If you sell online, it is easy to judge your Google Ads agency by what is most visible: clicks, impressions, traffic, and a tidy monthly report. But more visits do not automatically mean more profitable sales. The useful question is whether your agency is making decisions that help your business grow in a sustainable way.
A strong ecommerce agency should connect campaign activity to commercial goals, understand which products and customers matter to your business, and make sure the results are measured properly. That work often starts before a campaign is changed—or before more budget is put behind it.
Whether you are evaluating an agency such as ClickSlice (clickslice.co.uk), working with a design partner such as Zeka Design (Zeka Graphic), or reviewing your current Google Ads setup, use the same test: can the team explain what it is trying to improve, how it will measure the result, and what it will do differently based on what it learns?
Start With Commercial Goals, Not Vanity Metrics
Clicks, impressions, and click-through rate can help explain what is happening in an account. They are not business goals on their own. If an agency reports more traffic but cannot explain whether that traffic led to valuable orders, the report is incomplete.
Begin by agreeing on what success means for your business. For one retailer, it might mean increasing sales of a particular product range. For another, it could paid search agency mean supporting a seasonal launch, moving surplus inventory, or growing revenue without sacrificing too much margin. Your agency needs that context to make sensible choices.
Ask the team to connect its work to outcomes such as revenue, order volume, new-customer sales, or contribution to profit. The right measures depend on your business model and the information you can reliably track. A headline revenue figure can be useful, but it may not tell the whole story if products have very different costs, margins, or fulfilment requirements.
Ask what each metric is for
Every metric in a report should help answer a question or guide a decision. If it does neither, it may be taking up space without helping you manage the account. A practical review might look like this:
Good reporting is more than tables and screenshots. It explains what changed, what the evidence suggests, and what the agency recommends doing next. In a review call, ask: “What would you do differently next week?” A clear answer should follow from the business goal and the account data—not from a desire to change something just to show activity.
Give the Agency Business Context During Onboarding
An agency cannot make informed decisions from campaign access alone. Onboarding should include a conversation about how your business works: which products are priorities, how stock changes, where margins differ, what promotions are planned, and what constraints affect fulfilment or customer service.
Share the commercial details that influence advertising decisions. For example, a product that sells well may not be a priority if it is low in stock, has a long delivery time, or leaves little room for advertising costs. A quieter product range might be strategically important because it attracts repeat customers or supports a wider basket. Those distinctions matter.
Useful onboarding questions
- Which product categories or individual products are the main business priorities? Are there products with different margins, stock levels, or fulfilment challenges? Which promotions, launches, or seasonal periods should the agency plan around? What does a valuable customer look like, beyond completing a first order? Are there business goals that advertising should not pursue, even if it could increase sales? Who can confirm whether a reported sale was valid, profitable, or later cancelled?
This context should not be collected once and then forgotten. Build a regular way to share updates between your team and the agency. A product going out of stock, a change in delivery terms, or a new promotion can affect campaign performance. Timely communication helps the agency respond with purpose rather than reacting to account data without knowing what changed in the business.
Fix Measurement and Tracking Before Increasing Spend
Before asking an agency to scale campaigns, establish whether the account is measuring the right actions accurately. For ecommerce, that often means checking whether purchase tracking records completed orders correctly, whether revenue values are passed through as expected, and whether duplicate or incomplete events are creating misleading results.
Tracking problems can make a campaign look better or worse than it really is. If purchases are counted more than once, performance may appear stronger than it is. If revenue is missing or incorrect, product and campaign comparisons may not be useful. Decisions based on unreliable data can lead to wasted effort, even when campaign management is otherwise careful.
Review the customer journey as well as the advertising setup. Check that the purchase event corresponds to a real completed order, and consider how refunds, cancellations, and returns are handled in your business reporting. Google Ads reports on the signals it receives; it does not automatically know the full commercial outcome of an order.
Bring CRM and business data into the conversation
A CRM (customer relationship management system) can help connect advertising activity with information about customers and orders. The level of integration will vary by business, but even a regular comparison between Google Ads reporting and internal sales records can reveal gaps worth investigating.
Agree who is responsible for each part of measurement: who manages the website or tag setup, who checks order data, and who reports discrepancies. Your agency should explain what it has verified, what remains uncertain, and how that uncertainty affects its recommendations. Avoid treating tracking as a one-time setup task; it needs to be checked when the site, checkout, or measurement configuration changes.
