What an ecommerce PPC agency should do: feed and Merchant Center health, margin-led Shopping and Performance Max, the questions to ask, fees and 90 days.
Your Shopping campaigns are reporting a 500% return on ad spend, the monthly report looks healthy, and yet the finance figures for the quarter tell a quieter story. That gap between what the ad account says and what the business keeps is the reason many store owners start looking for an ecommerce PPC agency, and it is usually fixable.
The short answer to what an agency should do for you: run Google Ads around your margins, your stock and your product feed, and report on profit as well as revenue. Clicks and ROAS are useful signals, but the number that pays the bills is what's left once the products, the delivery and the ads are paid for. That is how our ecommerce PPC management service is built.
This guide is for founders and marketing leads deciding whether to hire help, or whether the help they have is working. It covers what good management looks like, why bidding should follow margin, the questions to ask an agency, how fees work in the UK, and what the first 90 days should contain.
Worth knowing before you hire
- A good ecommerce PPC agency structures Shopping and Performance Max around margin and stock, so your best-earning products get the budget rather than your best-selling ones.
- ROAS alone can hide losses: at a 20% gross margin, a 500% ROAS only just covers the cost of the clicks, which is why we track profit on ad spend alongside it.
- Clear Click manages ecommerce PPC from £1,500 a month plus VAT, starting with the feed and the tracking before any bids change.
What does good ecommerce PPC management look like?
Google Ads for ecommerce is mostly Shopping and Performance Max, with search campaigns around them. Both of the first two run on your product feed rather than on keywords you write, so the quality of the management shows up in four places before it ever shows up in a bid.
A healthy feed and Merchant Center account
Your Merchant Center account is where Google reads every product you sell: title, price, availability, images, identifiers. Disapproved products, mismatched prices and missing identifiers quietly take items out of the auction, so a store can be paying for traffic on half its range without anyone noticing. A good agency checks Merchant Center diagnostics weekly and fixes problems at the source, in the store or the feed tool, not with a patch that breaks on the next sync.
Product titles do a lot of heavy lifting here. Google matches Shopping ads to searches largely on what the title and description say, so a title that reads "Repair Mask 200ml" competes for far fewer searches than one naming the brand, the hair type and what the product does. We've written about this at length in why feed quality beats bid strategy, so we'll keep it brief here.
MCM Beauty, an Australian hair and beauty wholesaler moving into selling direct to consumers with a lean team, is the clearest example from our own work. We rewrote product titles, enriched the product data Google reads, and brought their reviews together through Reviews.io, which earned the store Google's "top quality store" badge. Google Shopping then grew their online revenue 400% year on year.
400% year on year: The growth in MCM Beauty's online revenue from Google Shopping after the product titles, product data and reviews were rebuilt.
Source: Clear Click, MCM Beauty case study.
Shopping structured by margin and stock
A single Shopping campaign containing every product lets Google decide where the money goes, and Google will tend to favour whatever sells most easily. That is often a low-margin bestseller. Splitting products into groups by margin band, and keeping items that are low in stock or about to be discontinued out of the high-budget groups, puts the decision back with you. Custom labels in the feed are the usual way to do it, and they cost nothing but a little setup time.
Our Google Shopping strategy guide covers campaign structure in more depth, including how to handle seasonal ranges.
Performance Max with proper asset groups and exclusions
Performance Max can work well for ecommerce, provided it is given a clear brief. That means asset groups that mirror real product categories rather than one group for everything, brand exclusions so the campaign isn't claiming credit for people who were already searching for you, and negative keywords and placement controls where the account allows them.
In plain terms, Performance Max spends where it finds conversions, and if you don't tell it which conversions you value, it will find the cheapest ones. Our assessment of when Performance Max works goes through the trade-offs.
Brand and non-brand kept apart
Searches for your own brand name convert at a much higher rate than anything else in the account, because those people already know you. Mixed in with everything else, they make the whole account look more profitable than it is. Reported separately, you can see what the ads are doing to win new customers, which is the question that decides whether to spend more.
Why should bidding follow margin rather than ROAS alone?
ROAS, return on ad spend, divides revenue by ad cost. It is a sensible measure, and Google's bidding is built around it. Its limitation is that it treats £100 of revenue the same whether the product behind it earns you £60 or £15.
Take a worked example. A store sells two products at £50 each. One has a 60% gross margin, the other 20%. Both campaigns report a 500% ROAS, so for every £1 of ad spend each brings in £5 of revenue. On the first product, that £5 carries £3 of gross profit. On the second, it carries £1, which means the ads are breaking even before delivery, returns or overheads are counted.
