Finlay Williams

I run the Ads behind your favourite brands • 200+ accounts managed• Scaling e-com brands past $100K+/day profitably with Google/YouTube.

[Finlay Williams @ItsFinlayW]

I’ve started doing something I haven't seen anyone else do.

It's a no-call audit of ur Google Ads acc

1/ fill out a form
2/ give me read-only access
3/ i send you a Loom in 48 hours.

I've used the same approach to scale 50+ brand past $100K/day w/ GAds

LINK IN BIO

[Finlay Williams @ItsFinlayW]

https://t.co/ID916ORmYW

[Finlay Williams @ItsFinlayW]

I spent 2 years working 72+ hours a week to build my Google Ads business.

My total income for those two years was less than £2,000.

At one point, I went over 6 months without landing a single client. When someone finally said yes, it was a £500 setup project for a small business.

Their website had a custom checkout that made conversion tracking difficult to set up. For 2 weeks, I worked from 8 am to 8 pm trying to get it working.

I still remember finishing the project while sitting in a café.

I begged the client for a review. He left a great one and paid the £500.

I've finished a difficult job. The client was happy. After months without work, I’d finally earned something.
But then I realised I was back at square one.

The project was over, and I needed another client. It had taken 6 months to find this one. I didn’t know how long it would take to find the next one.

That was what made it so bittersweet. I’d done the work well, but I still hadn’t figured out how to make a living from it.

People who know me today would probably be surprised by how long those early years went on. I was working 6 days a week with very little income to show for it.

For some reason, I kept going.

When I think about the first time I felt the business could work, I remember getting my first referral.

After struggling so hard to find clients, someone recommending me to another person meant a lot. That was a huge moment for me.

Today, 6 years into building this business, I run 20+ ad accounts.

Looking back now, I know things got better. At the time, I had no guarantee they would.

There will be points when you doubt yourself, especially when you’ve put in the work and have little to show for it.

That doesn’t mean you have to give up. You can change your approach, learn from what isn’t working and give yourself another chance.

Keep working on what you believe in. You don’t need to have the whole future figured out to take the next step.

[Finlay Williams @ItsFinlayW]

Your $100K store might be paying you less than a 9 to 5:

[Finlay Williams @ItsFinlayW]

@AnthonyEclipse haha yes

[Finlay Williams @ItsFinlayW]

What my week looks like managing 20+ ad accounts solo:

Monday: Client calls. Anyone who wants one gets one.

Tuesday: Finishing reports and making strategy changes. Every account follows the same growth

framework, with a different strategy based on what the business needs next.

Wednesday and Thursday: Account audits and anything else that comes up.

Friday: Working on my own business.

Of course, an account can need attention before its next audit.

I check the accounts daily. Alongside that, an automated system analyses the data 24/7 and alerts me to major issues or opportunities between checks.

That helps me keep track of what needs attention across all 20+ accounts.

I handle the changes myself, and clients speak directly to me.

They hired me. They should be able to reach me.

[Finlay Williams @ItsFinlayW]

Stop chasing your next goal for 30 seconds and read this.

You can get almost everything you wanted 5 years ago and still feel like you’re failing.

Back then, all I wanted was to:

• Make real money from my own work
• Finish a project without stressing over where the next client was coming from
• Travel and see the world
• Give my family a better life

At one point, I went 6 straight months without a single client. Today, I’m handling 20+.

My goals are bigger now, but that old list reminds me why I started.

Don’t spend so much time chasing what’s missing that you forget what’s already changed.

I’m nowhere near done, but I’m proud of how far I’ve come.

[Finlay Williams @ItsFinlayW]

your late 20s get expensive when you start trying to keep up with your friends’ life decisions.

a friend buys a house. suddenly, renting feels like falling behind.

another gets married. now your relationship feels too slow.

someone starts a business. the job you liked last week no longer feels good enough.

you end up wanting the house one friend has, the relationship of another and someone else’s income. all before 30.

it’s worth asking how much of that you wanted before you saw them with it.

you can be happy for your friends without treating their milestones as your deadlines.

a mortgage, a marriage or a career change will affect your daily life long after the pressure to keep up has passed.

MAKE SURE you actually want what you’re rushing into.

[Finlay Williams @ItsFinlayW]

High ROAS is lying to you...

Steal 7 rules we follow before throwing more spend at Google Ads.

