First, are ads the right next spend?
Paid ads are an amplifier. Point them at a store that converts well and they scale it. Point them at a store with a slow product page, no reviews, delivery costs hidden until checkout and no email capture, and they scale the leak. Before we spend a pound of your money we check four things.
- Conversion. If your store converts poorly from search and email, it will convert worse from cold ad traffic. Fix that first; our CRO page explains how.
- Margin. Your product margin has to cover the cost of buying a click and still leave something. For some catalogues it does not, and we will say so.
- The feed and the tracking. Google Shopping is only as good as your product data, and any platform is only as good as what it can measure.
- What happens after the sale. If there is no email flow to turn a paid first order into a second, you are paying for every customer twice.
If the answer is "not yet", you get a plain list of what to fix first, most of it cheaper than ads.
Google Shopping and Performance Max
For most retailers Google Shopping is the first paid channel, because it reaches people who have already typed what they want to buy, and the free listings alongside the paid ones cost nothing.
Performance Max is Google's automated campaign type that runs Shopping, Search, YouTube and Display from one budget. It can work very well, and it is a black box: it will happily spend on people searching for your own brand name and count that as a win. We structure it so brand searches are excluded or kept separate, group products by margin and role rather than throwing the whole catalogue in, give it clean conversion data to learn from, and keep standard Shopping or Search campaigns where we need control.
The feed is half the work
Google does not read your product page; it reads your product feed. Titles that use the words people search for rather than your internal names, barcodes on every product that has one, the right Google product category, images that pass review, availability synced accurately from Shopify, and custom labels so we can bid differently on best sellers, clearance and high-margin lines. Most accounts we see have unread disapprovals and titles that say "Blue" when the customer searched for a brand and a model. Because we do catalogue and listings work as well, feed fixes happen in the store, not in a spreadsheet bolted on the side.
Meta ads
Facebook and Instagram ads reach people who were not searching, which suits discovery and bringing back people who visited and left. Catalogue ads show someone the products they looked at; prospecting campaigns find new customers who look like your best ones. Creative decides everything here: the product in use, real customers, short video, a clear offer. We plan and brief the creative, build the campaigns, and connect the tracking through Shopify's own Meta integration so the platform sees the sales properly.
Landing pages that match the ad
The click is the expensive part; what happens next is free to fix and usually ignored. An ad for a specific product should land on that product, not the home page, with any promotion from the ad visible when they arrive. The page should load fast on a phone and show price, delivery and stock before anyone scrolls. Because we build storefronts, we change the landing pages ourselves rather than sending a request into someone else's queue.
Measurement after the iPhone changed the rules
Since Apple let people block tracking in apps and browsers tightened up on cookies, the ad platforms see far less of what happens after a click. Meta's reported results dropped sharply for many stores, not because the ads stopped working but because the measurement did. The fix has three parts: server-side tracking that sends conversions from Shopify straight to the platforms, enhanced conversion data that lets Google match orders to clicks, and a consent setup that collects permission properly and tells the platforms what they are allowed to use.
Even then, every platform overclaims. Google and Meta will both take credit for the same order, and both will count a customer who would have bought anyway. So we report two numbers side by side: what the platforms claim, and what Shopify actually banked against what you actually spent. The second one decides whether the budget goes up or down. New customer share is on the report too, because growth made entirely of existing customers is not growth.
How we run your accounts
Accounts are set up in your name, so the history and the data are yours whatever happens. We check the campaigns through the week, change things when the data justifies it rather than for the sake of activity, and send a monthly plain-English report: spend, revenue, new customers, what changed, what is next. Fixed quote before we start, and our pricing page explains how ad management is charged.
Who this is for
UK Shopify retailers with a store that converts and a product with enough margin to buy customers profitably. If you are there, ads are the fastest lever you have. If you are not there yet, we would rather get you there first, and the rest of our marketing work is how.
Questions we get asked
How much should we spend on Google Ads?
Enough to learn something, and no more until it is working. The right figure depends on your margin, what a click costs in your category and how well the store converts. We work it out with you from your numbers rather than quoting a budget off the shelf, start at a level that buys useful data, and only recommend more when the blended return justifies it.
Google Shopping or Performance Max?
Often both, with a clear job for each. Performance Max can reach further and is good at finding new customers when it has clean conversion data to learn from, but it hides where the money goes and loves spending on your own brand name. Standard Shopping and Search give control over exactly what shows for what. We set the mix for your catalogue and your data, and we change it as the account matures.
Our Meta ads used to work and then stopped. What happened?
Usually one of three things: the measurement broke when Apple let people block tracking, so the ads look worse than they are; the ad images and video wore out and the same audience stopped responding; or the store changed and the landing pages no longer match the ads. We check all three, fix the tracking first, and then judge the campaigns on what Shopify actually banked.
How do you charge for ad management?
Our pricing page explains how ad management is priced. Whatever the arrangement, you get a fixed quote before we start, the hours are tracked and visible, and the ad accounts are in your name, so the spend and the data are always yours.
Can you fix Merchant Center disapprovals and suspensions?
Yes. Disapprovals are nearly always product data: missing barcodes, prices that do not match the page, images that break the rules. Suspensions are usually about the store itself: returns and contact details that are hard to find, or a checkout that does not show the total clearly. Both are fixable, and because we work in the store as well as the account, we fix them at the source.