Five Mistakes We See in Every Google Shopping Audit

All right, today we look at five mistakes that kill all Google stores regardless of what kind of product you have, what kind of budget you have, what kind of offer you run. And these mistakes commonly pop up in every store that we audit. So, super important video. Let's dive straight into it.

First of all, okay, who am I? I'm Chris. I'm the CEO, founder, and supreme general of Senex Media, a big Google Ads agency. We run ads for over 200 e-com brands in various niches like fashion, home decor, travel niche, jewelry niche, whatever you name it. As long as it's e-com D2C, it's our specialty. Yeah, we know what we are talking about. I know what I'm talking about. I've audited a lot of stores myself, and these are the five mistakes. Honestly, quite simple mistakes, but with big impact that we see all over again, right? All right, first of all, before we dive into it. One thing that's super important to

understand for the first mistake as well. In general, it's like you have to understand your numbers, right? You have to understand your numbers in general on the bigger picture. But also, very important, [clears throat] you have to understand that ROAS is not profit, right? There's sometimes like this over-obsession on ROAS and like, do you have a ROAS guarantee? What's the average ROAS you get? And blah blah blah, and questions like that, right? Questions like that already show that you don't understand your numbers yourself. And it's quite stupid. Because in the end, like nobody cares about ROAS, right? ROAS It doesn't matter. It really depends, right?

You can have a 3x ROAS, for example, which again, some might consider it great. Some think it's not great. It really depends on your profit margin, right? And what kind of product you have, what kind of niche you're in, what's your current goal, and everything. You might make a great profit with with that ROAS, right? You can have the same ROAS, or even a better one, and you might lose your money, right? So, you have to understand your numbers, and you have to understand what really matters. And that's down the line, it's the profit, right? It's the marketing efficiency ratio of things, especially if you run on multiple channels, right?

It's not just the pure ROAS, ad account ROAS, and what's the ROAS of that campaign, right? It's a very simple way to look at it, and sometimes it makes sense, sometimes you need a simple overview, right? But you

also need to understand the bigger picture, you need to understand your numbers. And it's very important for this first mistake that we often see, and it's broken conversion tracking, right? And if you don't understand your numbers, and then on top of that you also have broken tracking, wrong tracking, [clears throat] misleading tracking, whatever, it's just double kill, right? That's why I mentioned it in the first place. What does broken tracking mean? It just means garbage, right? Can be over tracking, can be under tracking, can be a very simple setup that misses out on some of the the standards that we have, and that basically have wrong tracking, and you cannot rely on your numbers, right?

And also most importantly, the algorithm, the machine learning smart bidding of Google Ads relies on the data, right? It's super important, more important than ever. Again, if you have junk tracking and you feed the junk into the campaigns, you cannot expect great results, right? And a lot of people underestimate it, they're like, "Yeah, my tracking is not that great, or like like we have some issues there, blah blah blah, but I think it's fine, right?" But it's like, "Okay, you're you're missing the foundation already, right? If that's not the case, it's a shit." Nowadays, most of my clients, they do it pretty well. Uh I feel like it has improved, it was like way more of an issue years ago when yeah, the access to tracking tools maybe wasn't that accessible.

Nowadays, it's pretty easy, especially in the e-comm niche, right? There are a lot of tracking tools uh that basically do exactly that what you see here for you, right? The deuce. Like they have all the advanced tracking stuff as well, like enhanced conversion tracking, constant mode, all of that is like standard with every tracking tool, and it's very easy to implement, right? So, it's quite rare that we see things like that where everything is like super double tracking, under tracking, not firing correctly, firing twice, whatever. But, yeah. So, these are some of the basics, but still always important to repeat and understand. You need clean data, right?

So, it's not just about, "Yeah, it's fine like I see in the back end my actual sales numbers, right?" No, it's also like what data you feed into the campaigns, right? Super important. All right. And

that leads us to the second mistake that we see quite some time, and that is just wasted spend. Wasted spend on various level. It can be on product level, that can be on search term level, but obviously, if you have a bigger feed, also on product level, right? You might have a lot of winning products, but in the end your account is stuck or even losing money, because at the same time you have a lot of products that bleed money, right? Again, can be product Same principle can apply to search terms. Same principle can apply to certain campaigns, where some campaigns are crushing it, some are losing it.

