Google Ads can generate a great deal of revenue while quietly eating into your margins.
If you are dealing with wasted spend, falling ROAS, expensive clicks, weak conversion rates or campaigns that feel impossible to scale profitably, you need rather more than someone checking the account once a week.
I manage Google Ads around what your business actually makes, not simply the revenue Google reports.
More profitable growth. Less wasted spend. Clearer decisions.
and custom builds · Google & Microsoft Ads Partner
I will reply within one working day to arrange the call.
It is why accounts that looked healthy last year are struggling this one. Bidding on revenue works until competition tightens; then budget flows to whatever converts most easily rather than to whatever pays best. A line carrying a 70% margin but selling twice a month contributes less than a 30% line selling two hundred times — and a rise in returns can reverse that again within a quarter.
If your unit and customer economics are not reaching the bidding, you are paying to fall behind the competitors who have done that work. I would rather tell you that plainly than sell you a tidier dashboard.
I am Cameron Jackson, a freelance paid search specialist with 16 years in the discipline, working with retail, D2C and B2B brands across the UK, North America, the EU and Australia. You work with me directly.
The campaigns themselves, the product data beneath them, and the tracking that carries the result back.
Real contribution margin supplied to Google and Microsoft Ads, so automated bidding optimises towards profit per order and scales only what genuinely pays.
Builds and restructures with margin-weighted Shopping, ads grounded in your proposition, and considered exclusions, arranged so the algorithm spends where the unit economics hold.
Title optimisation, cost and margin labels, product categorisation and custom labels, turning the feed into an instrument of segmentation rather than a catalogue.
Server-side tagging, Consent Mode v2 and enhanced conversions, so the signals your bidding depends on remain accurate and durable.
Full management and a considered import strategy, capturing high-intent demand at lower cost that most eCommerce brands leave unattended.
Contribution, true acquisition cost and blended performance in a single view, drawn from Ads, GA4 and your commerce platform, written to be read by a finance director.
Strong return on ad spend. Conversion value climbing. Every target met, in green, across the whole account. None of it tells you whether those orders were worth taking — because the targets were set against revenue, and revenue is not what pays your suppliers, your staff or you.
Making Google Ads look excellent is straightforward. Consolidate, lean on the demand your brand already has, let the reported figures rise. The account will read beautifully while the margin drains out of it, one easy conversion at a time.
Underneath: how the business makes money, how it operates, and where its unit and customer economics genuinely sit. Cost prices, return rates, stock positions, repeat purchase behaviour — the cash consequence of a sale rather than its headline value.
Establish that properly, then manage the account and feed Google's automated bidding the correct data, and the system optimises towards profitable contribution margin instead of towards whatever converts most easily. The interface looks after itself from there. It simply stops being the objective.
Three products, £1,000 of media behind each. One returns the most revenue, one carries much the best margin, and a third — unremarkable on both counts — is the one your accounts would thank you for.
| Per £1,000 of spend | Product AHighest revenue | Product BHighest margin | Product CNeither |
|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue returned | £6,000 | £2,400 | £4,200 |
| Reported ROAS | 6.00× | 2.40× | 4.20× |
| Gross margin | 32% | 72% | 48% |
| Fulfilment & shipping | 6% | 6% | 6% |
| Returns | 4% | 18% | 7% |
| Contribution | £1,498 | £1,299 | £1,641 |
| Contribution after ad spend | £498 | £299 | £641 |
Product A wins on revenue and would take the budget in most accounts. Product B wins on margin and would take it in most of the accounts that have tried to correct for revenue. Product C, which leads on neither, contributes more than either of them — and it is the only one of the three whose position holds once returns are counted honestly. That is the measure I manage to.
Every decision comes back to one measure: what does this leave behind? Applied to what you sell, to what people search, and to who is buying.
Your catalogue is not a single economic unit, so it should not sit behind a single target. Cost prices, return rates and stock positions differ line by line, and each changes what an order is worth.
Products are segmented by contribution and bid accordingly, with targets revised as supplier pricing, refunds and availability move.
Two search terms can convert at the same rate and be worth entirely different amounts, because they sell different baskets to different people. Brand terms in particular flatter every average they are folded into.
Search terms are judged on the contribution of what they actually sell, which changes what is worth defending and what quietly deserves less.
A first order from a customer who returns three times is not the same acquisition as one who never comes back, and paying the same for both is an expensive habit.
