Ecommerce Google Ads Audit
We don't start by looking for things to change.
We start by looking for where the money is going.
Most Google Ads audits follow a familiar pattern. Negative keywords. Ad strength. Quality Score. Campaign settings. Search terms. Bid strategies. Audience signals. Recommendations.
All useful. But none answers the most important question:
Is your Google Ads investment going to the commercially best available opportunities?
That's where our audit starts.
Your account can be technically good and commercially wrong.
We've audited accounts with clean campaign structures, competent bidding, good feeds, strong ROAS and experienced agencies. And significant commercial problems hiding underneath them.
Because Google Ads can efficiently optimise towards the objective it has been given while that objective itself is wrong.
Sometimes the campaigns aren't broken. They're efficiently solving the wrong problem.
That's what we want to find.
We audit five questions.
Not 150 settings. Five questions.
01
Where is the money going?
Which campaigns? Which products? Which search terms? Which customers? Which markets? Which types of demand?
Before deciding whether performance is good, we need to understand where the capital is actually being allocated.
02
What are those products worth?
Margin. COGS. Returns. Fulfilment. Customer type. Stock. Contribution.
Revenue alone isn't enough. £100,000 spent against high-margin products and £100,000 spent against low-margin products are two completely different investments.
03
What job should each product be doing?
Scale? Generate profit? Acquire customers? Protect demand? Recover cash? Or receive no meaningful advertising investment at all?
If we don't know what a product is commercially supposed to achieve, judging its advertising performance becomes guesswork.
04
Where is commercially valuable demand being constrained?
Audits shouldn't only look for waste. That's half the job.
There may be products where margins are excellent, stock is strong, demand exists and customer economics work, but Google Ads isn't capturing enough of it. A £20,000 saving looks nice. Missing £200,000 of profitable demand does not.
05
Where should the next £1 go?
More into the existing account? Less? Different products? Different markets? Customer acquisition? Inventory recovery? Or nowhere?
The audit should produce an investment decision, not a list of Google Ads chores.
What most PPC audits get wrong.
They assume more findings means a better audit. So you get 87 slides. 143 recommendations. Red warning symbols everywhere. And enough "critical issues" to suggest the Google Ads account may shortly become self-aware and attack the finance department.
The problem? Not every issue has the same commercial value.
Issue A
£1,500 per month of irrelevant Search spend.
Issue B
£40,000 per month allocated to products with poor contribution.
Issue C
£150,000 of profitable demand constrained by an inappropriate target.
All three should be investigated. But pretending they're equally important is absurd.
We prioritise by economic consequence. Not by how impressive the audit looks.
What we look at
Commercial performance
Before getting lost inside Google Ads, we establish what success actually means. Revenue, gross margin, contribution, POAS, customer acquisition, repeat behaviour, returns, stock and cash. Not every business needs every metric, only the ones that materially change the advertising decision.
Product-level performance
Ecommerce happens at SKU level. Which products consume the most budget? Which generate the most contribution? Which have strong economics but limited visibility? Which repeatedly spend without converting? Which are being subsidised by stronger SKUs? Campaign averages hide product-level failure, so we go underneath them.
Google Shopping
Product coverage, query matching, segmentation, spend concentration, margin differences, campaign architecture, Standard Shopping, Performance Max, feed quality, Merchant Center and commercial product groups. And whether Google's allocation reflects what the business actually wants to sell.
Performance Max
We don't ask whether PMax is 'working'. We ask what it is selling, which products receive investment, how much performance comes from brand demand, how existing customers are treated, what signals Google receives, and whether products with materially different economics are grouped together. Performance Max needs a job too.
Search
Brand versus generic, search terms, query quality, match types, architecture, competitor activity, ad relevance, landing-page alignment, bid strategy and budget allocation. A messy search term costing £30 isn't more important than a structural problem costing £30,000 simply because it's easier to screenshot.
Product feed
We open the feed. Titles, product types, GTINs, descriptions, images, attributes, custom labels, availability, pricing, identifiers, Merchant Center errors and the data available for commercial segmentation. An agency auditing Shopping without auditing the feed is auditing half the system.
Tracking and measurement
Duplicate conversions, incorrect revenue values, missing transactions, broken tags, consent issues, primary and secondary conversion problems, GA4 inconsistencies, new-customer measurement, attribution and Merchant Center discrepancies. Automated bidding does not know your tracking is wrong. It will simply optimise towards the wrong data faster.
New versus returning customers
How much are you paying for a genuinely new customer? What is their first-order contribution? How quickly do they repay acquisition cost? Are repeat customers inflating campaign efficiency? A 5.0 blended ROAS can hide an acquisition problem.
Inventory
Stock depth, stock age, sales velocity, availability, incoming inventory, end-of-line products and commercial priority. A product's advertising objective should change as its inventory position changes. ROAS doesn't know your new collection arrives in six weeks. Your Google Ads strategy should.
