What a PPC Agency Actually Does for an Ecom Store, Week by Week

What a PPC Agency Actually Does for an Ecom Store

Most pages answer this with a list of nouns. Keyword research. Ad copy. Landing pages. That tells you nothing about where the hours go.

So here is the calendar instead.

That is our clock. Another agency runs a different rhythm and lands in the same place. The jobs themselves show up in most Google Ads work, in some order or other.

Week One: The Feed and the Tracking, Before Anything Else

Week one touches zero bids. That order is deliberate.

We measured 12,375 products across 251 ecom stores on 2026-07-28. Many of those accounts were measured at onboarding, before our feed work started. 81.3% of those products carried neither a GTIN nor an MPN. A GTIN is the barcode number printed on the product. An MPN is the part number the maker gives it. With neither one, Google has to guess what the thing even is. Only 4.2% of titles were under 50 characters, and 68% ran past 80. Full method and every finding in the Product Feed Quality Index.

That is what a store's product data usually looks like the day an agency gets the login. Google reads all of it from the product data specification, and Shopping and Performance Max decide what to show from exactly that. Tune bids on top of it and you are tuning on noise.

So week one is four jobs:

• Titles get rewritten so the words buyers type sit at the front: product type, then brand, then the attribute people search for, then the color. Google often shows only about the first 70 characters of a title. So the front of the title is the part doing the work.
• The empty fields get filled, where the field applies to the product. Barcode or part number if one exists. Google product category, product type, color, size, gender, age group, material. A hand-poured candle has no barcode and no gender, and you never invent either. You fill what is true and leave the rest alone.
• Merchant Center gets worked through. Disapproved products stop showing across Google, and an account-level suspension takes all of them out at once. Some of these clear in a day. Some need a policy review and take longer, and nobody can promise you a date on those.
• Tracking moves off the shopper's browser and onto a server, which is all "server-side tracking" means. Browsers and ad blockers throw away a lot of what sits in the browser, and a server has less to throw away. Then it gets checked against real store orders. Not the install. The match.

On a normal onboarding the Slack channel goes live the same afternoon. Tracking is fully live inside 48 hours. The rebuild plan is in your inbox by day three. The account is rebuilt by day fourteen. That timeline is published on our process page.

What Happens Every Single Day?

The daily layer is small and boring on purpose.

• Spend and revenue get a look. The comparison that helps is the same day last week. A monthly average smooths over a bad Tuesday.
• Anomaly alerts. Our software reads every account every hour. It flags ROAS drops, spend spikes, feed errors and tracking breaks.
• New Merchant Center issues get checked. A price that does not match the product page, or a required field left empty, can get a product disapproved. A disapproved product stops showing on Google. Some of these clear fast. Some need a policy review and take longer.
• Small budget moves. A campaign burning its budget with nothing to show gets throttled that day, not at the end of the month. The bigger call on targets waits for the weekly pass.

Software does the watching. It never sleeps and it never gets bored. That is the whole point. A person makes every judgment call. Is the ROAS dip a broken feed or just a Tuesday? Is the spend spike a winner finding its footing or a mistake?

What Happens Every Week?

This is where most of the hours go.

The search terms report gets read. That is Google's list of what people typed before they clicked your ad. It does not show every single query, but what it does show is real. You are looking for two things: money going to queries that will never buy, and queries that convert well enough to deserve their own campaign.

Then the negatives go in. The junk from that report gets blocked. On a store selling silver rings, "silver ring cleaning" and "how to resize a ring" both look like traffic and neither one buys. It is unglamorous work. It is also where a lot of wasted spend gets caught, and it only works if someone does it every week.

Products get sorted by what they earn. We label them Champion, Potential, Sleeper, Waster, Zombie. Those labels are what let one campaign treat a winner and a money-loser differently, instead of pouring budget into one big pile. Products move between labels as their numbers move, so the sorting gets redone.

Budgets and targets get the deeper pass here. The daily moves are small nudges off obvious losers. Once a week someone sits with a full week of data and asks the real question: does the return we ask Google to hit still match what this account can deliver? That number is the target ROAS.

Creative gets checked for fatigue. One thing we look at is click-through rate sliding while impressions hold steady. That does not prove much on its own. Someone opens the campaign and looks before anything moves. Then headlines, images and asset groups get rotated. We keep the changes small. Swap everything at once and you never learn which swap worked. Asset groups are the bundles of images, headlines and text a Performance Max campaign picks from.

And one report goes out at the end of it: spend, ROAS, sales, and what each sale cost you. Plain words, the same numbers the team watched all week.

A negative keyword list that has not moved in a month is either a very clean account or an agency that never opened the report. Ask which.

What Happens Every Month and Before Each Season?

This is the slower work. Bigger calls, made less often.

• We review structure against margins. Products that make you real money get their own room, and high-revenue, thin-margin products stop sitting in the same campaign as your best sellers.
• Winners get more budget, in steps, with the ROAS watched at each step. Double a winner overnight and you can push it into worse traffic at a higher price, so it goes up in stages.
• Dead products get cut, whole asset groups and sometimes whole markets. Ask for the list of what got cut and why.
• Season prep starts early. Sign in late October and the rebuild fights your biggest trading weeks for attention. Q4 is a lot easier when that work starts months ahead.
• The feed goes back on the bench. Once an account has a few months of its own search data, the words that actually convert go into the titles and attributes. Then it happens again later.

