Reallocating 60% of budget toward profitable products.

Revenue was steady. Profit was a different matter.

A UK retailer of premium kitchenware was spending around £8,000 per month on Google Ads — predominantly Shopping and Performance Max — with a headline ROAS that looked reasonable. Margins, however, were under pressure, and the cause was not obvious.

Sales were coming in and the account appeared to be functioning. But nobody had analysed which products were driving profitable revenue and which were consuming budget without returning it.

Four structural issues

The audit examined both the Google Ads account structure and the Merchant Centre feed in detail, to establish where budget was going, what it returned at product level, and whether the campaign architecture was set up to optimise for profit rather than revenue.

• 60% of budget on underperformers. Over half the monthly spend was allocated to product segments with below-breakeven ROAS, all within a single catch-all Performance Max campaign.
• Top 20% of products driving 80% of profit. A small group of high-margin SKUs consistently outperformed but competed for budget against hundreds of lower-value products.
• Merchant Centre feed issues. Product titles were not structured to match how customers search — missing material, size and use-case attributes that drive qualified traffic.
• A single ROAS target. One target applied across all products regardless of margin. High-margin products were held back; low-margin products were over-funded.

Treat different products differently

• Segment top-performing, high-margin products into dedicated campaigns with ROAS targets calibrated to actual margin rather than blended account averages
• Restructure the remaining catalogue into performance tiers, with budget weighted toward the segments showing the best return
• Rewrite Merchant Centre product titles to include the attributes customers search for, improving relevance, click-through rate and conversion quality
• Introduce product-level ROAS analysis as an ongoing practice rather than a one-off exercise
• Review Performance Max asset groups to ensure creative and product groupings are aligned to intent

A sequenced plan, not a list

The client received a structured plan ranked by expected impact — a specific sequence of changes rather than a general list of improvements. The 60-minute walkthrough turned the written report into something actionable immediately, and 30 days of follow-up support meant they were not left to work it out alone.

For a £399 investment, they left with a fundamentally clearer picture of the account and a roadmap to make the existing budget work considerably harder.