So, you just want to see, "Okay, what works, what doesn't work?" And just keep an eye on it, control it, kill it if needed, right? Otherwise, yeah, what's the point? In practice, it's quite simple, right? Like I said, you want to like feed more budget to the winners and avoid burning cash. It's a simple formula, right? If you have more winning products or like more winners than the account in general, whatever we are talking about than the losers, then you will be fine, then you are scaling, right? Pretty simple. It's like a simple simple example with your bank account, right? If more money comes in than money goes out, perfect.

Like you it will be fine, basically, right? It's the same kind of here if you break it down simple. So, you just want to have more winners than trainers, quite simple. Again, doesn't matter if it's on product level, campaign level, search term level. And you just want to avoid the junk clicks, Cut them out, right? So, cut the bleed, focus on what's working, and again, means cut the losing product, add the junk as negative keywords. I think it starts with understanding, right? So, you need to understand what's going on in your account in the first place, cuz a lot of people are just look at it and then they run to the agency or the media buyer.

They're like, "Yo, what's going on? Performance not great, right?" That's like That's the furthest they can see because they don't They lack understanding, right? But, you have to break it down. If something is not working, you always have to break it down. Okay, like, why is something not working, right? Like, look at the different variables and how do they How do they work together? And then, you can also find improvement. And the same principle, by the way, the same principle applies to your winning products, winning campaigns, winning creatives, whatever, as well, right? Like, you want to understand why, not just like, "Oh, great, it's a winner." Like, no, you want to break it down.

Look at the different variables. What is winning? Why is it winning? You want to see the patterns, recognize the patterns, use the data, right? To get even more of the winning slice, basically. So, it's quite simple. Again, all all simple stuff. You just need to execute it properly and with discipline, consistently. All right, number three. Next one on the list, something we see popping up more often lately, and it's

also like a foundational thing that's underestimated a lot, though, and it's the cost per traffic or the CPC of your ad account campaign, of your product in general, right? So, a lot of people are overpaying for every click. It's something they rarely focus on because they think, "Yeah, it's fine, right?" You kind of like have to pay the market price, and that was often like our mindset as well, right? You could only like influence CPC to a certain degree, but lately, I feel like Google Google has doubled down on it. Like, you see it more often that they really punish advertisers where they perceive trust or the quality of this advertiser, their campaign, their website, their product, their offer, everything is They kind of punish you immediately with a higher CPC, right?

And then sometimes you pay double, triple, four times even the price than some of the competitors do, right? And vice versa, we see it with accounts where Google perceives you as trustworthy, as high quality, they reward you with a insanely good CPC, right? Insanely low cost per traffic. And again, people disregard it a little bit and they are like, "Ah, yeah, okay, but like still uh then we need to make it work that way or something." And then they're like, "Okay, but ROAS is still not optimal, right?" And they completely disregard it. But just think about it, everything from there, if you have a high CPC, right?

Everything from that foundation will suffer already. Even if everything else is crushing, right? Let's say you have a great AOV, nicely optimized great conversion rate. If you already pay like four times more per click than everybody else, you already have a huge disadvantage, right? Kind of means you need to be like four times, five times better on every other front in order to just keep the same ROAS, right? Doesn't really make much sense. So of course cost per traffic matters, right? Of course it matters how much you pay per click, especially because advertising costs have been risen consistently year over year, right? That's nothing new.

That's standard with more people going digital still, more competition on Google, on Meta, on all channels basically, but that's exactly why you want to keep it as low as possible for you, right? And optimize everything. And some things super important, basically like we said, Google rewards a good experience, right? A trustworthy advertiser with high quality, basically called a quality score, very common for search campaigns that you can really like see it as well. For shopping campaigns, it's a bit more hidden, like you don't see directly a quality score, but it's definitely there, right? There is a quality ranking, and you can see how it affects the the CPC.

