What a Google Ads Consultant Should Actually Be Doing To Earn Their Fees

This is a step-by-step guide for DTC brand founders who want to know if their money is being well spent (and their ecommerce growth machine is being properly operated).

In my job, I get asked a lot of questions from founders running seven-figure ecommerce brands. Let’s dive deep today into the specifics of Google Ads accounts.

A typical example, they have been working with a Google Ads consultant or agency for six months, sometimes a year;

• Is our agency actually doing a good job?
• Are we wasting ad spend?
• Is our Google Ads structure correct?
• Should we restructure PMax?

Results have been variable. The reports look polished (love that branding…) The ROAS figures are presented with confidence. And yet the founder has a nagging feeling that something isn’t right. That feeling is usually correct. And it’s usually my job to help them either set a new course or build confidence that their current direction is healthy for the business short and long-term.

The problem isn’t always that the consultant is dishonest. Often, they’re simply operating to the wrong brief, running campaigns rather than operating a system, reporting on metrics rather than building understanding, optimising for the number rather than for the business.

I’ve been running reviews and audits for a long long time. I’m not looking for retainers or long-term work, instead my job is to figure out what’s going on and to provide honest feedback to my client. I’ve fine tuned my ability in;

• pattern recognition
• diagnosing performance issues
• understanding search intent
• spotting structural problems
• seeing what others miss

This article is a step-by-step account of what a genuinely experienced Google Ads consultant should be doing for a DTC brand in the £1m to £10m revenue range. At each step, I’ll flag the red flags that signal poor process and lazy thinking. By the end, you’ll have a clear-enough picture to evaluate whether the person managing your Google Ads is actually worth what you’re paying them.

A Google Ads consultant’s job is not to run campaigns. It’s to operate one layer of your growth machine… and that means understanding your customer, not just the platform.

Step 01: The Foundation: Understanding the Business Before Touching the Account

Before a consultant opens the Google Ads interface, they should spend meaningful time understanding how your business works. Not just your products. Not just your margins. The full picture of how a customer finds you, what convinces them to buy, why they come back, and why they don’t.

This means asking questions that most agencies skip entirely. What does your average order value look like across different customer cohorts? Where do your best customers tend to originate? What do post-purchase surveys tell you about why people chose you over a competitor? What’s the repeat purchase rate and what drives it?

The consultant needs this information because Google Ads doesn’t operate in isolation. It feeds signals into a machine that has other moving parts, organic search, email, product quality, pricing, brand trust. Understanding how those parts connect is what separates an operator from a button-pusher.

RED FLAG: watch out for:

• The onboarding is purely technical: account access, billing, conversion tracking setup, and nothing more.
• No questions are asked about customer lifetime value, average order value across segments, or existing retention data.
• The consultant sends a brief questionnaire that focuses entirely on budget, competitors, and target ROAS not on the customer journey.
• There is no discussion of what happens after the first purchase.

Step 02: Conversion Tracking: Getting the Signal Right Before Spending a Penny

The single highest-leverage technical task in Google Ads management is ensuring that the signals you’re feeding the platform are accurate. Google’s Smart Bidding algorithms are only as good as the data you give them. Garbage in, garbage out.

For Shopify brands, server-side tracking through a tool like Littledata is significantly more reliable than the default Shopify Google Ads integration, which relies on browser-based JavaScript that can be blocked by ad blockers, dropped by iOS privacy settings, or simply fire incorrectly. The gap between what gets attributed in-platform and what actually happened can be substantial and if Smart Bidding is optimising against inflated or inaccurate conversion data, it’s learning the wrong lesson.

Beyond tracking accuracy, a competent consultant should be working with you on conversion value strategy. Not all conversions are equal. A first-time buyer of a low-margin product is very different from a repeat customer purchasing a high-margin bundle. If the bidding strategy treats all conversions the same, it will optimise for volume rather than value.

The consultant should understand your product margins well enough to advise on passing actual revenue values, or segmented conversion values, back to the platform. That’s what turns Smart Bidding from a blunt instrument into a precision tool.

Smart Bidding is only as intelligent as the signals you feed it. If your tracking is leaking data, your algorithm is optimising against a fiction.

