Solved: Google Shopping Campaign Running at a Loss

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! It's good you've sent this over. What you're seeing is perfectly normal – having one campaign fly while another one flounders is pretty much par for the course when you're starting out. The real trick isn't just about tweaking, it's about knowing *when* and *what* to tweak without messing up what's already working.

So, let's get this sorted. I've put together some of my thoughts on your campaigns below, looking at the immediate fixes for your Google Shopping ads and then how to properly scale that profitable Meta campaign without breaking it. There’s a bit to get through, but it should give you a solid plan.

Let's be brutally honest about that Google Shopping campaign...

Okay, first things first. The idea that you should let a brand-new, poorly performing campaign "run and gather data" is one of the most common and expensive myths in paid advertising. The data you're gathering right now is telling you one thing very clearly: it's not working. Your cost per conversion is over 3.5 times your target. Every day you let it run as is, you're just confirming that it's broken and setting fire to £20 you could be putting into your profitable Meta campaign.

So, to answer your question: yes, you absolutely should intervene now. Not tomorrow, now.

The problem is, most people start tweaking the wrong things. They fiddle with the max CPC or the daily budget. With Google Shopping, that's like trying to fix a car's engine by changing the air freshener. The real engine of a Shopping campaign is your product feed. Google doesn't have keywords you've chosen; it scans your product titles, descriptions, and other attributes to decide which search queries are relevant. A poor feed equals poor relevance, which leads to low Click-Through Rates (CTRs), high Cost Per Clicks (CPCs), and ultimately, a terrible cost per conversion like you're seeing.

You're selling a single SKU, which actually makes this easier to fix. Your entire focus should be on making the data for that one product as perfect as possible. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Your Product Title is Everything: This is the single most important factor. A generic title like "Blue T-shirt" is useless. You need to pack it with keywords a potential buyer would actually search for. Think about the structure: Brand + Product Type + Key Attributes (Material, Colour, Style) + Size/Gender. A much better title would be something like: "YourBrand Men's Organic Cotton Crew Neck T-Shirt in Navy Blue - Size Large". This immediately qualifies the searcher and tells Google exactly who to show the ad to. Rewrite your title immediately with this level of detail.

2. Beef Up Your Description: While the title is for grabbing attention and matching queries, the description provides deeper context for Google's algorithm. Don't just list features. Use the space to talk about benefits, what materials are used, where it's made, what problem it solves. Use the keywords you identified for your title again here naturally.

3. Nail Your Negative Keywords: You've started this, which is good. You need to be ruthless. Go into your Search Terms report every single day for the next two weeks. Any query that is irrelevant, even slightly, add it as a negative keyword. Are people searching for "cheap" and your product is premium? Add "cheap" as a negative. Are they searching for a different brand? Add it. This is about cleaning up the traffic so that only the most relevant people see your ad.

Only after you've done all of the above should you even consider your max CPC. A max CPC of £3 seems quite high and might be forcing Google to enter you into expensive, competitive auctions you can't win profitably yet. After you've optimised your feed, try lowering it significantly to something like £0.50-£0.80. You'll get fewer impressions initially, but they should be of much higher quality, and you'll get more clicks for your £20 daily budget, which means more data on what's actually converting.

Now, for your Meta campaign: How to grow without blowing it up...

A ROAS of 3.17 and a profitable cost per conversion from week one is a brilliant start. It means you've found a combination of creative and targeting that resonates with an audience. The temptation now is to crank up the budget to get more sales, but that's often the fastest way to kill a winning campaign.

The Meta ads algorithm values stability. When you make a significant change to the budget (either up or down), it can often reset the "learning phase," forcing the algorithm to re-learn who your best customers are. This can cause your costs to spike and performance to become erratic. You've got something that works; the job now is to nurture it, not shock it.

Here's the right way to scale:

1. Slow and Steady Wins the Race: You should start increasing the budget now, but do it gradually. A good rule of thumb is to increase the daily budget by no more than 10-20% at a time. So, on your £10/day budget, you'd increase it to £12. Let it run at that level for 2-3 days. If performance remains stable and profitable, increase it by another 20% to around £14.50. This methodical approach lets the algorithm adjust smoothly and expand your reach without causing chaos. It's boring, but it works.

2. Don't Touch Anything Else: While you are in the process of scaling the budget, do not change the creative, the copy, or the targeting. You want to isolate one variable at a time. If you increase the budget and change the ad copy, and performance tanks, you won't know which change was responsible.

3. Plan for Creative Fatigue: Your current winning ad will not work forever. Eventually, your audience will have seen it too many times, and your performance will start to drop. You should already be thinking about your next 2-3 ad variations. They could be different images, different videos, or different hooks in your ad copy. When you're ready to test them, duplicate your winning ad set and test the new creative in the new ad set. This preserves the original that you know works.

Running profitable Meta campaigns is something we do day-in, day-out. I remember one eCommerce client selling women's apparel where we achieved a 691% return by using a similar methodical scaling process, combined with a robust structure for testing new creatives and audiences. It's not about finding one magic ad; it's about building a system.

To help you get a better handle on your numbers, here's a little calculator. You can see how small changes in your conversion rate or cost per click can dramatically affect your overall profitability. Play around with it to see what you need to aim for.

You probably should think bigger than just tweaking campaigns...

Fixing these two campaigns is your immediate priority. But your question hints at a bigger issue: a lack of a strategic framework. You're currently reacting to numbers on a dashboard. To truly succeed, you need to get ahead of the data and start building a proper customer acquisition engine.

This means understanding your numbers on a much deeper level. Your target Cost Per Conversion of £8 is a good start, but where did it come from? Is it based on your product margin? Or is it just a number that feels right? The real question you should be asking isn't "How low can my cost per conversion go?" but rather "How high a cost per conversion can I afford to acquire a valuable customer?"

The answer to that lies in your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). If a customer only ever buys your one SKU for, say, £30, then a £8 acquisition cost is pretty tight. But if a customer who buys that first product goes on to buy from you three more times over the next year, their value is actually £120. Suddenly, paying even £15 or £20 to acquire them looks like a fantastic deal. Knowing your LTV is what separates amateur ad spenders from professional growth marketers. It's the math that unlocks agressive, intelligent scaling.

I've run the numbers for lots of eCommerce brands, from subscription boxes to apparel, and the ones that scale successfully are always the ones who are obsessed with their LTV:CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) ratio. They aim for at least a 3:1 ratio. This gives them the confidence to spend more on ads, knowing that they'll make it back over the long term.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

To pull this all together, here's a clear, actionable plan for what you need to do over the next couple of weeks. This isn't about random tweaks; it's a structured approach to fix what's broken and scale what's working.

As you can see, there's a fair bit to it. The steps themselves are simple, but implementing them consistently, analysing the data correctly, and knowing what to do next is where the real work lies. This is often where business owners find they spend more time managing ads than running their business, and where mistakes can get expensive.

Getting this right can be the difference between a side project and a genuinely scalable eCommerce business. While you can definately implement these changes yourself, working with an expert can accelerate the process massively, helping you avoid common pitfalls and scale faster and more profitably than you could on your own.

We do this all day, every day for our clients. If you'd like to have a chat and a proper look through your ad accounts together, we offer a completely free, no-obligation initial consultation. We can walk through your campaigns and give you a more detailed, tailored strategy. It could be a really valuable 20-30 minutes for you.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh