How to Optimize Google Ads, in the Order That Pays

Most people optimize Google Ads by opening the account and fixing whatever they notice first. That is how an account gets busier without getting better. The order matters more than the effort, because three of the six jobs below are pointless until the one above them is done.

How to optimize Google Ads

To optimize Google Ads, fix your inputs in this order: conversion tracking, wasted search terms, the product feed, overlapping campaigns, profit targets per product, then budgets. Bids come last, and mostly they come off your list entirely. Google's Smart Bidding is, in its own words, "bidding strategies that use Google AI to optimize for conversions or conversion value in every auction", and it reads device, location, time of day, browser, the actual search query and a dozen other signals while the page is loading. You are not going to beat that with a Tuesday morning and a spreadsheet. What you can do is change what it is allowed to bid on.

That is the whole job. Six steps, and the first one decides whether the other five mean anything.

Step 1: check that one sale counts once

Pull the last seven days of conversions in Google Ads. Pull the same seven days of orders in your store. If Google is more than 5% higher, stop and find out why before you touch anything else.

On Shopify the usual cause is two tracking setups running at once, the Google tag plus the Google and YouTube app, both reporting the same purchase. Smart Bidding then thinks the account is twice as profitable as it is and bids accordingly. Every report you read after that is fiction, and so is every decision you make from it.

If the word Smart Bidding is new, here is the plain version.

Step 2: cut the searches that never sell

Open the search terms report and sort by cost. Google's own definition is worth holding onto: a search term is what a person typed, a keyword is what you added. You get billed for the first one.

Two things about that report catch people out.

First, you never see all of it. Google says search terms without enough query activity are left out "in order to keep with our standards on data privacy". So the leak you can see is smaller than the leak you have. Check weekly, not quarterly.

Second, negative keywords are fussier than positive ones. Google's help page is blunt about it: "Negative keywords won't match to close variants or other expansions. For example, if you exclude the negative broad match keyword flowers, ads won't be eligible to serve when a user searches red flowers, but can serve if a user searches for red flower." Block the plural and you have left the singular wide open. Add both, plus the obvious misspelling, every time. What a negative keyword is, in one page, if you want the longer version.

Step 3: fix the feed, because the feed writes your ads

On a Shopping or Performance Max campaign, Google builds the ad out of your product feed. Your title, your image, your price. Not a headline you wrote.

So the feed is where the optimization actually lives. Clear every disapproval in Merchant Center first. A disapproved bestseller does not pause your spend, it quietly moves your spend onto whatever is still eligible, which is usually your worst product. Then rewrite the vague titles. "Classic Ring" matches nothing. "14k Gold Signet Ring, Mens, Size 10" matches what people type.

The first audit we ran on a mid-seven-figure apparel account found €4,000 a month going nowhere. On that account the waste sat in low-intent search terms and underperforming display placements. Bad titles are the leak we see next most often.

Step 4: decide which campaign wins your best products

Google will not let two of your own campaigns bid against each other. If several of your keywords are eligible for the same search, Google says "they don't compete with each other in the auction". Where a Performance Max campaign overlaps a Search campaign, it says "the campaign or ad with the highest Ad Rank will be selected".

So Google picks one and runs it. The problem is that you do not get to pick. Your budget splits across campaigns you cannot steer, and the one Google chooses is often not the one you wanted.

Google documents how the tie breaks: "Performance Max complements existing Search campaigns and respects your keyword targeting. If a search query matches to an exact match keyword in your Search campaign, Google Ads prioritizes the Search campaign over Performance Max." It also notes that search themes rank the same as phrase and broad match keywords, not above exact.

That gives you a real lever. Any term you want a Search campaign to win, your brand name being the obvious one, goes in as exact match. Everything else can sit in one campaign where you can actually steer the budget. If one campaign holds 90% of your spend, you do not have a strategy, you have a single throttle.

Step 5: give your best products a different target

Almost every account we open has one Target ROAS across the entire catalog. That tells Google to bid the same way on a product with 60% margin and one with 12%. It is the most expensive default in ecommerce.

