I recently ran a full audit on a lovely little ecommerce brand, and I want to walk you through exactly what I found and exactly what I told them to do about it. It is one of those accounts that looks perfectly healthy on the surface, yet has tens of thousands of dollars of easy wins sitting there untouched.
The brand sells laundry-care consumables in the Netherlands. Low ticket, repeat purchase, a small catalogue of around ten products, and a lovely high conversion volume because people keep coming back for more. They were already running Standard Shopping and doing well on Meta with cold prospecting, but there was no Performance Max history and nothing at the top of the funnel on Google. Their goal was modest: a 2x ROAS on new customers.
Here is everything I picked apart.
The Brand vs Non-Brand Split Nobody Was Controlling
The single biggest issue was that all their Shopping traffic ran through one campaign. Branded and non-branded searches were mixed together, which means you cannot control them independently, and they behave nothing alike.
When I broke the numbers down, branded terms accounted for only around 22% of Shopping spend but almost 50% of the revenue. Non-brand was the opposite: roughly 80% of spend for about 55% of revenue. Two completely different animals living in one cage.
My recommendation was to segment them into separate campaigns so each can have its own ROAS target. I suggested aiming for roughly 6.5x on brand and around 3x on non-brand. And here is a nuance I really want you to sit with: brand and non-brand are not the same thing as returning versus new customers. Non-brand still contains plenty of returning buyers, and brand contains genuinely new customers who researched elsewhere and then searched the name. So set your targets on the actual economics, not on a lazy new-versus-returning assumption. That is also why their 2x non-brand goal was actually too low once you strip out the returning buyers hiding in there.
The way to do this with Standard Shopping is refreshingly simple. Take the existing campaign, treat it as your non-brand campaign, and add all your brand terms as negative keywords so branded queries can no longer sneak in. Then launch a second Standard Shopping campaign without those negatives, so branded queries flow into it instead. Set the brand campaign to High priority and the non-brand campaign to Low priority to reinforce the split. It is never perfect, so expect around 1 to 2% leakage even when maintained well, but it works. One warning: this priority trick only exists in Standard Shopping. You cannot do it if non-brand runs as Performance Max.
There is also a native brand inclusion and exclusion setting rolling out worldwide in beta. Once it lands, you set the brand as an inclusion in the brand campaign and an exclusion in the non-brand one, which is far cleaner than the negative keyword workaround. With this account's healthy conversion volume, it is a strong candidate to test.
The Free Impression Share Sitting on the Table
This one genuinely excites me. The campaign was losing around 37% impression share to budget, sitting at roughly 62% impression share overall.
That word, budget, is the important part. When you lose impression share to budget rather than rank, raising the daily budget lifts your market share directly. No bid changes needed. You are simply choosing to be visible more often at a very similar ROAS.
There was a ticking clock too. The campaign ran a 2.5x ROAS target but was over-delivering at about 2.7x, purely because budget-capping forces Google to lower CPCs and inflate ROAS. That over-delivery behaviour ends on 17 August. After that, a budget-capped campaign simply delivers the target, not the inflated version. So my advice was to act decisively before that date: roughly double or even triple the budget in one move. That shifts the budget-lost impression share over to rank-lost, jumps market share by around 36 to 37%, and turns the campaign into a ROAS-limited one, which is exactly where you want to be.
One simple rule of thumb to remember: the goal should be that impression share should only ever be lost to rank, never to budget. If you are losing impression share due to budget and you are at a ROAS target you are happy with, then you can either raise your budget and get more traffic at the target ROAS you set, or you can raise your ROAS target and get higher ROAS for the same spend. Either of those two options is better than continuing to lose impression share due to budget on a campaign that has a ROAS target you are happy with.
Two Feed Fixes Worth Real Money
Their product titles were nicely optimised in Dutch, but the product type field was completely empty. That is a mistake, because product type is the second highest-leverage feed field after the title for telling Google which keywords to show your Shopping ads against. You can go up to five levels deep with a 750 character limit, so I told them to fill every level with relevant keywords, using the same principles as their titles.
The second fix is a quiet one. Because they advertise in the EU, using a Comparison Shopping Service provider hands you an automatic discount of around 20% on every single click, thanks to the EU antitrust ruling. You cannot verify from inside the ads account whether one is active, so I flagged it to confirm. If it is missing, they are paying 20% more per click than they need to.
Testing Performance Max Properly
With no Performance Max history at all, I recommended a test. PMax often runs at a slightly lower ROAS than Standard Shopping but usually pulls more total volume, because it bolts retargeting and search text ads onto the Shopping component. More volume at a solid ROAS means more profit.
The key is giving it a fair test: at least 500 conversions in PMax versus 500 in Standard Shopping over a similar period. If you are wary of the two overlapping and stealing from each other, run a proper campaign experiment instead, a scientific A/B split where audience A never sees B's ads. Google then tells you whether PMax produced a statistically significant improvement. When you do run it, go full assets: reuse the best Meta video creatives and top images, and with only ten products, use one asset group per product so you can tailor headlines, images and descriptions right down at the product level.
Extending Their Meta Success to Google's Top of Funnel
Every scrap of their Google spend was bottom of funnel, capturing existing demand. There was nothing generating fresh awareness, despite the fact that Meta prospecting was already working beautifully for them. That same creative should work top of funnel on Google through Demand Gen.
The measurement piece matters enormously here. You must enable platform comparable conversions, which measures Demand Gen more like Meta measures its own ROAS, and then benchmark against your Meta ROAS rather than your normal Google target. Judging top-of-funnel by a bottom-of-funnel yardstick is how people kill campaigns that were actually working. Alongside that, watch your total Google Ads revenue, branded search volume and overall bottom-line revenue, because that is where the awareness effect really shows up.
Budget and patience are non-negotiable. At $500 a month the impact is too small to even detect, so given their low AOV and market size I recommended at least $5,000 to $10,000 a month, run for a minimum of two months and ideally three. Demand Gen needs frequency to build, because people react after around ten exposures, not one or two. Do not judge it in month one. For audiences, I suggested two lookalikes, a 5% of all customers and a 5% of high-value customers, plus their best in-market audiences, and a broad targeting test as well. Keep the structure simple with one prospecting and one retargeting campaign, run Maximise Conversions indefinitely, and only test Target CPA or Target ROAS once results look strong around month three or four.
That is the whole audit. A healthy account on the surface, and a small fortune in easy wins underneath.
Conclusion
A quick recap of the main points from this audit:
Segment brand vs non-brand Shopping. Brand was around 22% of spend but nearly 50% of revenue, so split it into separate campaigns with separate targets (roughly 6.5x brand, 3x non-brand).
Do not confuse brand/non-brand with returning/new. Set ROAS targets on economics, not on a false assumption.
Claim your budget-lost impression share. Around 37% was lost to budget, not rank, so raising budget lifts market share at a near-identical ROAS.
Beat the 11 August bid-strategy change. The 2.5x target over-delivering at 2.7x ends then, so raise budget and reset the target to what you actually want first.
Fill the empty product type field. Five levels, 750 characters, keyword-rich. It is the second most important feed field after the title.
Claim the EU CSS discount. A Comparison Shopping Service provider is around 20% off every click. Confirm one is active.
Test PMax properly. Around 500 conversions each versus Standard Shopping, or an uplift experiment if wary, with full assets and one asset group per product.
Extend Meta success to Google's top of funnel. Demand Gen with the best Meta creatives, $5,000 to $10,000 a month, a two to three month minimum, judged on platform comparable ROAS plus branded search and total revenue.