We see it with over 100 stores, right? And we see what works best in order to move the needle. And ideally, you have always ready before you even start advertising, right? Because sometimes it's it's a bit more difficult to revert a high CPC if Google already like deems you as not trustworthy, right? And the things that we see moving the needle the most is, first of all, page speed, right? You want to have fast page. We all heard it, right? We all heard the studies of like how it influences conversion rate as well, bounce rate, etc. Uh we know the data, but like sometimes I think our brain is not processing it, right?

We still think, "Ah, doesn't matter that much. Look at my site, it's fast enough, right?" But the data never lies, right? So like it actually genuinely matters, and it needs to be very very fast. And it's super easy to do it nowadays, right? Especially with Shopify if you have an e-commerce store. Like you don't have to overcomplicate it. It's worth the time. It doesn't even cost much time and money to get a fast page ready nowadays. It's the standard, right? Next page is also like the quality of the page, which which means the quality of the content, how everything is structured, everything is clean, rich in content, and just something that Google sees as valuable, right?

And also like leads to low bounce rates. If you have a high bounce rate, it's also something that Google is like, "Ah, not great," right? Obviously, it's a negative trust signal. So you want to have a fast page, you want to have a high-quality page, not some slop that looks You want to have it well optimized, well designed, the whole content of it, right? Needs to be high quality. Another thing that's super important is like everything needs to match. Basically, the landing page needs to match the ad, needs to match the search term of the customer, right? If they search for something specific, your ad needs to be a top match.

And when they click on the ad, the landing page needs to be matching as well on what's shown in the in the ad, right? So, that cannot be misleading or anything or like again, poor content, poor quality, like it needs to be the perfect fit, right? If it's a perfect fit, first of all, it increases conversion rate for you, but it also helps with the CPC. If everything is kind of vague, right? You're ranking for some some random search terms, maybe because your feed is not optimized well, it already like goes downhill from there, right? Like, okay, it's not a perfect fit. Obviously, the traffic quality is not that high.

So, your conversion rate kind of sucks. Google sees it's low quality or like it doesn't really match well, and then you have higher CPC already, right? So, super important the things we mentioned here, match types, of course. So, kind of goes hand in hand with what I just said before. You basically just want to avoid paying for junk searches that are not relevant for your business at all, right? You want to exclude them. You want to be careful how you set things up. And then, of course, last but not least, the CPC also um depends on your bidding settings, right? On your target ROAS, on your bid strategy in general.

How you run the ads, the campaigns, obviously that's a that's a factor as well. If you're too aggressive on certain search terms, campaigns, products, whatever, then of course, CPC might be high, might be too high to a degree where it's not even profitable for you anymore, right? So, that's about the media buying here in the media the last two parts, right? The first three parts kind of like the quality of the content mostly, and the second part's more media buying related. All right, mistake number four, which we do see quite often as well, is a weak product feed. And if you work with me, if you

know me, you know we pay a lot of attention to that as well, that we have a proper product feed, right? We started to dive even more into it with our clients lately, cuz we see the connection of a quality side of a rich product feed, rich product data, even like having like a well-optimized site in terms of basic SEO, right? And how this like works together with the ads, how that influences the CPC, how Google perceives you as an advertiser, and therefore down the line also the results, right? So, it's all about the data, your product data. That needs to be like top-notch. Your feed needs to be super detailed, no thin data, no feed, titles, all the attributes that matter, right?

Starts with like the basic ones, brand attribute, your product category super important, product type potentially as well, but more importantly product category in the beginning. Then, of course, like I said, we have product title, product description, color, size, material, uh product highlights, product details. There's just so many things, right? You can really go go deep into it. Gender, it depends on your type of product as well, what's more important for you, but you just want to give all the attributes that that are relevant, right? Gender we just mentioned, gender and age. You want to have rich data, right? Like basically, if it does well in terms of having it set up nicely by default, rich product data in the back end, basically well-optimized for SEO, right?

