Live Google Ads Audit: How a Profit-First Strategy Can Save a Losing Account

Your Google Ads account is losing money, and you might not even know why. 

In this episode of Google Ads Unleashed, host Jeremy breaks down a real Google Ads audit that uncovered broken conversion tracking, zero audience strategy, feed chaos, and campaigns optimised for revenue instead of profit. 

You’ll learn why profit-first tracking, first-party data, and feed optimisation are non-negotiable for large ecommerce accounts with tight margins.

Get your free 30 minute strategy session with Jeremy here: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/

Scale your store with 1:1 coaching: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/1-2-1-coaching

Transcript

Hello and welcome back to Google ads and leash guys. Hope everyone is doing fabulously this Monday morning. So today I want to share with you something from our agency daily life, and something that actually blew my mind, and I think you might enjoy, because one of the core things that we do is, of course, doing audits. We audit our own ad accounts all the time. Every week, we audit our own ones. We do sometimes reshuffles between different ad managers, between different growth managers so that they can get a different ad account and see their colleagues work and dive into that, see improvements. Maybe sometimes that helps to prevent, you know, the forest from the cheese things. But of course, actually doing audits is one of the main ways we win business, and it shows how you think about business and how you think about strategy, and how you think about the architecture of your Google Ads account in order to drive towards a business goal. And this client came to us is going to be, hopefully a client now came to us at the beginning of this month and said, Listen, Jeremy. First of all, they came via referral, which was very nice, but they came to me and said, Listen, Jeremy. So what has been happening is we have at this agency, they're not very responsive. We don't really, actually like how we work with them. Basically, they've sort of let the ad account slip a little bit, and they've just been really pushing budgets. And we've been close to actually having to close the business because we were losing that much money, which is crazy, and they don't really seem to be caring about the outcome of of of the business and how much profit we actually make. So the business itself sells. How should I say this? It's basically sanitary equipment, if you like. So anything regarding sanitary products to actual plumbing and and that kind of sanitary products, right? So plumbing, items, things for bigger businesses, etc, etc. So classic case, we've got a product, we've got a company with which is reselling most, most of the products. So typically, margins a bit tighter, but more important, margins are completely different from product to product, right? So that is one of the first indicators that said to me, probably we need a profit first strategy here, because people will be having some random, random ways of how they purchase, right? They will be, you know, looking at, for instance, when they make an order to maybe purchase several items of one, or they might purchase 567, items together. Or they may just purchase one tiny item that doesn't really carry as much profit. They may be purchasing, who knows, several items that may be extremely expensive, every single purchase looks different. So one of the first things that we actually looked at when the audit is, how do we track conversions, and how do we track what success looks like in this ad account? And what we found was a functional server side setup. That's all fine, but, and here's the big batch, there was no fallback, right? So nothing if, let's say, for instance, that type of conversion tracking goes down, there was nothing to fall back on, such as, for instance, a G for conversion. But more importantly, we are actually tracking the total gross turnover of each order with a conversion, and that is problematic for these kinds of businesses. If you have a lot of products, if you have very diverse baskets, if you have a lot a lot of different types of orders and a lot of different products at different margins. You must, must, must always track with profit and use profit metrics. Profit metrics is my absolute go to and favorite software. In fact, I will even have the custom Success Manager of profit metrics in this podcast in a couple of weeks time. Stay tuned for that is an amazing guest, and you will not want to miss that one. And why that works is pretty straightforward, because if you track gross turnover, the break even, ROAs of every single order will be different. Sometimes it'll be two, sometimes it'll be 10. Sometimes. The net, it'll be negative even right, that can happen the break even. Return on ads, ad spend will always be different from order to order, and you cannot, hence, set up Google Ads campaigns in a way where you understand what is driving profitable growth and what is not, because every single order requires a different ROAs, which you cannot set at a campaign level, like you can't have a dynamic ROAs that's not possible per product. What you can do, however, is put in profit as conversion value, and this is what I've recommended first in my audit, we should switch it all to profit metrics. As a result, we can boil down what is the profit per order, shoot that as a conversion value into Google ads, and that gives us a stable growth powers targets, or profit and ad spend target to work towards. Okay, so let's say 1.1 or 1.2 as a result, we can also then group products by their profit targets, or how, by how profit, how much profit they generate, if they're unprofitable, or if they're very profitable, etc, etc. So this amazing tool, and that is the first thing that I recommend, and it's always one of the first things I look at, what are the goals, and how do we track them, and how do we work towards them? The second thing that I looked at is our is audiences. Okay? So I look always at four things, conversion