Derek VaalEcommerce PPC Consultant
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Google Ads management

Google Ads management for ecommerce brands that need clearer control.

I manage Google Ads around the relationship between demand, products, margins, and measurement. That can mean rebuilding Search, cleaning up Performance Max, improving Shopping inputs, or making the reporting useful enough to guide the next decision.

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Fit

Who this is for, and who it is not for.

A good fit

  • Ecommerce brands with a real product catalog and meaningful monthly paid search spend.
  • Teams who want one experienced person close to the account rather than a rotating pod.
  • Accounts where Shopping or Performance Max carries a large share of revenue and nobody can fully explain why it performs the way it does.
  • Businesses that can talk about margin, inventory, and customer value, not only ROAS.
  • Owners who want to understand the reasoning behind changes instead of receiving a monthly slide deck.

Not a good fit

  • Lead generation, local services, or any account without products and a feed.
  • Brands looking for the cheapest possible management fee.
  • Accounts where the expectation is a guaranteed ROAS number before anyone has looked at the data.
  • Teams who want someone to execute a fixed change list without diagnosing the account first.
  • Very early stores still validating whether there is demand for the product at all.
What I manage

The parts of Google Ads that affect the business decision.

Search structure

Brand, non-brand, category, product, and competitor intent separated into campaigns with clear roles, budgets, and landing pages.

Separating branded demand matters most, because brand traffic blended into non-brand reporting makes an account look healthier than it is and hides whether anything is creating new demand.

Shopping and Performance Max

Product grouping, feed inputs, exclusions, conversion signals, and a defined role for each automated campaign.

Performance Max works better when it is given a narrower job and cleaner inputs than when it is handed the whole catalog and an unqualified budget.

Measurement and reporting

Primary conversions, value quality, attribution settings, budget pacing, search-term context, and reviewed next steps.

If the conversion data is wrong, every optimization decision downstream inherits that error, so measurement gets checked before structure.

Method

How an engagement actually runs.

1. Diagnose before touching anything

The first phase is an audit of the account, the conversion tracking, and the product data together, because these three fail in ways that look identical from inside the Google Ads interface. I document what I find, rank it by what is costing the most, and separate the problems worth fixing now from the ones that can wait.

2. Fix the inputs

Tracking accuracy, Merchant Center eligibility, and product data quality get resolved before campaign structure changes. Rebuilding campaigns on top of a broken feed or a double-counting conversion action produces results nobody can trust.

Where the fix sits outside the ad platform, I coordinate with your developer or platform team rather than handing over a ticket and waiting.

3. Restructure with a reason

Campaign roles are rebuilt around how the business actually thinks about its catalog: margin, merchandising priority, seasonality, and new versus returning demand. Every structural change is written up with the reasoning before it is applied.

4. Monitor and adjust

Ongoing work is search-term review, budget pacing, feed health, creative and asset testing, and the recurring checks that catch problems while they are still small. Guardian watches spend pacing, anomalies, and feed health daily and flags issues between our conversations.

Where I look first

Before changing bids, I check the inputs.

  • Business goals, contribution margin, inventory, and commercial priorities.
  • Conversion tracking, attribution settings, and the quality of reported value.
  • Merchant Center eligibility, product coverage, price, availability, and landing pages.
  • Campaign roles, query mix, budget constraints, and recent account changes.
  • How much of the reported return is branded demand the business already had.
Reporting

You can see the account without asking me.

Management includes Cardinal, a private client workspace with your reporting, account health, shared files, and the recommendations I have reviewed and published. Guardian runs daily checks on budget pacing, spend anomalies, and feed health inside it.

Every account change is logged with its reasoning, so the history of the account is readable months later rather than living in my memory.

See how Cardinal reporting works
Engagement

Scope, fees, and what is not included.

Included

  • Account audit covering campaigns, tracking, and product data.
  • Campaign strategy, build, and ongoing management across Search, Shopping, and Performance Max.
  • Merchant Center and feed diagnostics, plus coordination on fixes.
  • Conversion tracking review and measurement guidance.
  • Cardinal portal access with reporting, Guardian monitoring, and change history.
  • Direct access to me for account questions between reviews.

Not included

  • Ad spend, which is paid directly to the platform on your own billing.
  • Creative production, photography, and video. I will specify what is needed and review it.
  • Website development and theme work, though I will diagnose issues and brief your developer.
  • Paid social, email, SEO, and marketplaces. Paid search is the whole focus.
  • Guaranteed performance numbers. Nobody who has not seen your data can honestly offer one.
Questions

Questions ecommerce brands ask before starting.

Who actually works on the account?

I do. There is no account manager relaying instructions to a media buyer you never meet. The person who audits the account, builds the campaigns, writes the recommendations, and answers your questions is the same person throughout the engagement.

What does Google Ads management cost?

Management is a flat monthly fee, not a percentage of your ad spend. The fee is set by account complexity and the work the account actually needs, so it does not rise simply because you increased budget, and I have no incentive to grow your spend rather than your results. Management starts at $2,500 per month. A short strategy call gets you an exact quote with no commitment.

Do you start with a paid audit or a free one?

Paid, and credited in full against your first month if we go ahead. A full audit of the account, the conversion tracking, and the product data is $1,500. If you hire me, that comes off the first invoice, so the audit effectively costs nothing. If you do not, you keep the findings and the prioritized action list. You get real diagnostic work rather than a sales pitch dressed up as a free audit.

How long am I committed for?

The first term is 90 days, and after that it runs month to month with 30 days notice. Some wins land in weeks, usually where spend is being wasted outright or a tracking error is distorting the picture, but structural changes to Search, Shopping, and Performance Max need time to gather enough data for the results to mean anything. Judging a restructure on a single week of data tends to produce the wrong conclusion.

Will you make changes without telling me?

No. Recommendations are written up and reviewed with you before they are applied, and every account change is logged with the reasoning behind it. Cardinal keeps that history in one place so you can see what changed and when.

Do you use AI to run the account?

AI drafts internal analysis and helps me review large volumes of search-term and product data faster. It never applies a change. Every recommendation is reviewed by me before you see it, and every account change is made manually.

What if the problem is not in the ad account?

Then I will say so. Plenty of ecommerce paid search problems are actually product data, conversion tracking, landing page, margin, or inventory problems. Diagnosing that honestly is more useful than optimizing bids against a broken input.

Do I keep ownership of my account?

Everything stays yours. I work inside your own Google Ads and Merchant Center accounts, so the campaigns, the historical data, and the structure belong to your business. If we stop working together you keep all of it, including the exported change history from Cardinal explaining why each decision was made. There is no manager account holding your campaigns and nothing you need to rebuild from scratch.

Useful reading

Start with the account question underneath the metric.

These guides explain how I think about management scope, Search structure, and Performance Max decisions before an engagement begins.

Start with the paid account auditWhat ecommerce Google Ads management should includeGoogle Ads Search campaign structure for ecommercePerformance Max versus SearchHow to separate branded demand from Performance Max
Next step

Bring me the account question you cannot settle.

I will tell you what I would examine first and whether the engagement is a fit.

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