Profit on ad spend, often shortened to POAS, divides gross profit by ad cost instead. You get there by passing product cost or margin into the account, either through the conversion value you send to Google or through a margin field and custom labels in the feed. Once the account can see margin, the ROAS targets can be set differently for each margin band, and budget follows profit rather than turnover.
This only works if the tracking is sound. A good ecommerce setup sends the actual order value from the checkout, removes duplicate purchases, and is reconciled each month against what the store platform says it sold. GA4 and Google Ads will rarely agree to the pound, and that's fine, but they should agree on the direction. Where the gap is large, fixing it comes before any change to bidding.
What should you ask an ecommerce PPC agency?
A good agency will be glad to answer these on a first call. What you are listening for is whether the answers are specific to your store.
- How will you use our margins? A strong answer talks about custom labels, margin bands or conversion values, and asks you for a product cost file.
- What will you do in Merchant Center in the first month? A strong answer names diagnostics, disapprovals and titles. A less helpful one goes straight to bids.
- How do you treat brand searches? Listen for separate reporting and brand exclusions in Performance Max.
- Who works on the account each week? A name and a rough number of hours tells you more than a team chart.
- What will the monthly report lead with? Revenue and profit from new customers, ideally, with clicks and impressions further down.
It is also worth checking that the Google Ads and Merchant Center accounts sit in your own business's ownership, with the agency given access. That way the history stays with you whatever happens.
How do ecommerce PPC fees work in the UK?
You'll meet three models. A flat monthly fee, which keeps the advice about budget neutral because the agency earns the same whether you spend more or less. A percentage of ad spend, often with a minimum fee attached. And hybrids that add a bonus tied to revenue or profit targets, which work best once both sides trust the tracking.
Clear Click charges a flat fee, with paid media management from £1,500 a month plus VAT. We aim for 12-month partnerships, because the first quarter is mostly groundwork, and the early termination terms are set out in the agreement. Our guide to what a PPC agency costs in the UK compares the models in more detail.
A candid word on where that fee makes sense. If your monthly ad spend is small, the management fee can end up larger than the media it manages. At that stage, a tidy Shopping campaign run in-house, with an outside review every quarter, will often serve you better, and we'd say so on the first call. The fee earns its place once there is enough spend and enough product range for margin-led structure to change the result.
What should the first 90 days look like?
Month one: feed, Merchant Center and tracking. An audit of the account and the feed. Disapprovals cleared, titles and product data improved on the products that matter most, and purchase tracking checked against the store's own sales figures. Margin data gathered and turned into custom labels.
Month two: structure. Shopping rebuilt by margin and stock. Performance Max given asset groups by category, with brand exclusions in place. Brand and non-brand search split. Targets set for each margin band rather than one ROAS for the whole account.
Month three: scaling what earns. Budget moved towards the product groups producing profit, the first reliable read of profit on ad spend, and a plan for the next quarter, usually around seasonal peaks.
If month two feels like a lot of change and not much growth, that is normal. Smart bidding needs a few weeks of data after any structural change before it settles, and the gains usually show from month three onwards.
Margin-led structure and clean product data are where most of the extra profit in an ecommerce account comes from. See how we approach paid media
Questions we get asked
What does an ecommerce PPC agency do?
It runs your Google Ads, mainly Shopping, Performance Max and search, around your product feed, margins and stock. A good one spends as much time in Merchant Center and the tracking as it does on bids, and reports on profit as well as revenue.
Is a Google Shopping agency different from an ecommerce PPC agency?
In practice they usually do the same work, since Shopping is the core of most ecommerce Google Ads accounts. The difference is scope: an ecommerce PPC agency should also cover search, Performance Max and how they fit together, rather than Shopping on its own.
How much do PPC agencies charge in the UK for ecommerce?
Fees are usually a flat monthly amount or a percentage of ad spend with a minimum. Clear Click's paid media management starts from £1,500 a month plus VAT on a flat fee. The right model depends on your spend and how settled your tracking is.
Is Performance Max good for ecommerce?
It can be, provided it has well-structured asset groups, brand exclusions and accurate conversion values. Without those, it tends to drift towards cheap conversions and returning customers. We'd usually run it alongside Shopping and search rather than as the whole account.
Which PPC agency offers transparent reporting and predictable costs?
Look for a flat fee you know before the month starts, and a report that leads with revenue and profit from new customers. Ask to see an example report on the first call. A good agency will share one happily, with client details removed.
Where we fit
Clear Click manages Google Ads for ecommerce brands that want the account run on margin, stock and clean product data, with senior people doing the work each month. We start with the feed and the tracking, then the structure, then the budget.
For MCM Beauty, that approach grew online revenue from Google Shopping 400% year on year. If you'd like a second opinion on your current account, or want to see what ecommerce PPC management with us involves, get in touch and we'll give you a plain answer.
