Paid Media for E-commerce & Retail Brands
Most ecommerce ad accounts problem money in the plumbing. Feeds, tracking, and budget pacing break long before the ads do. You get the layer underneath fixed first, then Google, Meta, and TikTok managed with senior hands and a weekly cadence you can read.
Where it breaks
The problems that show up 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 problem.
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 you get
Built for E-commerce & Retail Brands. Owned by you.
Shopping and PMax feeds, rebuilt
Clean titles, correct GTINs, supplemental feeds, and category segmentation. Performance Max can only sell what your feed describes, so your feed gets fixed 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.
You get the team behind $100M+ in managed 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 your name.
Same industry, other services
The first 30 days
What actually happens after you say go.
Weeks 1 and 2: Access and the audit
You grant read access to Google, Meta, Merchant Center, and your analytics, all still in your name. Then the plumbing gets audited: 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 problems 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. You get walked through it live once, then it lands on the same day every week. From here your account runs on a documented cadence you can read, question, and keep if you ever part ways.
From the blog
Practical thinking on e-commerce & retail brands marketing.
How Do You Audit Paid Media Across Multiple Locations?
Auditing paid media across multiple locations takes two passes: review every location the same way, then review the overlap, budget, and tracking seams.
ReadWhat Do You Do With Paid Media Audit Findings?
An audit report is only worth the fixes you ship. How to triage paid media audit findings, sequence them correctly, and prove the changes worked.
ReadShould We Use Performance Max, or Stick With Search Campaigns?
Performance Max works when your conversion tracking is clean, volume is steady, and your assets are strong. If not, it spends faster on the wrong thing.
ReadCommon questions
Straight answers.
Do you produce ad creative for Meta and TikTok?
You will not get creative produced in-house here. When creative is the gap, you get connected with vetted creative teams and their work gets wired into the system. You get the testing rhythm run for you, and your creative partners get 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 you ever part ways, everything stays with you.
How do you manage Google Shopping and Performance Max?
Feed first, always. Your product data gets rebuilt so the machine knows what to sell, campaigns get segmented by category and margin, and brand terms get walled off so growth is measured on new customers. Then it all runs on a weekly documented cadence.
You sell on marketplaces and your own site. Can the split be handled?
Management covers Google, Meta, and TikTok. You get 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?
There is no 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.
You are heading into your 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: those get scheduled around your sales calendar, and if the peak is too close, what exists gets stabilized, weekly pacing runs through the season, and the rebuild lands in the quiet window after.
Find out what is costing you before you spend another dollar.
One call. You tell us what you are running and hear the first move worth making.