Blog · Page 2 of 3
Notes from the desk.
What's worth saying about paid search this month.
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Google Ads
Performance Max for ecommerce: what it's actually doing with your budget
Performance Max is Google's most polarising campaign type. Half the PPC community thinks it's a breakthrough in automated advertising. The other half thinks it's a black box designed to spend your money on junk inventory. The honest position: PMax can work for ecommerce, but only if you understand what it's doing and control what you can control.
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Shopping & Feeds
Google Shopping feed optimisation: why your product titles are costing you sales
Your Google Shopping campaigns are only as good as your product feed. The single biggest lever in Shopping feed optimisation is product titles. Not images. Not pricing. Not descriptions. Titles. They determine which search queries trigger your products and whether the click-through rate justifies the cost per click.
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Google Ads
Why your Google Ads conversion data isn't what you think it is
Most Google Ads accounts are missing 30-40% of conversions because of how the modern web breaks tracking. Enhanced Conversions plugs the gap. Here's what it actually does, how to set it up, and why bidding only works when the data is right.
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Google Ads
How to audit your Google Ads for wasted spend (ecommerce checklist)
Across the active book, RTN recovers an average of £1,300 per month in wasted spend per account. That's not a rounding error. That's profit being torched because somebody set up a campaign two years ago and never looked under the bonnet again. Work through this checklist and you'll almost certainly find money you're wasting right now.
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Google Ads
Why Performance Max is burning your ecommerce budget
Performance Max is Google's golden child. It's the campaign type they recommend to almost everyone, and the one most agencies default to. For large ecommerce businesses with big budgets, PMax can work. For the majority spending £1,000 to £50,000 a month, it's often doing more harm than good.
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Shopping & Feeds
The real cost of a bad Google Shopping feed
Your Google Shopping campaigns are only as good as the data feeding them. Most businesses focus on bids, budgets, and campaign structure. If your product feed is a mess, you're building on sand. You'll pay more per click, show up for the wrong searches, and lose out to competitors who've sorted their feed properly.
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Google Ads
What a Google Ads audit actually tells you (and what most agencies miss)
Most Google Ads audits are surface-level nonsense. A few screenshots, some vague recommendations about "optimising your campaigns," and a sales pitch dressed up as insight. A proper audit isn't a tick-box exercise. It's a diagnostic.
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Google Ads
The PPC checklist for ecommerce re-platforming
Re-platforming your store is a big growth decision, and it carries a real risk: it can wipe out years of ad performance data and momentum overnight. Plenty of businesses see a nasty dip through a migration, not because the strategy was wrong but because the execution was. Here's the checklist RTN works through to protect performance through the move.
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Shopping & Feeds
The ChatGPT shopping revolution: what it means for your Google Shopping ads
OpenAI has built shopping into ChatGPT, a conversational way for people to find and compare products. If you sell online and lean on Google Shopping, it is worth knowing what it changes.
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