Connect with Search Console, upload your sitemap there, have like a well-structured site, product schema, product metadata. That's kind of like basic SEO, right? It's nowadays really beneficial for advertising as well. So, you want to really have a clean site, right? It always has been important, but it became more and more important nowadays. I even found someone like joking on LinkedIn lately who said like um someone who's like really good with SEO is like more relevant or more effective in advertising on Google Ads nowadays than actual Google Ads media buyer, right? Which obviously is but there is some some truth to it, right? Which really made me thinking as well and it's really interesting and it really shows like how much more important it became to have like really good underlying data, right?

Even for for the LLMs, right? The moment we have some sort of shopping ads with like I don't know, [clears throat] even like Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, doesn't matter. They all need like proper data to to work, right? They will have some sort of product feed as well. And again, a feed is already richer by default if you have nice, well-structured product data by default in the back end, right? So it all starts with that. Don't underestimate it. Don't think in like two separate boxes of like, "Oh, that's SEO and that's like search engine advertising like organic ads, right?" It really goes hand in hand. Super important.

All right, just a little repetition. We had it in the last video as well, right? But especially the title is super important and that's just like an example actually. Like it's not brand plus type plus detail, right? I think in the last video I had a good example. It always depends a little bit on the product and the niche as well. Sometimes you want to lead with brand if it's relevant, but sometimes it's not as relevant and you want to start with the main keyword first. For example, here a product type, a product detail, a product highlight, the material, right? Whatever is relevant. Basically you want to have a rich product title.

I think we had that multiple times in videos. I don't want to like blow it up too much here. And then of course like just a quick repetition. Like we said, just make sure you have complete, I think that's the main keyword here, right? Complete and accurate product data. Edit it first, see how it does for a while. Yeah, no-brainer things that you don't do is like half-empty attributes or like half-assing the information. You don't want to have these promo claims. That's maybe important and something a lot of people don't know. You don't want to have this kind of stuff in the title. Also can lead to the product getting disapproved.

You want to be careful with that. All right, already mistake number

five and this one is actually very similar to what we have discussed before with hey, you don't want to accumulate wasters, right? This one is pretty much the same already actually because like yeah, you don't want to accumulate wasters and you want to cut losers early, right? You don't want to keep them alive in the feed for too long. But this part focuses more on the kill rules and like the all the rules that you apply for yourself and the discipline of like sticking to them, right? On campaign level, product level, that focuses more on the rules and when to exclude those wasters, cut them out.

Because a lot of people they have those rules sometimes, they don't stick to them or they don't have rules at all and they don't optimize it in the first place, right? But if you do, you need like clear rules on when to do what, otherwise it's random and might not even be effective. And keep in mind these numbers here, they are random, right? It really depends on the type of product, the niche you're operating in. Goes hand in hand with the first thing I mentioned before, which is you need to understand your numbers, right? And then you can also like create rules that make sense for you.

But here for example, a kill rule, right? If it's like 3x above your target CPA, kill it, pause it, whatever, right? Don't discuss it, you have a clear rule, you need to stick to it with discipline. Right? It's basically have clear rules so you don't have to be emotional about it. It's like okay, if it has 50 clicks or $100 in ad spend, doesn't matter if it's like a campaign and a new creative or product, right? You evaluate the rules you have rules targets of course, right? Again for the creatives as well. Just giving you some examples here. Again, I would I would not give you hard numbers because it genuinely really depends on your situation, right?

A furniture store with a CPA of 200 bucks doesn't have the same kill rules than like a jewelry store with a CPA of 20 bucks, right? Doesn't make sense. So super important and the most important principle, like it says here, it's cut fast, feed the winners, right? Because basically, and I like that, every dollar you pull off a loser funds a winner or a potential new winner, right? You have to think in in that way. You want to basically be very efficient with your money, right? And not just waste it randomly. Again, every dollar today funds either a winner or a potential new winner, right?

And this spend can go into new products and you can test them more effectively. So, you want to cut fast. This mean you cut too early in a way where it doesn't make sense, right? After like five clicks and there's barely barely any data. So, of course, you want to accumulate too much data, that's why I said, "Hey, it depends on your situation." But in the end, if the threshold is reached, if the rule is getting triggered, you want to cut fast, right? And don't like accumulate it too much. Usually like this this this feeds with a lot of waste, they don't go nowhere, right?

