do it in a Google Sheet. I know with our optimization checklist, we've got optimization notes built in there for that exact very reason. So let's just do a quick update on the, the biggest movers here. So Brent, so obviously the big thing that we are both believers in is that first thing is find out where you're spending the money and find out how we can better optimize that money. Then we went down into your campaign segmentation, making sure that you don't have mixed messages across your campaign. So that was where we were saying We're giving that recommendation we would turn off that shopping campaign and put that extra money into the Performance Max campaign. Look at your target ROAS. Smart bidding is one of those things whenever you edit anything with smart bidding, give it that 2 to 3 weeks, but then also start to have a look at that longer-term view of what's happened and look at the, not only the revenue, look at the CPC, and then you can make a decision as to whether you're trending in the right way. If you're trending the right way, you may want to go the same way of increase the ROAS again, and you may want to keep it the same. If performance has gone back, revert that. And then obviously with the G— the, the more the product attributes, especially with e-commerce, making sure we've got all the data in there as much as possible, because that's what Google is using for, for the targeting. All right, Brent. Hey mate, as always, great work. Thanks, uh, thanks for sharing and thanks for joining us. And, uh, mate, have a good day.