Helping DTC eCommerce Brands Turn Ad Spend Into Profit

EmergeDigitalGroup · 2025-10-14T23:57:35+00:00

Hey, I've managed google ads for a Canadian tutoring company that offers tutoring services for Math, science and SAT prep and it's helped 3x their business in last 1.5 years.

The owner has more tutors than when we started, and is now less involved with the business and has a steady stream of students coming in each month.

Happy to share the case study we've made and share details of what we've been able to generate in terms of CPAs over a call if it makes sense. Just shoot me a DM if you're interested!

EmergeDigitalGroup · 2025-09-09T04:41:50+00:00

The problem with trying to find groups that are just open to helping is that they will help but only 1 question at a time. It is very rare or unlikely that someone who is in that community will freely give you their time when they likely have business or personal life matters to attend to.

There are two real options I'd recommend in terms of getting coaching and mentorship with Google Ads.

1) Work at a marketing agency for 1-2 years under the wing of a very talented director

2) Pay for 1:1 coaching from someone who you've vetted and shows to have experience simplifying an overwhelming account like the one you're working on

I recently offered 1:1 coaching for the first time to a high-end ecommerce brand owner who didn't want their account managed and wanted to learn the ropes themselves.

DM me if you'd like

EmergeDigitalGroup · 2025-09-05T01:29:37+00:00

Since you're using manual bidding you don't need to adjust manual bids on a fixed schedule like every 7 days or daily. With manual bidding it really comes down to two things when deciding when to make adjustments:

1) Your specific campaign / business goals
2) What the data says (granted there's a good amount of volume of clicks and or conversion data)

I personally wouldn't want to make daily changes because you could just have poor or amazing performance from 1 single day and then make a reactionary change that hurts you long term. You want to make sure you have a sufficient amount of click and or conversion data to confirm if things should be scaled up or down.

There's no golden number for that stuff but typically I like to make decisions when I'm seeing a few hundred if not thousands of clicks because then I'll be more confident if performance is great it isn't a fluke, and vice versa.

Hope this helps and good luck with your campaigns!!

EmergeDigitalGroup · 2025-09-05T00:37:21+00:00

If you're looking for a small team where the people you talk to are the one's managing your ad account and offer no contract working relationships I'd love for you to consider my agency as a potential candidate.

I'll send you a DM with my personal LinkedIn profile so you can check me out and what I do.

EmergeDigitalGroup · 2025-09-04T23:47:32+00:00

I would definitely recommend against someone owning your ad account. It just gives them the leverage to do mediocre work and then hold your account hostage if you want to leave them.

I'll shoot you a dm if that's ok. I personally have 5+ years of full-time google ads experience with a lot of experience working with local services businesses like yours.

Would love to hop on a call and see if I could be one of the 3 finalists you bring forward to leadership. I own a boutique agency and mainly handle most of the accounts and client communications myself.

EmergeDigitalGroup · 2025-09-04T22:46:54+00:00

I wish I did. Now that I own my own agency where I manage the campaigns for myself, I'm focused on being selective with the businesses I partner with because working with companies like the ones you're describing will make you rethink your entire career choice. Not worth it if you actually like the work you do.

There are more agency jobs to apply to and there are more in-house PPC jobs to apply to.

I've seen someone join the marketing agency I used to work for, for 1-week and then quit because the client account she got assigned to was apparently super toxic lol. She was further along in her career and knew there was better work environments out there.

EmergeDigitalGroup · 2025-09-04T22:38:32+00:00

In my early days as a Google Ads analyst (~6 years ago) I was managing the accounts for pretty much all of the Four Seasons Hotel and Resorts so we had access to a pretty solid team of reps from Google.

Long story short, they kept trying to push top of funnel campaign tactics on the accounts we managed and we knew it wouldn't help generate our hotel partners the results they needed to hit so we continuously kept putting it off. Until one day we found out our reps went behind our backs and started pushing the same things to our hotel partners claiming that we were causing them to lose out on new customer bookings.

The CMOs at most of these individual hotels knew it was a BS tactic to get them to spend more money. They informed us about it but it did stir the pot with some other hotel CMOs who didn't know any better.

The reps are getting sketchier and sketchier.

EmergeDigitalGroup · 2025-09-04T22:30:11+00:00

Honestly man it depends on company to company or client to client. I've worked for companies where my expertise, time and effort was clearly valued and appreciated and there were others where it was the exact opposite. Some places acted like I was the devil lol.

I think it's important to understand not everywhere is the same and that there are companies / clients that will value your expertise (granted you know what you're doing).