RED FLAG: watch out for:

• The consultant sets up conversion tracking using the standard Shopify Google Ads integration and considers it done.
• No mention is made of server-side tracking or the limitations of browser-based measurement.
• All purchases are tracked as equal conversion events with no value differentiation.
• The consultant doesn’t ask about your product margins or customer lifetime value before configuring conversion value rules.
• There is no conversation about what a high-value customer looks like — and therefore nothing to tell the bidding algorithm to seek.

Step 03: Campaign Architecture: Built Around the Customer Journey, Not the Platform Defaults

Once the foundation is solid, campaign architecture should be designed around how your customers actually search and make decisions, not around what’s easiest to set up or what the platform defaults suggest.

For most DTC brands, this means a clear separation between prospecting and remarketing activity, with distinct budget allocation and performance expectations for each. A first-time visitor discovering your brand for the first time needs to be treated very differently from someone who viewed a product page twice last week.

Performance Max campaigns have become a significant part of the Google Ads landscape and they can work well when properly configured. But they require careful feed architecture, strong creative inputs, and clearly defined audience signals. Left to their own devices, PMax campaigns will find the path of least resistance, which often means showing ads to people who were already going to buy from you. This looks great in the reporting and costs you real money.

A competent consultant will set PMax up with appropriate brand exclusions, use customer match lists to provide meaningful audience signals, and monitor search term reports to understand where spend is actually going. They’ll audit the feed quality, because the feed is the backbone of any product-focused campaign. And they’ll treat PMax as one part of a structured approach, not as a replacement for strategic thinking.

A note on campaign structure:

• Prospecting campaigns should be held to different performance targets than remarketing. Expecting the same ROAS from cold acquisition as from warm retargeting is how brands underinvest in growth.
• Feed quality is campaign quality. A product title that says ‘Blue Jumper’ will underperform one that says ‘Merino Wool Crew-Neck Jumper Navy, S-XL’ every time.
• Audience signals in PMax are not targeting. They’re suggestions. The more specific and behavioural your signals, the better the algorithm’s starting point.

RED FLAG: watch out for:

• All budget goes into a single Performance Max campaign with no separation by objective.
• There are no brand exclusions applied to prospecting campaigns.
• Feed quality is never discussed or audited.
• The consultant cannot explain where PMax spend is being allocated between search, shopping, YouTube, and display inventory.
• There is no audience signal strategy, the campaign is simply left to ‘learn’.

Step 04: The ROAS Problem and Why It’s Hiding the Truth From You

ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) is the metric reported in almost every Google Ads update. It’s also the metric most likely to mislead you if you don’t understand what it’s actually measuring.

Here is the specific problem that costs brands more money than almost any other single issue in paid search. An inexperienced or incentivised consultant can inflate their ROAS figures significantly by running branded search campaigns, capturing people who are already searching for your brand by name. These are people who were, in all likelihood, going to find you through organic search anyway. Your brand name appears at the top of the paid results. They click. The consultant records a conversion. The ROAS looks excellent.

What has actually happened? You’ve paid for a click that organic search would have delivered for free. You’ve cannibalised your own organic traffic. And the consultant’s performance metrics look strong enough to justify their continued engagement.

This is not a fringe practice. It’s widespread. And it’s particularly damaging for brands with strong organic brand search presence, because those are exactly the brands where branded campaigns generate the most impressive-looking ROAS figures.

The fix is not to never run branded campaigns. There are legitimate reasons to bid on your own brand name, protecting against competitor bidding being the most common. But branded performance should always be reported separately from non-branded performance, and the two should never be blended into a single ROAS figure that obscures what’s really happening.

A headline ROAS figure that blends branded and non-branded campaigns is not a performance metric. It’s a confidence trick, usually an unintentional one, but damaging either way.

What you actually want to know is: how efficiently is my paid activity bringing in customers who wouldn’t otherwise have found me? That requires separating branded from non-branded, understanding incrementality, and being honest about the difference between capturing existing demand and creating new demand.

Ask yourself:

• Does your monthly report show ROAS split between branded and non-branded campaigns?
• Do you know what percentage of your paid search conversions come from people searching your brand name?
• Has your consultant ever discussed whether your branded campaign spend is incremental or simply replacing organic clicks?
• Can you see how your Google Ads performance affects your overall channel mix, including organic traffic trends?

RED FLAG watch out for:

• ROAS is reported as a single blended figure across all campaign types.
• Branded search is running with no separate reporting line and no discussion of incrementality.
• When you ask whether the branded campaigns are cannibalising organic traffic, the answer is evasive or the question is deflected.
• Organic traffic to branded terms has declined since paid brand campaigns launched, but this connection has never been raised.

