Benjamin Davis

Google Ads specialist. I've managed millions in ad spend for ecom brands and share what actually works

[Benjamin Davis @bengoogleads]

We took a jewellery brand from no Google ads to an account that made over $100k in profit in the first 90 days

And $331k in revenue in the first 5 months

[Benjamin Davis @bengoogleads]

Apples physical stores and support have got to be the worst shopping experience

[Benjamin Davis @bengoogleads]

@AppleSupport says to cancel apple upgrade program with Barclays. Barclays say they can't do anything and to talk to Apple

Seemingly no way to deal with it as they both push you to the other

Regret getting this stupid thing

[Benjamin Davis @bengoogleads]

Most Shopping feeds going into BFCM still have shipping set as a vague "3-7 days" on every SKU.

Google uses that when it decides whether to show you. If a competitor has 1-2 day shipping on the same product and you're on the default, you lose the auction before your bid even matters.

Fix it on your top 50 sellers this week. Put real processing time plus transit in Merchant Center, then check product status for anything still limited or missing shipping.

If Shopify already has accurate rates, make sure the feed is actually pulling them. Plenty of brands think it's synced when the feed still has the old blanket estimate.

20 minutes of feed work beats another $2k of November spend on products that can't compete on delivery.

If your top sellers still show blanket shipping, reply and I'll tell you what to check first.

[Benjamin Davis @bengoogleads]

PMax loves your brand name. It's the easiest sale in the account and Google will happily count it as new revenue.

Pretty common to open the search terms on a PMax campaign showing 6 or 7x ROAS and find a big chunk of the conversions came from people typing the brand name. Those people were already coming.

Quick check before Black Friday:

- Open the PMax search terms report and filter for your brand name
- If brand is a big share, add a brand exclusion list to the campaign
- Put a cheap exact match branded Search campaign next to it so you still catch those clicks for pennies

PMax ROAS will drop on paper once you do this. What's left is what it's actually bringing in, and that's the number to set budgets on.

Reply if you want me to look at yours.

[Benjamin Davis @bengoogleads]

Black Friday's 6 weeks away and I promise you don't want to be fixing your Google Shopping feed on the 26th of November.

Do this lot now:

1. Sort your feed disapprovals. Google takes its time reviewing them
2. Add your actual returns policy in Merchant Center. Otherwise Google just makes one up for you
3. Set up promotions so your offer actually shows on the ad
4. Give your best sellers their own campaign. Stop making them fight the rest of your catalogue for budget
5. Have a brand campaign live. Your competitors will happily bid on your name over BFCM
6. Raise budgets the week before. Not on the day, when the algorithm is panicking

Bookmark it, thank me in December.

[Benjamin Davis @bengoogleads]

Brand is people searching your store name. They already know you, so clicks are cheap and ROAS looks great.

Non-brand is people searching the product itself, e.g. "linen dress". That's where new customers come from.

Split them into separate campaigns, otherwise brand ROAS inflates your overall numbers

[Benjamin Davis @bengoogleads]

@mlksdoclima Happy to help. At 15k/month off Meta alone, Google Shopping is usually the quickest win as you're catching people already searching for what you sell. I run Google Ads for Shopify brands. DM me what you sell and I'll show you how much search demand there is for it

[Benjamin Davis @bengoogleads]

Most Shopify brands look at Shopping ROAS and call the campaign healthy. They never open the product report.

I checked one last week with 180 products live. 14 SKUs ate about 90% of the impressions. The other 166 were basically ghosts. Bestsellers sitting there with zero auction pressure while junk variants soaked what little budget was left.

Before you raise spend for Black Friday, go to Products in Google Ads, sort by impressions, and look at the bottom half. If your winners aren't showing, fix titles, availability, and price competitiveness first. Dumping more budget onto a feed that only pushes 14 products just buys those same 14 harder.

Reply if you want the product-coverage checklist I run before Q4.

[Benjamin Davis @bengoogleads]

@badhongrowth We say not to make too many spontaneous changes but often a losing battle

[Benjamin Davis @bengoogleads]

Black Friday is 6 weeks out and most Shopify brands on tROAS are going to waste the first 2 days of it

Smart bidding learns off your normal conversion rate. On BFCM your CVR can jump from 2.5% to 5% and the algorithm takes a few days to believe it's real. By the time it catches up Cyber Monday is basically done

The fix is a seasonality adjustment

Tools > Bid strategies > Advanced controls > Seasonality adjustments

Set it for your actual sale dates, scope it to your Shopping and PMax campaigns, and put in the CVR lift you saw last year. If last BFCM went from 2.4% to 4.1% that's roughly +70%

Few things I've learned doing this on client accounts:

Keep each one to 1 to 7 days. Google says it works best on short events and longer windows go sideways

Don't guess the number. Pull last year's daily conversion rate from Ads or Shopify and use that

If your sale starts early, like the 20th, make a separate adjustment for that week instead of one big 12 day window

And if your tracking breaks mid sale, add a data exclusion for those days so bidding doesn't learn off a fake bad day

Put it in the calendar now so you're not doing it at 11pm on Thanksgiving

Reply if you want me to sanity check your setup

[Benjamin Davis @bengoogleads]

Every Q4 it's the same story. Store does 90% of revenue off Meta, CPMs jump in November, ROAS halves, and the owner wants Google Ads live by Black Friday.

That's too late. Merchant Center can take a few days to review your products, and a new Shopping campaign needs 2 to 3 weeks of data before the bidding is any good.

If Meta is your only channel, this is what I'd do this week:

1. Get Merchant Center approved and clean up the Shopify feed. Product type plus the main attribute people search in every title, real GTINs where you have them.
2. Launch one Standard Shopping campaign on your top 20 sellers. Max Clicks with a bid cap, $30 to $50 a day.
3. Turn on a branded Search campaign. People who see your Meta ads go to Google and type your name. If you're not there, a reseller or competitor is.
4. Leave it alone until early November, then switch anything with 30+ conversions to tROAS.

Google won't replace Meta for most stores. It catches people already searching for what you sell, and it keeps paying when Meta has a bad week.

Reply or DM if you want me to check whether your feed is ready.

[Benjamin Davis @bengoogleads]

@badhongrowth oh 100%, seen so many last minute changes with themes or popups, etc

[Benjamin Davis @bengoogleads]

@DTCopss I'd base it on last promo, usually you'd still see higher CVR during BFCM but it'll be a good starting point if you have nothing else to base it on

[Benjamin Davis @bengoogleads]

Why tf does Waitrose vanilla yoghurt with granola not come with a spoon
Worst meal deal snack 😢

[ecom willow @WillowGagnon]

sweet google ads

[Benjamin Davis @bengoogleads]

@filipscaleson I appreciate it man. Thank you

[Benjamin Davis @bengoogleads]

We took a jewellery brand from no Google ads to an account that made over $100k in profit in the first 90 days

And $331k in revenue in the first 5 months

[Rob Walling @robwalling]

Coffee shop is too loud to dictate to Claude. Forced to type with my hands like some kind of fucking peasant.

[Benjamin Davis @bengoogleads]

@pejmanjohn Seeing the same with @bot recently

[Benjamin Davis @bengoogleads]

@growthzacks Easy billion $ business right there

[Abhinav | google ads & landing pages @probablyabhinv]

saying respectfully... if your CRM has no sales value on closed jobs and none of it gets fed back to google-ads, you're flying blind, chasing MORE leads with zero clue which ones actually paid the bills