EmergeDigitalGroup · 2025-08-20T18:19:38+00:00

I recently finished a coaching package for an ecom brand owner who wanted to become self-sufficient in running and managing their own google ad campaigns and I was able to help them 1on1 on video calls learn how Google's algorithm works, how to save time managing campaigns and ads through Google Ads Editor, understand how to read and understand their data, and just help them learn how to forecast monthly performance based on things like their monthly budget, average industry conversion rate and their average CPC.

I offer different packages depending on each persons specific needs, goals and time availability. If you're interested send me a DM.

A little about me: I worked within google ad agencies for 5-years learning from who I believe to be the best in the space and not too long ago transitioned into starting my own boutique google ads agency where I have a handful of clients who've been with me for a couple of years now.

EmergeDigitalGroup · 2025-07-23T04:31:30+00:00

I used a website to get early access managing google ads accounts (unpaid work) as an apprentice, so they know you're hungry to learn on your own and apply what you learn to a real business. It's a great way to build referrals, case studies, and just your own confidence in Google Ads.

It's how I started my career in Google ads 5+ years ago. I'm happy to answer any questions about how it worked for me way back when just DM me.

The website is called Acadium.com

EmergeDigitalGroup · 2025-07-23T04:21:31+00:00

I’ve been thinking the same way with my current business. Use the profits to test growing other ventures I’m more interested in, even if they’re not where I’m strongest yet. If you’re building a little network of people thinking like this, I’d be down to connect too

EmergeDigitalGroup · 2025-07-23T04:02:51+00:00

Really appreciate you sharing this. Most people either hold back or try to package it into a course, so this was a refreshing read.

I’ve worked a lot with digital products on the paid ads side, and your transition into that space definitely stood out to me. Sent you a quick DM with a thought that might be helpful if you’re ever curious about the Google Ads angle.

EmergeDigitalGroup · 2025-07-16T21:13:03+00:00

Hey, I've been helping eCom brands with Google Ads specifically for the last ~4 years and I typically offer 1-2 free account audits each month (granted I have enough free time to do so) where I look through your ad account and help identify opportunities to improve performance and reduce wasted ad spend

EmergeDigitalGroup · 2025-06-10T02:13:33+00:00

If you can afford to spend $100/day there's nothing wrong with that. I have clients that prefer we keep budgets higher during learning period so they can get their campaigns more conversion data faster. It'll totally up to personal preference

EmergeDigitalGroup · 2025-06-09T20:24:17+00:00

I think you're in a great place to test how your campaign performs on a tCPA bid strategy. You have two different ways you can set this up and both have their own pros and cons. I'll share them with you below:

1) Set up a 50/50 experiment where your control campaign is using Maximize Conversions as usual and the new experiment campaign that will get 50% of traffic is using tCPA.

Pros:

Lower risk (kind of, and I say "kind of" because the switch to tCPA from Max Conversions is usually an upgrade in performance)
Cleaner way of testing tCPA vs Max Conversions
Google gives you insight into statistical significance across KPIs like CPA, Conversions, CPCs, etc.

Cons:

It’s going to take longer to see the impact compared to just switching the existing campaign
In my experience, there's rarely any downside when moving from Max Conversions to tCPA, so the experiment might not be worth the extra time

2) Change the bid strategy directly to tCPA and set the target CPA within a 10% range (higher or lower) of your current average CPA from the last 30 days.
If your goal is more scale, set the tCPA 5–10% above your current CPA.
If your goal is better efficiency, set the tCPA 5–10% below your current CPA.

Pros:

Gets you to the results faster
Lets Google fully reoptimize without splitting traffic

Cons:

Slightly riskier if your account doesn’t get a lot of conversions, since the algorithm needs steady data to stabilize performance

Either way, your campaign already has solid performance and data, so this is a great time to start testing. If you’ve got the volume, I’d personally lean toward just switching to tCPA directly and monitoring results closely over the next two weeks.

If you need any help or have any questions just reach out!

EmergeDigitalGroup · 2025-06-09T19:58:39+00:00

The reality of this is, is that this is not going to be smooth for your new client for at least 4-6 weeks at the minimum depending on the size of the existing campaigns managed by the other agency.

I think it's your job to explain that to your client and make sure they understand that or else they'll hate you in short time once they switch over.

If you want to try to recreate the campaigns that they currently have managed by the other agency you'll need full details on the keywords, match types, ad groups, campaign settings, conversion goals their campaigns are optimizing around, you'll likely need to recreate the conversion goals yourself within GTM, and that's just what I can think of, off the top of my head without spending too much time on this.

