Paid Media for E-commerce & Retail Brands
Most ecommerce ad accounts leak money in the plumbing. Feeds, tracking, and budget pacing break long before the ads do. We fix the layer underneath, then manage Google, Meta, and TikTok with senior hands and a weekly cadence you can read.
Where it breaks
The problems we see over and over.
PMax spends blind on a broken feed
Product titles, GTINs, and availability flags decide what Shopping and Performance Max can sell. Most feeds ship straight from the platform export and never get touched again.
Brand terms eat the budget
Performance Max and broad match quietly buy your own brand name. Blended ROAS looks great while new customer growth stalls.
One ROAS number hides the losers
A blended account target lets hero SKUs subsidize categories that lose money on every order. Without reporting by SKU category, nobody sees it happening.
Seasonal budgets drift off a cliff
Holiday plans get locked in early, then spend wanders with no weekly pacing check. The budget is gone before the days that convert best.
How this plays out
The pattern, up close.
Picture a Monday morning at an online store doing eight figures across a few thousand products. Performance Max, Google's automated campaign type, spent all weekend, and nobody can say on which products. The feed still lists last season's bestseller as in stock, Meta is running the same three ads it ran in June, and the dashboard shows one blended ROAS (return on ad spend) that mixes brand and non-brand, so it tells you almost nothing. Someone spends the morning exporting reports to answer one question: did the weekend make money? By noon the answer is still probably.
The usual fix is to hire another buyer or hand the account to a big retainer shop. Neither touches the plumbing. A new hire inherits the same broken feed and the same blended reporting, so they optimize the numbers they can see, which are the wrong ones. A big shop parks a junior team on daily bid changes while product titles, GTIN coverage (the barcode IDs Google uses to match products), and tracking gaps sit untouched, because feed work is unglamorous and nobody gets promoted for it. Spend keeps flowing through pipes that leak.
With the system in, the feed becomes an asset instead of a liability. Every campaign maps to a product category and margin tier, brand demand is walled off from acquisition, and the weekly report answers the Monday question on one screen: what sold, at what return, and where the next dollar should go. Seasonal budgets get a pacing check every week, so holiday money moves in October instead of vanishing in a December panic. Nobody rebuilds a spreadsheet to learn whether the weekend worked. The account stops being a black box you pay into and becomes a machine you can read.
Signs this is you
Your blended ROAS looks great while new customer orders stay flat.
Nobody has touched the product feed since the site launched.
You cannot say which SKUs Performance Max actually spent on last week.
Brand and non-brand share a campaign, so acquisition cost is a guess.
The holiday budget ran out before the days that convert best.
Meta has run the same three ads since spring because nothing new gets tested.
What we do about it
Audit · Build · Manage
Shopping and PMax feeds, rebuilt
Clean titles, correct GTINs, supplemental feeds, and category segmentation. Performance Max can only sell what your feed describes, so we fix that first.
Brand walled off from non-brand
Account architecture that separates the demand you already own from the demand you are buying. True acquisition cost becomes a number you can read.
ROAS by SKU category, not one blended number
Reporting that writes itself, split by category and margin tier. Budget moves toward the products that actually make money.
A Meta creative testing rhythm
Weekly test rotations with every winner and loser documented. Your creative team gets a clear brief on what to make next.
Seasonal pacing with weekly checkpoints
Budgets planned before the season and checked every week, documented in the open. Money moves while it can still change the outcome.
We have managed $100M+ in paid spend for brands you know in outdoor, Western, industrial, and agricultural retail, including multi-location brands with hundreds of locations. The accounts, the data, and the system stay in the client's name.
Same industry, other services
The first 30 days
What actually happens after you say go.
Weeks 1 and 2: Access and the audit
We get read access to Google, Meta, Merchant Center, and your analytics, all still in your name. Then we audit the plumbing: feed quality, conversion tracking, brand versus non-brand structure, and where Performance Max spend actually went. You get a written findings list ranked by revenue at stake, not a slide deck of vague opportunities.
Weeks 2 and 3: The plan and the first fixes
The biggest leaks get fixed first, and in ecommerce that is almost always the feed and the tracking. Titles get rewritten, GTINs filled in, dead SKUs excluded, and brand terms walled off so acquisition finally has its own number. Structural rebuilds are scheduled around your sales calendar so nothing resets campaign learning in the middle of a promotion.
Week 4: The rhythm starts
The first weekly report ships: ROAS by SKU category, brand and non-brand split out, and pacing against the seasonal plan. We walk you through it live once, then it lands on the same day every week. From here the account runs on a documented cadence you can read, question, and keep if we ever part ways.
From the blog
How we think about e-commerce & retail brands marketing.
UTM Tracking, Done Properly
A practical guide to UTM tracking: the five parameters, casing rules, governance, common breakages, and how to audit the links you already have.
ReadA Weekly Search Terms and Negatives Workflow
A repeatable weekly workflow for Google Ads search terms: fast reviews, intent buckets, shared negative lists, broad match discipline, and a decision log.
ReadThe Paid Media Reporting Stack, Explained
The five layers of a paid media reporting stack, from raw platform exports to a narrative people actually read, and where AI fits in the middle.
ReadQuestions we get
Straight answers.
Do you produce ad creative for Meta and TikTok?
We do not produce creative in-house. When creative is the gap, we connect you with creative teams we trust and wire their work into the system. We run the testing rhythm and hand your creative partners a documented record of what wins.
Who owns the ad accounts and the data?
You do, from day one. Accounts, dashboards, naming conventions, and automation all live in your name. If we ever part ways, everything stays with you.
How do you manage Google Shopping and Performance Max?
Feed first, always. We rebuild product data so the machine knows what to sell, segment campaigns by category and margin, and wall off brand terms so growth is measured on new customers. Then we run it on a weekly documented cadence.
We sell on marketplaces and our own site. Can you handle the split?
Our management covers Google, Meta, and TikTok. We build reporting that shows marketplace and DTC performance side by side, so budget decisions between the two become weekly numbers instead of guesses.
Is there a minimum ad spend to work with you?
We do not set a hard floor, but the shape matters. This fits established stores spending enough that feed quality, campaign structure, and pacing decisions move real revenue, not day-one launches still finding product-market fit. If your account is earlier than that, the Performance Audit will tell you plainly whether full management pays for itself yet.
We are heading into our peak season. Is it too late to start?
Depends where the calendar sits. Feed fixes and tracking repairs help within weeks and rarely disrupt live campaigns, so those are worth doing almost any time. Full structural rebuilds are a different call: we schedule those around your sales calendar, and if the peak is too close we stabilize what exists, run weekly pacing through the season, and rebuild in the quiet window after.
Find out what is leaking before you spend another dollar.
One call. We learn what you are running and tell you the first move worth making.