Prioritize Shopping Campaign Optimization and Product Feed Management
For many ecommerce advertisers, Shopping campaigns are central to how products appear in Google Ads. Their performance depends not just on bids and budgets, but also on the quality and accuracy of the product information supplied to the platform. That makes shopping campaign optimization and product feed management closely connected.
The product feed contains details such as titles, descriptions, images, availability, and other attributes. Clear, accurate information helps Google match products to relevant shopping searches. Errors, outdated stock details, vague titles, or inconsistent product data can limit visibility or create a poor experience for shoppers.
What a good feed review should cover
- Accuracy: Do prices, availability, product identifiers, and landing pages match the website? Clarity: Do titles and descriptions describe the product in language customers are likely to understand? Completeness: Are relevant attributes populated consistently across the catalogue? Prioritization: Can the agency distinguish key products from low-stock, low-priority, or less suitable items? Maintenance: How are feed issues and catalogue changes identified and resolved?
Feed improvements should be based on the catalogue and customer search behaviour, not just on a preference for certain wording. Ask the agency to explain which changes it recommends, what problem each change is meant to address, and how it will assess the result.
Shopping campaign optimization also involves choices about campaign structure, product coverage, search query quality, budgets, and bidding. A responsible agency should be able to describe how those choices support your commercial priorities. It should also avoid changing several major things at once and then presenting the outcome as proof that one specific change worked. Keep tests focused enough that you can learn from them.
Discuss Profit Margin Bidding With Realistic Expectations
Revenue is not the same as profit. If products have substantially different margins, a strategy that values every sale equally may not reflect what is best for the business. This is where profit margin bidding may be worth discussing: the aim is to make advertising decisions with more attention to the value of an order, rather than treating all revenue as equally valuable.
That approach depends on trustworthy product and transaction data. The agency needs to understand how margin is calculated, whether costs vary by product, and whether the available data can be connected to the advertising setup in a practical way. If margin inputs are incomplete or outdated, the bid strategy may create a false sense of precision.
Do not expect a bidding setting to solve the underlying business problem by itself. Ask the agency what information it needs, what assumptions it is making, and how it will check whether the approach is supporting your goals. The strategy should fit your data and operating reality—not be adopted because it sounds advanced.
Judge the Agency by Its Thinking, Not a Generic Number
A common mistake when comparing agencies is expecting a universal answer on pricing, retainers, ad spend, or cost per acquisition (CPA). This article does not provide those figures, because they are not meaningful without details about your catalogue, goals, margins, market, measurement quality, and current account performance.
Instead of comparing a generic CPA or spend recommendation, ask an agency to explain how it would evaluate your account and what information it needs before making a recommendation. A useful proposal should clarify the scope of work, responsibilities, reporting approach, and how decisions will be made. It should distinguish what is known from what still needs to be tested.
Likewise, a low CPA is not automatically a win if the orders are low-value, unprofitable, or likely to be cancelled. A higher CPA may be acceptable for some products or customer groups if the resulting sales support the business’s goals. The point is not to ignore efficiency; it is to interpret it in context.
Set a Review Rhythm That Leads to Decisions
A strong agency relationship includes a regular rhythm for reviewing results and sharing business updates. The conversation should cover what happened, why it may have happened, and what the team plans to do next. It should also leave room to question assumptions and flag tracking or data issues.
Review the agreed goals: Are campaigns supporting the commercial priorities you set? Check data quality: Are reported orders and revenue consistent with internal records? Discuss product and stock context: Have changes in availability, margin, or promotions affected the account? Agree a focused action: What will change, and what evidence will show whether it helped? Record the learning: What should the team keep, revise, or stop doing?This rhythm also makes the agency accountable without encouraging random changes. You want a team that can explain the reason for its actions, admit when a test has not answered the question, and adapt as your business changes.
Choose an Agency That Connects Ads to the Business
The best answer to “what should my agency focus on?” is not simply more traffic or more campaign activity. It is a clear, shared understanding of the business outcome you want, supported by reliable measurement and practical decisions about products, feeds, and bidding.
Look for an agency that asks about your margins, stock, customer value, and operational constraints before promising results. Expect it to explain shopping campaign optimization and product feed management in plain language, and to treat profit margin bidding as a data-dependent option rather than a shortcut. Most importantly, every report should help you decide what to do next—not just show what happened.
When reviewing your current or prospective agency, keep one question close: “What would you do differently next week, and why?” The answer should connect Google Ads activity to your commercial goals. If it does, you are far more likely to build an account that supports the business, rather than one that simply looks busy.