Auditing a $1M Per Month Google Ads Account

Ever wondered what goes on inside a Google Ads account that pulls in over $1 million in revenue every month? Well, wonder no more. In today’s newsletter, I’m giving you an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at a high-performing e-commerce Google Ads account and sharing key strategies you can use to optimise your own campaigns.

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1. Spend Distribution and Channel Selection

This high-level account spends around ￡326,000 ($400,000) monthly, with the bulk going to Shopping (￡233,000) and Search (￡64,000). Despite the success, there's room to improve Search spending. A higher Search budget could potentially double their revenue.

Takeaway: If your Ecommerce Search spend is significantly less than your Shopping Ads spend, that could be a sign there is room to expand Search.

2. Bids and Budgets

The account uses a mix of bid strategies, which creates a bit of chaos. We recommend consolidating into just two or three strategies, such as Target ROAS or Maximise Conversion Value. Simplify your approach and create cohesive bid strategies across your campaigns.

3. Optimising Brand Campaigns

Aim for a 100% impression share in your brand campaigns if your ROAS is above 1000%.

This ensures you capture the maximum possible traffic for your brand keywords. Use Target ROAS bid strategy and increase your budget to maintain high impression share while optimising for profitability.

4. Shopping Ads Strategy

Switch from manual CPC to Target ROAS for Shopping campaigns, especially if you're getting a high volume of conversions. Structure your campaigns around product priorities: create separate campaigns for top-performing products with lower target ROAS and others with higher targets. This gives you control over which products to push more.

5. Utilise Portfolios

Group multiple campaigns into portfolios to aggregate conversion data, allowing Google’s algorithm to make smarter bidding decisions. This is particularly effective in Standard Shopping campaigns and Search campaigns. Unfortunately Portfolios are not yet available for Performance Max, which is one of the cons of using Performance Max in this type of campaign.

6. Search Term Optimization (Seed Mining Method)

Regularly check your search terms report.

Any term with over 30 impressions in the last 90 days should either be added as a keyword if it's relevant or as a negative keyword if it's not. This process, called the Seed Mining Method, strengthens your account over time.

7. Dynamic Search Ads (DSA)

Run two types of DSA campaigns: targeted (for specific URLs or categories) and catch-all (targeting your entire site with exclusions). This ensures you capture all potential search traffic while maintaining control over your ads.

8. Ad Copy Testing

Even in brand campaigns, run two to three responsive search ads per ad group and continuously optimise based on performance. This can significantly boost your click-through rates and overall campaign effectiveness.

9. Performance Max Experiments

Nervous about transitioning from standard Shopping to Performance Max?

Run a Performance Max uplift experiment to compare results. Typically, Performance Max shows an uplift over Standard Shopping, especially if given at least two months to run.

10. Conversion Tracking

Ensure enhanced conversions are set up. Use the Google Ads pixel for primary tracking, but also import GA4 conversions as secondary to have a backup in case the primary tag goes down.

These are just a few of the insights from a deep dive into a high-performing Google Ads account. By implementing these strategies, you can enhance your own campaigns and potentially add an extra zero to your business revenue.

— Daryl

What's Big Flare again?

We create profit-focused advertising campaigns on Google, YouTube and Meta. Our best fit clients are 7+ figure Ecommerce businesses that have a great product but struggle with paid ads.

Interested in working together?

Book a strategy session with me, here: https://www.bigflare.com/get-a-free-ppc-strategy-session

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