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Is your Google Ads budget melting away faster than an ice cream in the middle of August 🍦☀️, whilst your sales aren’t keeping pace? You’re not alone. Between Search, Shopping, Performance Max and AI-driven auctions, managing your e-commerce campaigns in-house (or with an agency that isn’t really specialised) can quickly become a headache. This is precisely where a Google Ads agency specialising in e-commerce can make all the difference. Its role? To transform your advertising spend into a real driver of profitable growth, by optimising your campaigns, your product feed and your ROAS without simply increasing your budgets.
But with dozens of SEA agencies all promising to ‘boost your performance’, how do you choose the right Google Ads agency for your e-commerce business? That is the question.
Key points to remember:
In summary, a good e-commerce Google Ads agency does not simply manage campaigns or promise a high ROAS. It must understand the advertiser’s product range, margins and business challenges, whilst mastering the various Google Ads levers and changes to the platform.
Managing Google Ads for a showcase website and managing Google Ads for an online shop are two different jobs. A generalist knows how to launch a proper Search campaign. An e-commerce specialist, on top of that, knows how to juggle a product feed that changes every day, margins that vary by SKU, seasonality that can turn everything on its head in 48 hours (hello, sales), and Performance Max algorithms that need to be fed the right data so they stop spending on the wrong products.
In practical terms, an e-commerce agency needs to be able to answer very specific questions: how can I optimise my Merchant Centre feed? How do I segment my Performance Max campaigns without them eating into my budget for my best-sellers? How do I maintain a decent ROAS during Black Friday without driving the CPA through the roof? If the agency you’re dealing with is floundering and panicking over these issues, it’s time to walk away.🚪
A well-designed Google Ads e-commerce account combines several strategies, each with its own role:
| Lever | What is it for? | Point to watch out for |
| Shopping Ads | Display your products (photos, prices, reviews) directly in the search results | Depends entirely on the quality of your product feed |
| Performance Max | Automate ad delivery across all Google properties (Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Gmail) | If poorly targeted, it may cannibalise your other campaigns |
| Search | Identifying purchase intent based on specific search queries | Remains essential for trademark searches and profitable long-tail keywords |
| YouTube Ads | Reach buyers at the top of the funnel, even before they start searching | Often underused, even though it really boosts remarketing |
A reputable Google Ads agency builds an ecosystem in which each campaign feeds into the others.
Managing 50 SKUs is a far cry from managing 15,000 product lines. Ask for specific examples of catalogues they have managed, detailing their size and complexity (variants, stock levels, promotions).
An ROAS of 8 can mask a dismal profit margin if the agency is promoting your least profitable products. A good e-commerce agency cross-references your profit margin data with your bids to optimise actual profitability, not just to produce a flattering figure on a report.
PMax has become indispensable, but also more opaque. The agency must know how to structure campaigns by margin or by category, feed in the right audience signals, and, above all, understand what is happening behind the scenes rather than simply letting it run on autopilot.
Google Ads changes quickly – sometimes very quickly! The switch to AI Max is a good example of this: it directly affects Search campaigns built around exact match or broad match keywords, as we explain in our analysis ‘Migration to AI Max: what advertisers need to review before September 2026’. An agency that fails to keep up with these changes puts you at real risk.
Case studies with figures, before-and-after comparisons, and verifiable testimonials. If the narrative remains vague when it comes to concrete results, be wary.
A good Ads account doesn’t operate in a vacuum. It has to work alongside SEO and tracking, and increasingly, with the arrival of AI Overviews, which are eating into organic traffic – a phenomenon we quantify in detail in our article ‘GEO Strategy: Rethinking Your Media Mix in the Age of AI Overviews’.
You need to be able to track, over time, what has been tested, what has worked and what has been discontinued. Reporting that is limited to an overall ROAS without campaign-level detail doesn’t tell you much about actual performance.
💡 Advice from our experts:
At Ad’s up Consulting, Google Ads for e-commerce isn’t just a generic service added to our catalogue: it’s a genuine area of expertise, thoroughly documented and continuously updated. We regularly provide detailed updates on changes to the platform that directly impact e-commerce accounts, such as in this comparison of the best Google Ads agencies in 2026, or this round-up of the latest developments on YouTube featuring video campaign groups – a tool that is still underused by many e-retailers.
The team combines Search, Shopping, Performance Max and Social Ads into a coherent strategy, tailored to the specific challenges of each e-commerce business. To find out more, discover how we structure our Google Ads expertise to support our clients’ business objectives.
📣 Case study: automating Google Ads campaigns for a hotel group
Business Challenge
A multi-brand hotel group with an extensive network of properties wanted to better adapt its Google Ads campaigns to changes in its portfolio. As the number of hotels could vary regularly, it was difficult to update the campaigns quickly enough, leading to unnecessary advertising spend and missed opportunities.
Ad’s up Consulting’s approach
Our business
impact
The budget depends mainly on the size of the product catalogue, the volume of the media budget managed and the level of support required. An initial audit usually helps to establish a realistic budget.
No, ideally you’ll want an agency capable of managing both channels consistently, as they reinforce each other within an e-commerce account.
Not entirely. PMax is powerful but remains somewhat opaque; it’s often still worth keeping dedicated Search campaigns for brand terms and strategic queries.
Check whether the reporting goes beyond the overall ROAS: look for breakdowns by campaign, by product category, and, above all, by actual margin generated.
Yes, absolutely — the two complement each other, especially now that AI Overviews are reducing some of the free organic traffic.
The best Google Ads agency for an e-commerce business isn’t the one that promises the most impressive ROAS in a sales brochure. It’s the one that understands your profit margin and your product range, and knows how to adapt your account in line with changes to the platform, without leaving you in the dark.
Fancy an honest assessment of your e-commerce Google Ads account? At Ad’s up, we can audit your current set-up and highlight specific areas for improvement.