Who Does the Work: People or Software?

Software watches, sorts and flags around the clock. Our engine scans every account every hour. Feed checks, forecast models, anomaly thresholds.

A senior operator makes every call. Which alert matters. Whether to scale or hold. Whether the drop is the account or the season.

A dashboard on its own is not management. It hands you alerts. You still do the thinking, and the thinking is the part you paid to hand over.

Nothing watching is worse. A ROAS drop gets found whenever someone next logs in. That gap costs money.

What Is Not Included?

Scope, said plainly.

Not yours to hand over: your site design and page speed, your email and SMS flows, your pricing, your margins, your stock. No bid adjustment fixes a product that is out of stock or priced way above everyone else. Feed and campaign work can only sell what the store can actually deliver.

Where our scope sits: Google Ads is the core focus - Search, Performance Max, Shopping and Demand Gen. That is the work the calendar above describes. Want every channel moving on one plan today? A multi-channel shop like KlientBoost or Tinuiti is the better hire. They are genuinely good at that. We are not going to pretend otherwise to win a deal.

On the fee: feed engineering and server-side tracking sit inside our management fee, not billed as extras. The fee is a tiered percentage of monthly Google Ads spend, starting at 10% on the first €10,000 and stepping down to 6% above €150,000. No setup fee, no lock-in. Two tools are billed on top at published prices: a CSS partner at €24.90 and a feed management tool at €49.90, per store per month, only once installed. All of it sits on the pricing page, and the four ways agencies charge are broken down in Google Ads management fees explained.

How Do You Check Your Agency Is Actually Doing This?

Four checks. All four run from your own Google Ads and Merchant Center logins. You do not need to ask anyone.

1. Change history. Tools and Settings, then Change history. Set it to the last 30 days. You are looking for real edits: negatives added, budgets moved, assets swapped. If the only entries are automated system changes, nobody changed anything for a month. That is not proof nobody looked, so ask what they reviewed and what they chose to leave alone. A good answer is specific.
2. The search terms tab. Open it, sort by cost, and look at the top 20 queries with spend and no sales. If obvious junk is still buying clicks, the weekly negative pass is not happening.
3. The feed itself. Pick ten products. Compare the titles in Merchant Center to the titles on your Shopify product pages. If they are identical, nobody has rewritten anything.
4. The report against your own numbers. Take last month's reported conversions and revenue and put them next to your Shopify orders for the same dates. They will not match to the cent. They should be close, and your agency should be able to explain the gap without hedging.

More ways to pressure-test the numbers in how to verify a Google Ads agency.

We manage Google Ads for 200+ ecom brands, 4.8 from 38 reviews on Trustpilot, €200M+ in client revenue generated. The calendar above is how we run an account. The full scope of what we own is on the ecommerce PPC agency page.

Want a second opinion on what your current agency shipped this month? Send your store URL on WhatsApp. We will tell you what should have happened by now, client or not.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Does a PPC Agency Do for an Ecom Store?

Seven repeating jobs. Product feed work, which is titles, product IDs, categories and Merchant Center fixes. Conversion tracking that matches your real store orders. Reading search terms and blocking the ones that waste money. Campaign structure across Shopping, Performance Max and Search. Bids and budgets. Ad creative. And one plain report. They run on a clock, not as one-off projects. Feed and tracking get built in the first two weeks. Anomaly checks, Merchant Center issues and small budget moves are daily. Search terms, negatives, creative and the report are weekly. Structure and scaling get reviewed monthly.

What Does a PPC Agency Do Every Week for an Ecom Store?

Five things. It reads the search terms report and blocks the queries that spend without selling. It sorts products by what they earn, so winners and money-losers stop getting treated the same. It takes a full-week look at budgets and at the return you ask Google to hit. It checks ad copy, images and asset groups for fatigue and rotates what is tired. Then it sends one plain report with spend, ROAS, sales and what each sale cost. If a week passes with no new negative keywords and no product moved, ask what happened.

Is Product Feed Work Included in the Management Fee?

It should be, and at ZenoX it is inside the fee rather than billed as an extra. On Shopping and Performance Max, Google reads your product data from the feed, so feed work is the campaign work. An agency that only opens the Google Ads interface never touches it. Ask before you sign whether feed engineering and tracking are inside the fee or quoted on top, and get the answer in writing. A fee you cannot predict is a fee you can never compare.

What Is Not Included in a PPC Retainer?

Your site design, your email and SMS flows, your pricing and your margins stay with you. So does stock. No amount of bidding fixes a product that is out of stock or priced wrong. Scope also depends on who you hire. Google Ads is the core focus at ZenoX: Search, Performance Max, Shopping and Demand Gen. That is the work the calendar above describes. A brand that wants every channel on one plan today is better off with a multi-channel shop like KlientBoost or Tinuiti.