Case study · Ecommerce
Google was spending blind. Then it could see the sales.
An ecommerce store spending most of its marketing budget on Google Ads. The account looked fine on its own reports. The store’s orders said otherwise.
Marketing you can measure · Growth reviews · 4 min read01The leak
Two months of spend, and Google saw no sales.
The main campaign had recorded no sales in Google Ads for two months while spend carried on. A smaller set of search ads earned about a third as much per dollar as the main campaign, and about one in six ad visits came from places the store couldn’t deliver to.
02The fix
Ads judged against the store’s own orders.
We rebuilt the account over four days and checked every number against the orders the store actually took.
- Sales tracking fixed Google could see each sale again, valued without GST and shipping.
- Searches cleaned up no ads for competitors’ names or products the store doesn’t sell, and only inside the delivery area.
- Budget follows sales the weak search campaign switched off; product lines ranked from $1 to $40+ in sales per $1 spent.
Sales credited to ads, the same two weeks
What Google Ads claimed1.7×
What the store’s orders credited1×
2.9× the average order from free search, against an order from ads
03Now
The next dollar went to checkout, not more ads.
Google Ads claimed 1.7 times the sales the store’s own records credited to ads, and the biggest carts came from free search and stopped at checkout. So ad spend was trimmed instead of raised, and delivery quotes became the next project.
From the store’s Google Ads account and its own order records: impressions in the two days after the tracking fix, and two weeks of orders after the rebuild.
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