They they are very inconsistent, they don't have like high budgets, they don't have a lot of momentum, they don't have scale because very simple, you accumulate more waste than actual winning products. Very straightforward,

right? All right, a little bonus section because we're almost at the end, so three more very fast that we also see quite often and they are quite relevant. First of all, no split between brand and non-brand, especially relevant for bigger brands, right? With a lot of people that are already looking for a brand with a lot of warm traffic, hot traffic, a lot of return buyers, right? If you don't clearly separate between brand and uh yeah, you're basically wasting a lot of money and you cannot really evaluate the results of your campaigns, especially when it comes to new customer acquisition. So, big mistake and it's actually terrifying how often we see that with bigger brands.

Then, next one is like scaling too fast or like scaling randomly, again emotional. Like making either like too many changes, too many rapid changes, like big changes, plus 50%, minus 40%, plus whatever, whatever, like it's just going randomly in places, right? Without discipline, without structure, without giving it enough time after changing the budget. So, that's a big one as well. And another one is like if you have a messy account structure in general. And that starts with like simple things like a naming convention for your campaign, right? Having like optimized titles, optimized product data, a clean structure, a structure that makes sense, a structure where you can argue clearly, okay, why do you have to do that in place?

Why do you split up the campaigns like that? And why does it benefit you in the first place, right? Like you need a very clear data-driven reason on why you do those things, and it needs to be measurable, then it's effective, right? That's usually not the case. Usually there's a lot of and like weird split. And I audit these accounts of like some competitor agencies as well. It has like a weird name, nothing is really well optimized. A lot of things are usually like kind of like double set up, and it doesn't really make much sense, and I don't really can see why. So, that's super important as well, right?

Because everything starts and falls, you can only scale with a clean structure, right? The organization, the foundation is already in the first place, like obviously you cannot scale, right? Or or you will be limited very early on. So, quick recap of the video which we

discussed before, besides these three mistakes that we just had, is like, okay, tracking, super important. Cut the wasted spend wherever it comes from, cut it, cut it early like we said before as well. In terms of CPC, make sure you have a solid foundation in the back end, so you can keep it as low as possible. And you'll be as a trustworthy advertiser towards Google, right? If Google says you're not trustworthy, you have already lost. Right? It makes sense. Like they will not push your ad in the auction the way they could if they think you are a low-quality advertiser. Then that also goes hand-in-hand with the feed, right?

Having rich product data, rich content, everything well optimized. Telling Google clearly, "Hey, this is what this product is about." And this helps you with your targeting, with your ranking, right? Showing in front of the right customer. And then what we said about the wasted spend as well, having clear rules, management rules, kill rules, and cutting those losers early. Super important. Otherwise, you might be stuck. And being stuck is already a sign of something is not going well, right? Because we said the formula is quite simple. If you have more winners than losers, you're scaling. If you're stuck somewhere, it's probably a bit of a mixed setting, right?

Where you might have some winners, maybe you're not developing enough, maybe the offer is not that great, maybe you accumulate a lot of wastage spend. But yeah, being stuck is already a sign of, "Okay, like there is room for improvement, right?" And don't get me wrong, it's normal to be stuck sometimes, especially if you had a long period of scaling and you hit a certain plateau, right? Obviously, it gets more and more difficult to continue to push aggressively if you're already at the high level. But the same principles apply, right? It still means, "Hey, there might be something we can do better." You just need to find the the variables to tweak to get it even further.

And last but not least, if you

want to learn more about this, about how to scale with Google Ads, structure your campaigns properly, and having a community that does the exact same thing as you do, and helps you like organize and winning with Google Ads, click the link below and join our free school community. We're over 1,000 members at this day of recording already. A lot of like-minded people with the same goals, same problems, same issues, same obstacles, same challenges, same mentality, same everything. And there are people that are more advanced than you, people that are beginners, and you see all kinds of questions and value that will help you down the line to scale even further with your Google Ads account, right?

So, like I said, it's basically free. It's a good community already. Click the link below, and then see you there. Until the next video. Ciao, ciao. >> [music]