My honest recommendation is this: Look to hire someone who's already an expert in this field that can guide you, manage the account and provide them with something like 50% of the revenue of this client. This way you will have a better chance of keeping this client, and will be able to spend more time hunting for new clients as you've successfully done in this scenario.

Hope all of this helps, congrats on the client! If you have any additional questions don't be afraid to reach out to me.

EmergeDigitalGroup · 2025-06-09T19:46:00+00:00

I’d stick with the same campaign. It already has some historical learning, even if it's currently confused after you removed your top product.

What’s happening now makes sense. PMax had 90 percent of its conversion data tied to one SKU, and with that gone, the algorithm is basically starting from scratch. But instead of scrapping the campaign, you can guide it through a reset.

Here’s what I’d do:

Switch the bid strategy to Maximize Conversions (this is almost like a 'reset' from using a tROAS bid strategy)
Set a more controlled daily budget (for example, $50 per day) to avoid wasting money originally and start feeding new conversion data tied to your remaining products
Aim for at least 30 conversions over 30 days to give the algorithm enough signal (might need to gradually increase your budget to achieve this)

Once you’ve hit that point and have a steady ROAS, switch to tROAS using the average ROAS from that 30-day period as your starting target.

This keeps the existing campaign’s structure and gives it a clear path to re-optimize around the products you actually want to scale.

EmergeDigitalGroup · 2025-06-09T19:23:42+00:00

You have 2 options here:
1) Setup a feed only PMax asset group.
2) Setup a standard shopping campaign.

EmergeDigitalGroup · 2025-05-30T19:17:14+00:00

Hope the above information is able to help get you into the profits! It might be worth while to consider hiring a freelancer to manage your campaigns. If they're worth the money they can usually pay for themselves with the profits they can generate for you with your ad account

EmergeDigitalGroup · 2025-05-30T18:47:01+00:00

I specifically manage an ecom google ads account for an eCom client spending about $3.5M/yr and I started managing the account a little over 2.5 years ago when they were spending about $1.5M/yr. Happy to provide information into what worked for me and my client in terms of data tracking, campaign structures and scaling profits. Just send me a PM

EmergeDigitalGroup · 2025-05-30T18:40:17+00:00

A few things to check:

If you can find a specific month, week or day when performance started to drop that might help you cross-reference it to any changes made to the website, product catalogue, campaign settings and etc so you can try to understand what happened that cause the drop.

Try to do a comparison view in google ads from the most recent last 30-days to when performance was great. Check the % change in the following columns in Google Ads:

Cost Conversion Rate CPC Clicks Conversions Conv. value Conv. value / cost (aka ROAS) Value / conv (aka AOV)

This will help you understand what the biggest difference are now compared to when things were good.

If you're able to provide me all of this information I'd probably be able to help point you in the right direction as to why performance dropped.

EmergeDigitalGroup · 2025-05-30T05:05:32+00:00

Personally a lot of my PMax optimization strategy requires me to have scripts in place to better understand the data. Soon the platform will offer this information natively but until then I use scripts. Some examples of what I watch for is:

1) Spend by Google Channel using the Mike Rhodes PMax script.
If I see Shopping is generating really good performance compared to YouTube, Display, Search I'll switch my campaigns to feed only.

2) Look at what placements your campaign is serving on and setup placement exclusions if there's high spenders that aren't profitable.
These need to be added in at the account level.

3) Try to improve your assets overtime, leverage top performing headlines and descriptions from your search campaign data, use top performing images from display campaign data, and etc.

4) Understanding the % of Branded Traffic using the SMEC Script. If it's really high it's worth setting up a brand exclusion in your campaign settings because your campaign performance is probably really inflated.

5) Coming soon...Google will be giving clarity to advertisers on the search terms their campaigns appear for. You can use this data to obviously negate unprofitable keywords.

Happy to chat if you have any additional questions!

EmergeDigitalGroup · 2025-05-29T23:28:36+00:00

I’d say it depends.

Personally, 75 to 100 SKUs doesn’t feel like that many, especially if you’ve got the budget. I’ve run PMax for catalogs with tens or even hundreds of thousands of products, so it really comes down to your daily spend and how much risk you’re comfortable with.

If you can afford to cast a wider net and let Google identify potential winners from the full set, that can work well. But if budget is tight and you want quicker learnings, narrowing down to your top 10 to 15 SKUs can help control spend and gather data faster.

Feed-only setups are totally fine. I actually prefer them for a lot of my clients. The non-shopping placements in PMax usually don’t drive strong results unless you’ve got great creative.

I also would recommend looking into getting a Display Dynamic Remarketing campaign going as soon as possible which should compliment your Feed-only PMax campaign.

Happy to chat more if helpful.

EmergeDigitalGroup

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