New and returning demand are separated and priced differently, so acquisition is judged against customer value rather than the first transaction alone.
Automated bidding still runs on the signals Google receives; that is how the system works. What changes the outcome is the quality of what reaches it. Server-side tracking, Consent Mode and enhanced conversions exist here for one purpose — to make sure the contribution signal survives the journey and is actually acted upon.
These are the questions I work through before touching a bid. None is exotic, and each costs considerably more than any adjustment to a target would recover.
The account has been instructed to maximise turnover, and it obliges. Every bid inherits that instruction, and the thinnest-margin lines quietly attract the most budget.
People searching your name were always going to buy. Averaged in, they flatter the return and obscure what the rest of the account is doing.
It reports handsomely because a good deal of what it claims was demand you already held. The incremental portion is usually smaller than the dashboard suggests.
Block lists are added to and rarely reviewed. Run in reverse, the exercise frequently shows the exclusions costing more than they ever saved.
Listing groups configured once, feed disapprovals nobody chased, discontinued lines still in the campaign. Products can go a year without a single impression and nothing draws attention to it.
A target return can look ambitious and still fall short of what the account needs to cover its own costs. Usually the figure has never been established, so the shortfall goes unnoticed.
Send me read-only access, or simply the exports, and I will work through the list above against your own account and come back with what I find.
Half an hour to understand the business, the margins and what you are trying to achieve. No presentation.
I map your unit economics, then examine structure, search terms, feed and tracking to establish where contribution is being lost.
Rebuilds and new campaigns delivered promptly, grounded in proven demand and real contribution rather than assumption.
Continual testing, measured scaling of what pays, and reporting you would be comfortable placing in front of your board.
If every product in your catalogue carried the same margin, the same stock position and the same commercial purpose, a single blended target would serve you perfectly well — and you would not need me.
No catalogue works that way. Almost every account is managed as though it did.
How an account is charged for quietly decides how it is managed.
Most agencies take a percentage of your media budget. Consider what that arrangement pays them to do: recommend more of it. Whether the last £10,000 of monthly spend returned more than it cost makes no difference to their invoice — only to your profit and loss.
It rewards precisely the thing an account cannot afford. Every additional pound of budget buys slightly less willing demand than the one before it, so there is always a point beyond which the next £10,000 produces less incremental profit than the last. A percentage fee gives your agency a reason not to notice where that point is.
So I charge a fixed monthly fee, agreed in advance. It does not move when your budget does. When I recommend scaling, the product-level arithmetic is there to support it — and when the honest answer is to spend less, it costs me nothing to say so.
A fixed monthly fee, agreed in advance and priced on catalogue complexity and the work the account needs. Never a percentage of spend and never a media mark-up — the reasoning is set out above.
ROAS measures revenue per pound of spend, and revenue is not profit. Gross margin is closer, but a high percentage on a slow-moving or frequently returned line can still contribute less than a modest percentage on something that sells steadily and stays sold.
Contribution margin accounts for cost of goods, fulfilment and refunds, in cash rather than as a ratio. It is not the only measure that matters — acquisition cost, cash position and customer value each warrant their own — but it is the one that determines what you can afford to bid.
As one instrument rather than the whole strategy. It performs, but it is opaque and it optimises for conversions rather than your economics. So it is segmented by product contribution, brand demand is separated out, and asset groups are reviewed for dilution rather than left to their own devices.
A monthly view built around contribution, true acquisition cost and blended performance, drawing Ads, GA4 and your commerce data into one place, with whatever cadence of conversation suits you in between. Ratios are recalculated from summed components rather than averaged — a distinction where a good deal of agency reporting quietly flatters itself.
No lengthy commitment. An initial period to put the foundations in place and demonstrate the work, then rolling with thirty days' notice. Clients remain because the figures move, not because of a contract.
Changing hands carries risk and I would rather say so plainly. It is managed by auditing before altering anything, keeping proven structures running while new ones earn their place, and introducing changes in stages rather than rebuilding an account in the first week.
I will. There is no account manager relaying messages and no junior learning at your expense. That is the trade in working with a freelancer rather than an agency: fewer clients, direct access, and the person building the account is the person you speak to.
No. Google and Microsoft Ads, together with the feed and tracking work behind them. I am glad to work alongside your social, email and SEO colleagues, but I will not claim to be the right choice for their work.
Tell me about the business and I will reply within one working day. If I am not confident I can improve matters, I will say so.
I will reply within one working day to arrange the call.