tracking and goal setting. And how do we actually track conversions, and does that work? The second thing that I look at is first party data. Do we use that properly? The third thing is feed. The fourth thing is campaigns. So the second thing I looked at were audiences, and they were just completely missing. There were no audiences uploaded whatsoever, which is bizarre, because with this particular customer, what was very interesting, or with this particular client, is that they have a quite a large use based customer base, because they've been going for 20 years, which in the digital space is quite a long time. So they've got a huge customer base that repurchases from them, and they've not uploaded that into into Google, which is really, really strange. So I've recommended we should be doing that, but also having a few more customer profiles, such as larger B to B clients order from them. Have them as audiences which we want to put into the Google Ads Manager, and those should be very, very good audience signals on which Google can optimize their bid. And if it knows what your ideal customer looks like, then it is much, much easier for Google to find people who search for stuff that you offer but also look like an ideal customer. It is just basic hygiene, guys. It needs to be done. The third thing I then looked at is the feed. So there are 50,000 products in total, which is insane, and nothing was optimized. So what we will do here is pretty straightforward, is we're going to be using some feed optimization software, because we cannot go through 50,000 products. We need a bit of help from Ai here and from certain automations. And we're going to be either using data feed watch, or we're going to use product hero to make a significant difference in the quality of the feed. There were lots of products broken, lots of products which just weren't optimized whatsoever, lots of products which just had one to one the title of the shop, right? Total disaster. So big, big problem area which needs tackling, and that is something that we will do. Then lastly, it was strategy with their campaigns. So for some reason, this account had something like 40 odd campaigns running all on bizarre, various ROAs targets. No real sort of idea of why those campaigns were sort of set up in this way. They were all either set to buy the brand of the product. They were, for instance, if there was a certain brand of those sanitary products that they were reselling, then they had a campaign where all of the products of that brand were in there, then another one of another brand, then one campaign by product type and so on and so on. Although there were several products in that product type campaign, of course, all with different margins. So there was a random Ross target of six or seven attributed to it, which says nothing about whether this, this thing actually works or not. Okay, so total over segmentation, total craziness when it comes to a strategy in the account which was basically non existent. And to be honest, they were just not doing anything right. Assets are completely outdated or disapproved. They weren't really using search at all. Search was basically non existent, probably for similar reasons as a. Said just now,
and it was just a bit of a desolate state. So the plan for this account pretty straightforward, is to first of all look at what kind of business goals they want to achieve, what kind of profitability, and establish the numbers, set up profit metrics, gather some data for over a month. In the meantime, we can focus on optimizing the feed, making sure that everything runs smoothly, get the first party data in already, do some hygiene, like clean up all assets, make sure that we don't have automatic recommendations or some sort of shite on etc, etc. And when we have our profit, enough profit, we can actually switch over to profit metrics to consolidate the setup and let the automation begin. And with that, we will achieve success with 50,000 products. I find it very hard to believe that we cannot achieve that. Beyond that, I've said to them, listen when we actually then have to sort of month three, still working together, we have flexible contracts, right? So in theory, every client could leave it any month if they wanted to. And to be honest, I like that, because I don't like binding people to a contract if it doesn't work for either side. Sometimes we work with clients and it just doesn't work, right? We just don't gel with them. And that's just when that's fine, then we want to, of course, be able to stop work as well. But that's besides the point. That beyond that, we will then start to sort of systematically weed out products from their stocks, from their stock which we just want to get rid of because they don't sell or are not profitable. Of never have profitable which sell, which helps them save shelf space, which, of course, lowers sort of your fixed costs, of what you need to do in logistics, we will help them implement improvements in PDPs. So let's say at the top 20 profitable products, and every single month we go through those and optimize the PDPs. We want to then implement things such as review requests and so on and so on, and just help them go, Yeah, from from strength to strength. And that is how you need to think about Google ads, guys. It's it's a tool to achieve a certain outcome, but you need to be creative in the design and the architecture of ad accounts in order to achieve the goal that you want to achieve. Okay? And that is the main takeaway from this audit today that I want you to take away. And if you want to discuss maybe your current setup with me, please do so you can always reach out. It's Jeremy at young and digital dot marketing. Or you can book a one to one call with me via the website young and digital dot marketing. Or you could just send me a message. You'll find me. Jeremy young, Google ads on LinkedIn really easily. Shoot me a message, and I'd love to have a chat with you. This has been Jeremy young, your personal Google Ads expert, and I wish you a happy and prosperous week ahead.