You do not need to know how to build a Google Ads campaign. You do need to know whether the person managing yours is doing a good job.
That can be surprisingly difficult to judge. Perhaps you have an external provider sending you a monthly report full of numbers and acronyms. Perhaps Google Ads sits with someone internally who knows their way around the platform but has plenty of other marketing jobs competing for their attention. Or perhaps you started running it yourself when the business was smaller, and the account has gradually grown into something much more complicated.
None of that means your Google Ads is being managed badly. But when you are spending thousands of dollars a month, you should be able to ask straightforward questions about where that money goes and get straightforward answers.
For an established ecommerce business, the biggest leaks are not always obvious. You might be paying for irrelevant searches, optimising towards revenue rather than profit, or counting existing customers as new sales. And sometimes the problem is not in Google Ads at all. It is what happens after someone clicks.
Here are six questions worth asking whoever manages your account.
1. What are we actually paying for?
Your budget can do several different jobs.
Search campaigns capture existing demand from people actively looking for what you sell. Shopping campaigns put your products in front of people comparing what to buy, with your image and price doing much of the initial selling. Other campaign types, including Demand Gen and YouTube, help create interest before someone is actively searching.
There is a place for all of these depending on your business and your goals. The important thing is knowing why your budget is split the way it is. If you are spending $10,000 a month, you should understand why $5,000 goes into Shopping, $2,500 into Search and the rest elsewhere, what each part is expected to achieve, and what would make you change that allocation.
Traffic is not a goal. Clicks are not a goal. Your budget should be working towards sales and profitable growth.
Ask: How is our Google Ads budget split, and why?
A good answer connects the split to your products, margins, customer acquisition goals and where you are trying to grow. If the answer is that this is how it has always been run, it may be time for a closer look.
2. Are we paying for the wrong searches?
You may have carefully chosen the keywords you want to target, but those are not necessarily the searches you are paying for. Google matches your ads to a much wider range of searches, particularly when using broad match keywords and automated campaign types. Some of those searches will be valuable. Some will not.
A premium skincare brand might find its ads appearing for people looking for free samples. A specialist equipment supplier could be paying for students doing research. A premium furniture retailer might be competing for searches from people looking for cheap or second-hand alternatives.
Every irrelevant click costs money, which is why reviewing your actual search terms matters. It is one of the simplest ways to spot wasted spend and one of the easiest things to overlook when nobody is regularly looking at the detail.
Ask: Can you show me the searches we actually paid for last month, sorted by cost?
Look at the most expensive searches first. Are they relevant? Would you want to pay for another hundred people searching for the same thing? The answer tells you a lot about whether anyone is paying attention to where your budget goes.
3. Are we optimising for profit, or just revenue?
A $1,000 sale looks better than a $100 sale in a Google Ads report. Your business does not necessarily make more money from it. Margins differ. One product may be heavily discounted, another might cost significantly more to ship, and another might be returned regularly while the rest almost never are.
Google optimises towards the signals you give it. If you tell it that a $1,000 sale is worth ten times a $100 sale, it will look for more of those higher-value sales. That does not make them ten times more valuable to your business.
This matters most for businesses with a wide product range. Your best-selling products are not always your most profitable, and your highest-revenue campaigns are not necessarily your best campaigns. A strong return on ad spend does not automatically mean a strong return on your advertising investment.
Ask: Are we optimising towards the sales that make us the most money, or simply the highest revenue?
Your strategy should reflect how your business actually makes money, not what looks good in a monthly report.
4. How much of our performance comes from people who already knew us?
Some of the easiest sales for Google Ads to claim come from people who already know your business. Someone searches your brand name. Someone clicks an ad after visiting your website yesterday. Someone who has bought from you before sees a remarketing ad and comes back.
These sales may be perfectly legitimate, and there are good reasons to include brand campaigns and remarketing in your strategy. But they are not evidence that your advertising is bringing you new customers. If your account reports a 600% return on ad spend, that sounds excellent, until you learn that a large proportion of it came from people who were already looking for you.
If your goal is growth, you need to know how much of your spend captures existing demand and how much creates new demand.
Ask: How much of our reported revenue comes from existing customers or people who already knew our brand?
You do not need to stop advertising to these people. You do need to know what they contribute, particularly when deciding where to put your next dollar.
5. Does our data match what is happening in the real business?
Your Google Ads revenue will not match your actual ecommerce revenue exactly. Attribution models differ, orders get cancelled or refunded, and discounts and shipping affect the final value of an order. Some difference is normal. A difference nobody can explain is not.
The same applies to conversions. Are purchases being tracked correctly? Is the value passed back to Google accurate? Are duplicate purchases being counted? Is Google optimising towards the right conversion action?
Your advertising decisions are only as good as the information behind them.
Ask: Does the revenue reported in Google Ads broadly match what we actually made, and if not, why?
If nobody can give you a clear answer, it is difficult to know whether the account is performing as well as the report suggests.
6. What has changed in the last six months, and who decided?
Google changes its platform constantly. New campaign types arrive, old ones are migrated automatically, and the platform regularly suggests changes that can be applied to your account without anyone actively choosing them.
Some of those changes will be improvements. Others quietly alter how your budget is spent, and you may only notice through a shift in results that nobody connects back to the cause.
Ask: What has changed in how our campaigns are set up in the last six months, and who decided?
You are not looking for a technical explanation. You are looking for evidence that someone is making deliberate decisions on your behalf rather than accepting whatever the platform proposes.
One more place your budget can leak: Your website
Not every leak happens inside Google Ads. You can have a well-structured campaign, strong search intent and a good product, then lose the sale because the website gets in the way.
The product is out of stock. The mobile experience is frustrating. Delivery costs come as a surprise at checkout. The product page does not answer the customer's questions. The ad sends someone to a generic collection page instead of the product they were looking for.
By the time someone reaches your website, you have already paid for the click.
If your conversion rate has dropped, the answer may not be to change your bids or increase your budget. It might be the product page, the checkout, the offer or the customer experience.
Often the cheapest conversion to improve is the one you already paid to acquire.
What good Google Ads management should look like
You should not need to understand every setting inside Google Ads. You should understand what your advertising is trying to achieve and whether it is getting there.
A good monthly report does more than tell you how many clicks you received and how your cost per click changed. It tells you what happened, what was done about it, what worked, what did not, and what is being tested next.
Most importantly, it tells you what that means for your business.
Are you attracting new customers? Are you selling profitable products? Is your website converting the traffic you are paying for?
These are the questions that matter.
Has your Google Ads outgrown whoever started it?
This happens more often than you might think.
A business owner sets up Google Ads when the business is small. A marketing coordinator takes over when things get busier. Someone external is brought in when the spend reaches a certain level.
Then a few years pass, and the business, the product range, the margins, the competition and the platform have all moved on while the account keeps running much as it always has.
There comes a point where Google Ads has outgrown whoever picked it up first.
That does not mean they have done a bad job. It means the business has grown and the account needs to grow with it.
If you are spending a meaningful amount, you should not have to understand every technical detail. But you should have someone who does, and who can explain the important parts in plain English.
Ask these six questions of whoever manages your account now. If the answers are good, you have peace of mind. If they are not, you have found your next opportunity.
If your account has grown alongside your business and you are no longer sure whether it is working as hard as it should: Book a growth strategy call