Step 05: The Monthly Report Is Not a Strategy, It’s a Symptom

Let’s talk about the monthly report. Most Google Ads consultants and agencies produce one. It arrives as a PDF or a slide deck, usually a few days after the end of the month. It contains charts of impressions, clicks, CTR, conversions, and ROAS. Sometimes there’s a short commentary. Sometimes there’s a list of ‘optimisations’ carried out during the month.

And it tells you almost nothing useful.

The monthly report is a relic of a slower, less interconnected marketing world. It was built for a time when insight took weeks to gather and campaigns ran for months unchanged. That’s not the ecommerce environment you’re operating in. Your business changes week by week. Seasonality, stock levels, competitor activity, price changes, and new product launches all affect performance continuously. A report that arrives thirty days after the period it covers is not helping you make better decisions. It’s helping the consultant feel accountable.

What genuine insight sharing looks like in practice is very different. A competent consultant is reviewing account performance weekly at minimum, flagging issues or opportunities as they arise, and communicating with you in a way that connects Google Ads activity to broader business outcomes. They’re not waiting for the end of the month to tell you that your best-selling product ran out of stock in week two and that’s why ROAS dropped.

They’re also not just reporting on what happened inside the platform. They’re bringing you insight from the customer journey, what search terms are driving enquiries, where people are dropping off in the purchase journey, what questions your best prospects are asking before they buy. That’s intelligence that improves your whole business, not just your ad account.

The monthly report tells you what happened. A real consultant tells you what it means and ideally, before the month is over.

What genuine reporting should include:

• Weekly performance review with commentary connected to business context, stock levels, seasonality, external factors.
• Branded vs non-branded performance reported separately, every time.
• Search term analysis: what are people actually typing? Are these terms revealing anything about unmet needs or product gaps?
• Conversion path insight: where are customers in their journey when they convert?
• Flagging of anomalies in real time, not retrospectively in a monthly summary.
• Connection to downstream metrics: are paid customers showing similar or different retention behaviour to organic customers?

RED FLAG watch out for:

• The only regular communication you receive is the monthly report.
• Problems are identified in the report rather than raised as they occur.
• The report focuses entirely on platform metrics with no connection to business outcomes.
• There is no discussion of what the data suggests about customer behaviour beyond the ad click.
• You don’t hear from the consultant unless you reach out first.

Step 06: Customer Insight Gathering: The Work That Lives Outside the Platform

This is where good Google Ads consultants separate themselves from average ones. And it’s the part of the job that gets skipped most often, because it requires curiosity about the customer rather than fluency with the platform.

Search query data is one of the richest sources of customer insight available to you. When someone types a question into Google before finding your brand, they’re telling you exactly what they’re thinking, what they’re worried about, and what they need to believe before they’ll buy. That’s intelligence that should be feeding your product descriptions, your email sequences, your landing page copy, and your content strategy. Not just your keyword list.

A consultant who is genuinely operating your growth machine will be surfacing this data regularly. They’ll be identifying patterns in the queries that lead to conversion and the queries that lead to clicks but not purchases. They’ll be flagging the questions your prospects are asking that your current content doesn’t answer. They’ll be connecting search intent data to what your post-purchase survey results are telling you.

That last point matters. Post-purchase surveys, through tools like Fairing, for example, give you direct voice-of-customer data about attribution, motivation, and discovery. A consultant who never asks about what your post-purchase survey is revealing is working with incomplete information. Search data tells you what people are thinking before they buy. Survey data tells you what actually drove the decision. Combined, they give you a picture of the customer journey that no platform dashboard can replicate.

The practical output of this kind of insight work is better copy, better landing pages, better email sequences, and better product positioning. All of which compound across every channel simultaneously. The Google Ads consultant who does this work isn’t just improving your ROAS. They’re improving your whole machine.

Search queries are customer confessions. They tell you exactly what your prospect is thinking before they decide to trust you. That intelligence belongs across your whole business not just in a keyword report.

The insight loop: from search to customer understanding

• Search term reports identify the language real customers use when they’re in buying mode.
• Negative keyword work reveals who is not a good fit, equally valuable intelligence.
• Combined with post-purchase survey data, you build a picture of the decision journey.
• That picture improves your product page copy, email sequences, and organic content compounding results across channels.
• Updated copy improves Quality Score, which improves ad performance, which reduces cost per click. The loop is self-reinforcing.