[Finlay Williams @ItsFinlayW]

@AutismCapital https://t.co/EuPM9Np8uV

Pretty much verbatim what you said lol

[Finlay Williams @ItsFinlayW]

@bandholz This isn’t a theory this is true. Google just switched to the same thing on the 17th of August.

[Finlay Williams @ItsFinlayW]

@sibaiisaac @thesamparr is famously an extensive reader and phenomenal entrepreneur. Grifter is perhaps the last word I’d use to describe him. You’ve lost this one buddy, put it back in the trailer and drive home.

[Finlay Williams @ItsFinlayW]

@JSHorwitz Wut? 🤣

[Finlay Williams @ItsFinlayW]

“having kids will destroy your freedom.”

this might be one of the biggest myths ambitious adults carry.

i think the answer becomes clearer once you’ve built the life you actually want.

before that, you’re trying to picture parenthood without knowing what your time, freedom, or priorities will look like.

once those pieces fall into place, the picture may look completely different.

summers in Europe can include your kids. road trips can have another seat. they can experience the life you worked so hard to create.

you may reach every career milestone and still decide children are not for you. completely fair.

but deciding too early feels like choosing what you’ll eat for dinner next Friday. you don’t know where you’ll be, how hungry you’ll feel, or what options you’ll have.

i’d rather build the life first, then decide with the full picture in front of me.

[Rob Moore @robprogressive]

Not having kids is a life hack

I spend my summers in Europe, take cross-country road trips, and disappear off-grid on weekends

The money I’d spend on kids goes to investing, experiences, & freedom.
Different priorities. Different definition of rich

^^I saw @TheMattViera post this & I think it’s one of the reasons people are more selfish, the world is more sinister & we are more disconnected

I could not disagree with this ANY more. What do you think?

[Finlay Williams @ItsFinlayW]

"It's 2 AM. I should be sleeping, but I keep thinking about the life I want."

most ecom guys we work with have had a version of this night...
refreshing Shopify at midnight, running the numbers again, waiting for something to move.

The ecom guys who scale tend to have a quieter routine than that. logged off by 9 PM, and the sales still came in overnight.

Both of them worked hard this month. Only one was working on something that kept paying after the laptop closed.

late nights tend to go on:

> checking ROAS every hour
> pausing an ad after one slow day
> rewriting the product page again at 1 AM

the quieter version goes on:

> a google account set up properly
> tracking that counts every sale once
> campaigns left alone long enough to actually learn

So while one guy sleeps, people are searching google for exactly what they sell, and their ads are the ones showing up.

That setup takes a few weeks to build, then it keeps running while you're offline.

Every 2 AM night like this is interest on an account nobody set up properly. The debt doesn’t clear just because you stayed up later.

[Dickie Bush @dickiebush]

All roads lead back to 9 PM bed time, 5 AM wake up, 4 hours of deep, focused work creative work first thing, leaving your notifications off, work out mid day to break it up, admin & calls in the afternoon, hang with friends and loved ones in the evening, repeat forever.

[Finlay Williams @ItsFinlayW]

Your “$100k/month” store might be paying you less than a 9-5.

Let’s run the actual math on a normal DTC setup doing $100k in revenue:

• Product costs: ~$35k
• Shipping, fulfilment, packaging: ~$12k
• Returns + payment fees: ~$6k
• Ads to buy those customers: ~$30k

That’s $83k gone. You’re left with $17k before software, team, agency, and tax.

Once those hit, a founder at this level often takes home $3k–$5k a month.

while an employee on $75k a year takes home around $4.5k to $5k a month, with no inventory risk, no ad account that can get banned overnight, and their weekends back.

Founders love posting revenue screenshots, but margin is the only flex that pays.

[Luke Belmar 👽 @lukebelmar]

You have to realize 100k is not a lot of money. After taxes, living expenses, taking care of bills, you are left with very little.

In order to get rich you have to do 3 things:

1) Live below your means for a long time (BUT live in style and comfortable so you don't feel the urge to overspend).

2) Learn about emerging markets and invest your extra capital and play the long term game understanding your investments

3) Put time and money into yourself and your network. This will yield great opportunities and connections beyond direct paychecks.

People focus on money but to make generational wealth you need to follow a specific playbook when you are starting from zero. Don't get distracted by the noise.... stack your dollars and if you invest them wisely they can some become millions.

[Finlay Williams @ItsFinlayW]

your homepage is where HIGH-INTENT Google traffic goes to DIE.

