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Ecommerce & DTC

Ecommerce PPC judged on margin, not blended ROAS

Blended ROAS hides which products actually make money. Plenty of stores scale a 4x ROAS campaign that is selling their worst-margin SKUs and wonder why profit did not move. Feed quality and margin data fix that.

14+Years Experience
4Industries
3Continents Served
The Problem

Where ecommerce accounts quietly lose money

Usually in the feed and in the reporting, not in the ad copy.

The product feed is the campaign

In Shopping and Performance Max, feed quality determines what you show for far more than bids do. Poor titles, missing attributes and stale availability cap performance before anything else matters.

Margin is invisible to the platform

Feeding revenue but not margin means bidding optimises toward turnover. A high-revenue, low-margin SKU looks like a winner right up until you check the bank account.

Performance Max as a black box

Run without structure or exclusions, PMax will happily spend most of your budget re-buying customers who were coming back anyway, and report it as new revenue.

Brand and non-brand are blended

Brand search converts beautifully and mostly would have converted anyway. Blended into one number it flatters everything else and hides whether acquisition is actually working.

What You Get

What an ecommerce engagement includes

Feed and measurement first, then scale.

Measurement and tracking setup

Before anything gets scaled, the data has to be right. GA4 and Google Tag Manager audited and rebuilt where needed, conversion actions deduplicated, Meta CAPI or server-side tagging where it applies, and offline conversion import so the platform optimises toward revenue instead of form fills.

Product feed audit and optimisation

Titles, attributes, GTINs, availability and custom labels structured so Shopping and PMax can match you to the right queries. This is usually the highest-leverage work in an ecommerce account.

Margin-aware bidding

Where your platform allows it, margin or product-level profitability fed back as conversion value so bidding chases profit rather than revenue.

Campaign landing pages

Paid traffic dies on a bad page. I build and iterate the landing pages the campaigns point to, so the conversion path is one system instead of two vendors blaming each other. Fixed scope, tied to the campaigns, not open-ended web design.

Reporting you can actually read

A Looker Studio dashboard tied to your real conversion data, plus a written read on what changed and why. No 40-tab spreadsheet, no vanity metrics, no 'impressions are up' as a headline.

Brand and non-brand always get reported separately. If a vendor shows you one blended ROAS number, ask to see it split.

Proof

What I have actually run

Some engagements have verified public numbers. Others are longer-running or confidential roles where I can speak to scope and approach but not exact percentages. I would rather show you the real mix than invent a case study.

Mission AC & Plumbing, Houston, TX

Freelance · May 2025 to Feb 2026
44%CPA Reduction
60%More Qualified Leads

Roughly $20K per month in Google Ads spend, in a market with $45 to $80 CPCs.

Large Healthcare Organization, Brazil

Ongoing · client name withheld under confidentiality
Google Ads Meta Ads LinkedIn Ads Multi-Million $ Annual Budget

Ongoing role as Senior Paid Media Manager, leading strategy and a growing paid media team in a heavily regulated industry.

How It Works

How it runs

1

Audit

I go through the account, the tracking and the conversion path and tell you what is actually broken. You get the findings whether or not we work together.

2

Fix the foundation

Tracking, conversion actions and structure get corrected first. Optimising on top of bad data just makes you confidently wrong.

3

Build and launch

Campaigns, ad copy, audiences and landing pages built around how your buyers actually search.

4

Iterate

Weekly optimisation against the metric that matters to your business, with a monthly written read on what moved and what is next.

Go Deeper

Related guides

Long-form writing on this topic from the blog.

FAQ

Ecommerce questions

Do you work with Shopify, WooCommerce or custom platforms?

All of them. The platform matters less than whether it can export product-level data and accept proper conversion tracking. Shopify is the easiest, custom builds usually need more tracking work up front.

Is Performance Max worth running?

Usually yes, but with structure: brand exclusions, proper asset groups and product segmentation. PMax run as a single catch-all campaign tends to take credit for demand you already had.

Can you feed margin data into bidding?

If you can export product-level margin, yes. It is one of the more effective changes available to an ecommerce account and relatively few stores do it.

What monthly spend do you work with?

Ecommerce economics tend to need somewhere north of $5K per month before the data supports confident decisions. Below that, feed and tracking fixes still help, but ongoing management is harder to justify.

Get In Touch

Tell me what you are working with

A short form beats a long discovery call. Give me the basics and I will come back with a straight read on whether I can help, usually within one business day.

  • No sales sequence. You get a reply from me, not a nurture flow.
  • If I am not the right fit, I will say so and point you somewhere better.
  • Prefer to talk live? Book a slot instead, link below.

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I read every message myself. No newsletter, no list, no follow-up sequence.