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Google Shopping works brilliantly for plenty of brands. But there's an assumption that every ecommerce brand should be on it. Here's how it goes wrong. A brand sells through stockists as well as its own website. Then it starts advertising on Shopping and finds itself bidding against the very retailers it supplies. It's the same product, often at a lower price and sometimes with free delivery too. The brand pays for the click. The stockist wins the sale. No amount of optimisat

Meta says it made the sale. Google says it made the sale. GA4 says something completely different. Who should you believe? You shouldn't rely on any one of them on its own. The platforms disagree because each one only sees its own slice of the customer journey. When someone sees a Meta ad, searches your brand on Google and buys after an email, every platform can put its hand up and claim the sale. That part is normal. The bigger issue is what we do with it. And how much time

A great ad can get someone to your website. It can't make sense of the website for them. When sales don't follow, the ads usually take the blame. People test new creatives, switch audiences and tweak bids inside Meta or Google. The ads can be doing exactly what they should. They're finding the right people, getting good engagement and sending relevant traffic. Whether or not that traffic buys depends on what it finds next. Advertising can't fix: • An unclear landing pag

Google has quietly changed how Target ROAS works, and if you used to employ a ‘set and forget’ approach to this bidding strategy, you need to read this. Target ROAS is one of the most common bidding settings in Google Ads. You tell Google how much revenue you want back for every £1 spent, and it adjusts bids to try to hit that number. A target of 450% means asking for £4.50 in sales per £1 spent. Historically, that target worked more like a guardrail than an instruction. A ca

September is usually when conversations about Q4 ad budgets start getting serious. How much more should we spend? When should we start increasing budgets? How much should go behind Black Friday? What should we be aiming for? I think there's a more important conversation to have before any of that. Having more money available to spend doesn't necessarily mean you should spend it. And a bigger Q4 budget doesn't guarantee a better commercial result. For established Ecomm brands,

Ever felt frustrated because your main competitor seems to be everywhere on Google? Even when you Google your own brand name. I get it. It is infuriating, but it is a distraction. And unless you have access to their account data, you really can’t know if being everywhere is really paying off in terms of profitability. Smaller brands often feel most exposed to this. They see a bigger competitor with deeper pockets showing up on every search and assume they're being crowded out

I hand bidding, targeting and budget optimisation over to machine learning. Performance Max and Advantage+ read auction signals and audience data faster than any human team could manage, and they don't get tired or emotionally attached to a campaign that isn't working. For founders and marketing managers watching a media budget, that shift usually means faster, more consistent decisions than a person working alone could ever make. Creative is a different story. Meta and Googl

One of the most expensive assumptions in advertising is believing every performance problem starts and ends with your ads. Often, the campaigns are doing exactly what they're meant to do. It's what happens after the click that lets the business down. A slow site. A landing page that doesn't match the ad. A checkout with one step too many. None of it shows up in your ads dashboard, but all of it shows up in your conversion rate. If you want to get to the root of what is impact

One of the least useful things you can do in ads. Panic after three bad days of performance. I see it a lot, and honestly, I understand why. If you're running your own ads, you're checking performance daily. You've built the products, you know the margins, it's your money. A couple of rough days and it feels urgent to fix something. But three days rarely tells you anything real. Platforms often see signals before we do. Campaigns need time to settle. And plenty of dips have n

If you've ever opened up Ads Manager and noticed that one creative, usually a dynamic carousel, is hoovering up almost all of your budget, you're not imagining it. It's one of the most common frustrations I hear from clients and ads managers alike, and one I see in account after account. So, when news started circulating that Meta is testing a feature giving advertisers more control over how much budget goes to a specific creative, my first reaction was relief. My second was:

Is it too late to say Happy New Year? Probably  😄 January is racing past at speed, and if you work in e-commerce, you are probably still catching your breath after peak season and January sales 😅 But Q1 isn't a time for rest (sorry). Here are some things to think about in the next few months, to make sure your ad accounts are set up for success... 👀 What to Focus on in Meta in Q1 Q2 is harder than it looks. In my experience, Q2 can be the most challenging quarter for

Winning at Q4 in an AI-Driven Digital Ads Landscape Q4 is here, but this time it feels a little different. More automation. More pressure. More ad platform updates to keep on top of than ever before. AI is literally everywhere, with the promise of time-saving, maximising and generally making everything more shiny and exciting. But also demanding we give up more and more control. AI is an amazing addition to digital ads and elements of it can be game changers, but it can also

Meta have just released their Holiday Playbook. I’ve waded through it (so you don’t have to!) and pulled out the insights ecomm brands...

Hot off the press from Meta’s Peak Season Accelerator yesterday - here’s what they’re telling advertisers to prioritise if we want to win...

Meta Ads - Main Campaign Types Guide This guide summarises the main campaign types available to advertisers in Meta Ads (Facebook and...

If you’re investing in Meta and/or Google Ads and working with an agency or a freelancer - or even an in-house team - you will receive...

When you're running ecomm ads, ROAS (Return On Ad Spend) is obviously a metric you need to keep a very close eye on. However, one of the...

👀 Obsessively watching your competitors to see who breaks cover first and launches their Black Friday ads? Do you stick to your...

The more innovative and unique your product, the less likely potential buyers will know they need you in their lives. They aren't going...

For most ecomm businesses, a LOT hangs on peak season. That's why you need to make sure you get it right. So, how do you cut through the...