The fix is boring and it works. Tag every product by margin and by how fast it sells, then set a target per tier. A jewelry brand we work with had all 2,400 products in one campaign on one target. They split them into three tiers at 4.0, 3.0 and 2.2, changed nothing else that week, and overall ROAS was up 38% in seven days.

They never touched a bid. They changed what the bidder was aiming at.

- What actually moved

Step 6: set the budget, then stop poking it

Two numbers from Google that explain most budget panic.

Your campaign can spend up to two times your average daily budget on any single day. Over a month it is capped at 30.4 times the daily figure, because 30.4 is 365 divided by 12. So a €50 a day budget spending €100 on a Tuesday is not a bug and not an overspend. It is the documented behaviour, and it usually means Google found a good day.

Cutting the budget the morning after a spike is how people undo their own week. Judge budgets on the month.

What optimization score is, and what it is not

Google defines it as "an estimate of how well your Google Ads account is set to perform", scored 0 to 100%. Read how it is built: it is calculated from your settings and status, "the relevant impact of available recommendations, and recent recommendations history".

So it partly measures how many of Google's suggestions you have been accepting. Accept them all and the score goes up. Some of those suggestions widen your matching or raise your budget, which also sends your spend up. That can be right for you. It is not automatically right for you.

Read every recommendation. Apply the ones that match the plan you already had. Let the score land wherever it lands. Nobody has ever been paid for a number in the top right corner.

What runs daily, and what runs once a quarter

Half of the six steps above are a habit, not a project. Most accounts do this exactly backwards: a big review every three months, and nothing in between, so a leak runs for the whole quarter before anyone notices.

The full daily and quarterly split is in what PPC optimization actually covers. If you want the diagnostic version instead, our 12-point audit is the read-before-you-change pass.

Who should be doing the daily half

Three honest options.

You, if the account is small and you genuinely open it most days. Under about €10,000 a month in spend, doing it yourself is often the right call and you keep the cash.

An agency, if you need judgment as well as hours. Pricing, offers, which market to enter next, whether the creative is the real problem. Software cannot do any of that. A good agency for an ecom account usually runs €3,000 to €8,000 a month.

Software, if the daily list is the bottleneck. It never gets bored, which is the entire point, because that list is boring by design. If you run many accounts and have an analyst with real hours, a recommendation tool like Optmyzr is a better fit than anything that tries to run the account for you, and we ranked the whole field by how much work each one actually does. If you spend under about €5,000 a month, use the free recommendations tab in Google Ads and put the difference into stock.

Scaley is the software answer, and I built it, so weigh that. It reads your Google Ads account and your Merchant Center feed 24/7, tags every product by margin and speed of sale, and surfaces every bad search term and loss-making product with the evidence attached. It writes nothing to your account until you approve it. I also run ZenoX Media, a Google Ads agency, so I sell both sides of the choice above.

Start the free trial and the first pass is read-only, so it looks without touching. See what is in the box, check what it costs, or read how the Google Ads AI works before you connect anything.

Where these facts come from

Everything above that Google says is quoted from Google's own help pages, checked on 2026-08-20:

• About Smart Bidding - the definition of Smart Bidding, and the signals it reads in every auction.
• About negative keywords - negative keywords not matching close variants, and the flowers against flower example.
• About search terms - the search term against keyword difference, and terms being left out to keep with Google's standards on data privacy.
• How the Google Ads auction works - keywords from the same account not competing against each other in the auction.
• Ad Rank: Definition - the campaign or ad with the highest Ad Rank being selected where Performance Max overlaps a Search campaign.
• About Performance Max campaigns - Performance Max respecting your keyword targeting, exact match in a Search campaign taking priority, and where search themes rank.
• About average daily budgets - the two times daily spending limit and the 30.4 times monthly cap.
• About optimization score - the definition, the 0 to 100% range, and recent recommendations history feeding the score.

The account numbers, like the 38% ROAS lift across 2,400 products and the €4,000 a month of waste in a first audit, come from accounts the team runs at ZenoX Media, where they have generated over €200M in revenue for 200+ ecom brands.