Ask yourself:

• Does your consultant share search term insights you could use to improve your website copy or content strategy?
• Has your consultant ever asked about your post-purchase survey data?
• Do you know which questions your best prospects are asking before they buy and whether your site answers them?
• Is the intelligence from your paid search activity feeding into your broader marketing, or staying siloed inside the ad account?

Step 07: Optimisation as Ongoing Process, Not Monthly Maintenance

Genuine optimisation in Google Ads is not a list of tasks completed each month. It’s a continuous process of hypothesis, testing, and learning with each cycle feeding better inputs into the next.

This means structured testing of ad copy against real customer language. It means testing landing page variants that reflect what the search query data is telling you about buyer motivation. It means adjusting bidding strategies based on what’s happening to conversion value, not just conversion volume. And it means being willing to make decisions that look worse on a short-term ROAS report because they’re right for the business over a longer horizon.

The compounding principle applies here as firmly as it does anywhere in ecommerce. A 10% improvement in click-through rate, built on customer language drawn from search term data, improves the cost of every visit from paid search. A 15% improvement in landing page conversion, built on insight about what objections your buyers need resolved, improves the return from every pound of ad spend. These gains don’t reset at the end of the month. They stack.

An experienced consultant understands this and frames their work accordingly. They’re not just asking ‘what happened last month?’ They’re asking ‘what have we learned, and what does that tell us to try next?’

What optimisation actually looks like:

• Bid adjustments that reflect changes in conversion value, not just conversion volume.
• Ad copy testing grounded in actual customer language from search queries and post-purchase surveys.
• Landing page recommendations based on where visitors are dropping off and what questions remain unanswered.
• Audience refinement using first-party data, customer match lists built from your email subscribers and past buyers.
• Negative keyword development that protects budget from irrelevant queries and tightens the machine’s aim.
• Feed optimisation that improves product data quality and therefore ad relevance for Shopping and PMax.

RED FLAG watch out for:

• Optimisation is described in terms of tasks completed rather than hypotheses tested and lessons learned.
• Ad copy hasn’t changed meaningfully in months.
• There is no structured testing process and all changes are made reactively rather than strategically.
• First-party data is not being used to inform audience strategy.
• The conversation about performance never moves beyond ‘results were up’ or ‘results were down’.

The Difference Between Knowing the Platform and Operating the Machine

There are plenty of people who know how Google Ads works at a technical level. They understand campaign types, bidding strategies, Quality Score, and attribution models. That knowledge is table stakes. It’s the minimum required to avoid doing immediate damage.

What separates a consultant worth working with from one who isn’t is what they do with that knowledge. Do they use it to serve the platform’s interests, or your business’s? Do they optimise for the metric that makes their reports look good, or for the business outcome that makes your brand stronger?

The consultant operating a layer of your growth machine is bringing customer intelligence into the account. They’re feeding first-party data into the bidding algorithm. They’re treating search query data as business insight, not just keyword management. They’re telling you things your platform dashboard won’t tell you. And they’re making the connection between what happens inside Google Ads and what happens to your brand’s overall trajectory.

That’s a different job from running campaigns. It’s a different mindset, a different skill set, and a different standard of accountability. When you find someone operating to that standard, the conversation stops being about monthly reports and starts being about building something that compounds.

The best Google Ads consultants make your whole machine better not just your ad account. If their work only improves the platform metrics, you’re getting a fraction of what’s possible.

Ask yourself:

• Does your consultant understand your business well enough to explain how Google Ads fits into your overall growth machine?
• Is branded performance reported separately so you can see the true cost of acquiring genuinely new customers?
• Is the intelligence from your paid search activity improving your website, your copy, and your email strategy or staying inside the ad account?
• Are you having weekly conversations about what’s being learned, or monthly conversations about what happened?
• Do you feel like your consultant is operating your machine or just tending to one dial on the dashboard?

Each week I’m running a Google Ads audit for a DTC brand, usually with 7-figure+ yearly revenues. It’s my job to help build confidence in the management and mechanics of a Google Ads account. This is what I’ve been doing for years. Not to win ownership of the management of your account… instead to ensure you’re getting maximum value out of every penny you spend on Google and to ensure your account is in wise, safe hands.

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