International performance
Spend, revenue and contribution by market. Local CPCs, conversion rates, shipping economics, pricing, product availability, feed localisation, currency and regional behaviour. A market deserves investment because its economics justify it, not because the UK campaign happened to work first.
Campaign architecture
Only after understanding the commercial problem do we decide whether structure is contributing to it. Segmentation, budget control, product groups, portfolio structure, bid strategies, brand separation, PMax and Search architecture, geography, feeds and audience signals. A beautifully organised account optimising the wrong products is still wrong.
We don't manufacture waste.
There is a cottage industry in agency audits built around calculating enormous "wasted spend" numbers. Take every click that didn't immediately convert. Add them together. Put the number in 72pt red text.
Real analysis is harder. Non-converting spend can still be commercially rational. Testing costs money. Customer journeys are messy. Demand changes. Not every click needs to convert individually to contribute to a profitable system.
We call something waste when we can explain why the investment was commercially unjustified.
We also look for missed opportunity.
A conventional audit asks where we can cut. We also ask where you should spend more. Maybe a profitable product is constrained. A high-margin category has weak Shopping coverage. A strong new-customer product isn't receiving enough investment. A profitable international market is underdeveloped. A feed problem is limiting eligibility. A bid target is choking incremental demand.
Recovering £20,000 of waste is good. Finding £200,000 of profitable growth may be considerably better. Both belong in the audit.
How we prioritise findings
Every meaningful finding should answer four questions.
What is happening?
The evidence.
Why does it matter?
The commercial consequence.
What should change?
The recommendation.
What is it worth?
The likely financial impact or relative priority.
If we can't explain why a finding matters commercially, it probably doesn't deserve to be on slide one.
What you'll get
Not a giant checklist. A prioritised commercial diagnosis.
1
Executive conclusion
What we think is happening. In plain English.
2
The biggest commercial opportunities
Usually a small number. Ranked by potential impact.
3
Evidence
The data supporting each conclusion. Google Ads, Shopping, feeds and commercial data where available.
4
Recommended action
What we'd actually do. Not 'optimise PMax'. Actual decisions.
5
Commercial priority
What should happen first. What can wait. And what isn't worth worrying about.
The output should survive the CFO test.
Imagine forwarding the audit to your CFO. Would they understand where the money is going, what's wrong, why it matters, what should change and what the likely commercial impact is? If not, we've probably produced a PPC audit rather than a business case. We want both.
What we need from you
Google Ads access
Obviously.
Merchant Center
For Shopping and feed analysis.
GA4
For additional measurement context.
Ecommerce platform
Usually Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce or equivalent.
Commercial data
Where available: product costs, margin, returns, stock, new customer data and customer value.
We don't always need everything before we can find useful problems. But the deeper the commercial data, the less we're forced to infer from revenue.
What if you can't share margin data?
We can still analyse the account. But there is an unavoidable limitation: if we don't know what products are worth commercially, we cannot confidently claim which products are most profitable.
We can identify spend concentration, demand, conversion behaviour, structural problems, feed opportunities, tracking issues and potential waste. Commercial conclusions simply become stronger when commercial data exists.
If we're estimating, we'll tell you we're estimating.
Is the audit really free?
Yes. There isn't a secret invoice. We use the audit to determine whether there is a commercially meaningful opportunity and whether JudeLuxe is the right agency to address it.
That means we're selective. A proper audit takes time. We don't produce them for every person curious about whether their ad strength could be improved.
We may tell you not to hire us.
There is a significant opportunity.
And JudeLuxe is well suited to it. We'll explain what we'd do next.
There is an opportunity, but we're not the right solution.
We'll tell you.
The account is already being managed well.
We'll tell you that too.
An audit isn't useful if every possible result mysteriously ends with hiring the company that produced it.
What we've found across ecommerce accounts
The recurring problems aren't usually exotic. They're structural.
- Budget concentrated in the wrong products.
- Blended targets hiding poor economics.
- Profitable demand constrained.
- Feeds limiting Shopping performance.
- Customer acquisition hidden by repeat demand.
- Stock ignored.
- Automation given incomplete objectives.
- Measurement overstating reality.
The interesting part isn't finding them. It's quantifying which ones actually matter.
The stages above are the technical route through an account. Deciding what the findings mean commercially is a separate read: the Six-Layer Read covers the six commercial lenses (margin, cash, inventory, customer value, demand and risk) we apply to the results.
The audit in one sentence
We trace your Google Ads spend through to its commercial consequence.
Where did the money go? What did it produce? Was that outcome worth buying? What opportunity was missed?
And where should the next £1 go?
If Google Ads is a meaningful commercial channel for your business, we'll look beyond the headline metrics and establish whether the investment is being allocated where it creates the most value.
We'll need some basic information about your business and current Google Ads investment first. No 87-slide checklist. No manufactured waste number. No obligation to appoint JudeLuxe afterwards.