I audited an account last week that made this painfully obvious.

clean account, great product, campaigns set up properly.

every click going to the homepage.

the numbers:

€176,769 spent on homepage traffic, converting at 5.02%.
€54,085 spent on search term specific pages, converting at 6.47%.
the pages they barely funded were the ones doing the work.

BUT why does it happen??

Let's take an example.

someone searches for "red leather office chair". Google finds it for them, they click, and they land on your homepage.

now they have to search for it again. except this time on your site, past a hero banner, a bestsellers row and a newsletter popup, using filters that are worse than Google's.

Almost nobody bothers. they hit back and buy from whoever's next in the results.

you paid for that click and then asked the buyer to do the finding.

Google watches this entire interaction too…

if users constantly bounce back to search, Google penalizes your account with higher ad costs and lower positions

3 things to check, in this order:

1. Spot the waste: Pull your landing page report and sort by spend. Compare your homepage conversion rate against your product pages, the gap will shock you.

2. Match the search: Specific products go to product pages, broad searches go to collection pages, and problems go to solution pages. Simple.

3. Pass the 1-second test: Show the exact item, price, and answer above the fold so visitors don't have to scroll or guess.

Do that before you touch another bid.

[Finlay Williams @ItsFinlayW]

the WORST product in your category is probably outranking you.

no, they aren't Google's favourite son. Google just can't tell that your product is better.

it can only judge what you put in front of it:

> your images
> your titles
> your landing page
> your Merchant Center data

that's it.

your materials, your fit, your 10 years of getting it right, your customer service... none of it reaches the algorithm.

there’s actually a hidden metric in the Merchant Center you probably haven't opened: Click Potential.

it scores the only things Google can actually see:

> price against competitors
> landing page experience
> image quality
> title relevance

There's one more thing you're probably getting wrong: Shopping ads have a quality score, too.

assuming it's a search-only metric is a massive mistake

if your inputs are off, you're paying a hidden penalty on every single impression you buy

We took a menswear brand from $47k to $198k per month by fixing exactly this.

their images looked like every other brand in the grid. so we tested 3 variations, found a clear winner, and pushed it across all 42 SKUs.

Google re-crawled the feed and immediately started ranking them against a completely different set of competitors.

The only thing that changed was how the product was presented to the machine.

If you're losing to brands you know you're better than, don't assume you need a better product or a bigger budget.

Google can't see through the screen your competitor is just presenting better to an algorithm that only reads presentations.

[Finlay Williams @ItsFinlayW]

you can spend months rebuilding campaigns to fix a problem that was never in the campaigns.

if you don't believe me, do this today:

1/ pull your landing page report and sort by spend.
2/ find where your homepage sits on that list.
3/ put its conversion rate next to your product and category page conversion rates.
4/ now open the search terms driving your top-spending campaigns and read what people actually typed.
5/ ask whether the page they landed on answers that specific search.

audited an account last week that ran exactly this way.

€176,769 spent sending traffic to the homepage, converting at 5.02%.
€54,085 to product pages, converting at 6.47%.

the pages getting the least spend were doing the most work.

Every search comes with an intent. Your page either helps them get there or it doesn't, and Google grades you on that either way.

the click was the expensive part, the page is free

[Finlay Williams @ItsFinlayW]

A brand owner told me something last week that made 0 sense at first.

He's profitable at 1.2x ROAS, while his competitors need 3x just to survive.

The difference isn't better ads.

It's how he built the business around them.

1/ He made his supplier a partner.

Instead of treating his supplier like someone he buys from, he gave him a reason to help the brand grow.
That led to two big advantages.

2/ He got access to an agency ad account.

99% of brands run ads through their own account. One policy issue can shut it down, along with years of data.

His agency account gives him better support and a more stable setup. So he can keep running while competitors are stuck trying to recover.

3/ He gets 3% cashback on ad spend.

That means every $1 in ads costs him 97¢. And when he spends more, his supplier gets bigger orders.

They both want the brand to grow.

While his competitors' suppliers are just waiting for the next purchase order.

Then he adds strong checkout upsells. A customer who came to buy a $50 product might end up spending $70. So he can afford to pay more for the same click.

And because he can afford more, he wins more auctions.

His competitors see the prices, think they're crazy, and back off.

He won because he built a business that could afford to buy customers his competitors couldn't.