Google Ads and Merchant Centre
audits for UK D2C brands.
Read against your P&L, not your dashboard.
D2C · £10k+/month · From £2,500
Platform metrics show you what's underperforming. They don't tell you why, or what it's actually costing you. This audit starts with your margins, your SKU roles and your business goals, then reads the account and the feed through that lens.
It isn't free, and that's the point. A margin-led diagnosis needs your cost data and days of modelling before anyone opens the ads account. That work doesn't scale to free, from me or from anyone else.
The problem with most audits
Most Google Ads audits are a list. Disapproved assets. Low Quality Scores. Bid strategies that don't match best practice. Delivered in a slide deck you close after the first skim.
The issues aren't wrong. But they're read from the platform outward, without knowing your margins, which products actually matter to the business, or what you're trying to achieve in the next 90 days.
Why this one isn't free
Free audits are common now, and some of them are genuinely good. But price follows scope, and scope follows inputs.
An audit that runs from account access alone can be produced quickly, which is why that version scales to free. An audit that reads your account against SKU-level contribution margin cannot. It needs your cost of goods, your shipping and returns, your product roles and your channel mix, and then it needs days of modelling before anyone looks at a campaign.
The output is different because the input is different. One tells you which settings are wrong. The other tells you which products are funding the business and which are quietly draining it.
You're paying for days of margin modelling, not a platform scan. That's the whole difference, and it's why the fee is what it is.
Not sure whether you need an audit at all? That's a free twenty minutes, and I'll tell you if the answer is no.
Built from your business first
Before anything is reviewed, I spend time understanding the business. That means actual calls where I work through:
- Your margins and what profit looks like at SKU level
- Which products you want to grow, protect, or exit
- Your current channel mix and how Google Ads fits within it
- What success looks like for you, not what Google defines as a good account
Only once I understand the business do I go into the account. That context changes what I'm looking for. Margin blindness, unclear new customer acquisition cost and allowable breakevens. Targeting problems are often feed problems. And structural issues won't be fixed by optimisation, they need rebuilding.
What I need from you before we start
This is a hard requirement rather than a wish list. Without it, the audit becomes the platform-level version described above, and neither of us gets anything worth £2,500 out of it.
- Cost of goods at SKU or product-family level
- Shipping costs and return rates
- Payment processing and any finance or instalment fees
- Which products you consider hero, growth, or end of line
- Read access to Google Ads, Merchant Centre and your ecommerce backend
If the margin data doesn't exist yet in a usable form, say so on the sense check call. Building it is often the single most valuable thing a brand does in the process, and I'd rather help you get there than run a weaker audit around the gap.
What you actually get
Not a settings checklist. A written commercial read plus the underlying models, delivered as a document and a presentation, then walked through with you on a call.
Three things do most of the work.
SKU-level profitability table
Every product carrying spend, with contribution margin after media, and a funding decision attached to each. This is usually the table that reorders which campaigns you thought were working.
Illustrative structure, not client data.
Back-end KPI reality table
Your actual trading numbers year on year, on like-for-like weeks, next to what the platform is reporting. Contribution margin, new customer acquisition cost, new customer volume and what the spend is doing to working capital.
Three-month roadmap
Sequenced by dependency rather than by effort, so the work happens in an order that actually compounds. Delivered with a conservative and an upside case, and a list of what I need from you on the critical path.
Measurement corrected first: attribution, brand and generic separation, conversion integrity. Account hygiene fixed. Alongside that, feed enrichment starts and the custom label system gets built against margin, velocity and spend - so the segmentation exists before anything is restructured around it.
The restructure that puts month one's work to use. Campaigns rebuilt around the label system so budget follows margin rather than product type, catalogue coverage widened, and targets held steady so the changes can actually be read.
Exposure widened only where margin supports it, and a 30/60/90 checkpoint against the baseline set at the start.
- Brand contamination analysis: reported ROAS against true non-brand return
- SKU spend-band analysis: what share of catalogue carries what share of budget and revenue
- Custom label system design, including the data flow from backend sales to feed to campaign
- Campaign budget allocation and impression share against target headroom
- Merchant Centre status, disapprovals and attribute coverage
- Before and after product title examples, written for search language
- Executive summary with one central finding and three ranked priorities
If that's the level of detail you've been missing, the audit is two weeks from start to readout.
Account and feed reviewed together, because they're the same problem
The audit covers two things most agencies treat separately.
Campaign type and structure, bidding strategy selection, budget allocation, hygiene, ad copy, audience usage, conversion tracking integrity and wasted spend - all read against what I've learned about the business rather than against best practice in the abstract.
As a shopping specialist, attribute coverage and density, title alignment to real search behaviour, feed health, categorisation, and how the feed performs for the products that actually carry your margin.
Disapprovals, limitations and errors get dug into as well, the wider set of issues I resolve as a Merchant Centre consultant rather than simply flag. For D2C brands the two are inseparable. A well-run account built on a weak feed is still a leaking account.
Not a PDF drop. A deliverable you go through together.
You get a presentation and a structured document. Then I go through it with you on a call: each finding, why it matters for your business specifically, and which fixes to prioritise first.
You leave knowing exactly what to do, in what order, and why.
Here's exactly what happens
Two weeks from receiving access and your margin data through to the readout call.
A no-commitment call to understand your situation and work out whether an audit is the right next step, or whether something else is. If it isn't, I'll say so.
Margins, SKU roles, channel mix and business goals, worked through properly with your cost data in hand before the account is opened.
Account and Merchant Centre reviewed through the lens of everything learned about the business, then modelled at SKU level.
I take you through the full audit. Findings first, prioritised fixes second, and the roadmap sequenced so you know what to do on Monday.
One fee. One deliverable. No retainer attached.
Fixed price, agreed before anything starts. No day-rate creep and no scope negotiation halfway through.
- Two weeks from access and margin data to readout call
- Account and Merchant Centre reviewed together, not separately
- Document, presentation and a live walkthrough
- You own the findings, the models and the roadmap outright
UK D2C brands spending £10k+ per month on Google Ads. That's deliberately lower than the threshold for ongoing management, because a diagnosis is worth having at a spend level where a retainer isn't yet.
Below £10k the numbers get thin enough that SKU-level modelling starts producing noise rather than signal, and I'd rather tell you that than take the fee.
No obligation to continue. You own everything.
The audit is a one-off. There's no expectation of what comes after. The findings are yours, the document is yours, and you can action all of it independently, in-house, or with another agency if that's what makes sense.
Some clients go on to ongoing account management afterwards. That's a separate conversation, on separate terms, made after you've seen the work rather than before.
Questions you should be asking
Why isn't your audit free?
Because of what goes into it. An audit that runs from account access alone can be turned around fast, and that's the version most people give away. This one starts with your cost of goods, shipping, returns and product roles, and spends days modelling contribution margin at SKU level before anyone looks at a campaign.
Price follows scope, and scope follows inputs. Some free audits are genuinely good. None of them are this, because this doesn't scale to free for anyone.
What's the difference between this and a free audit?
Where it starts. A platform-led audit begins in the ads account and reads outward, so its findings are settings-shaped: structure, bidding, disapprovals, wasted spend. Useful, but it can't tell you which products should be funded, because it never saw your margins.
This begins with the P&L and reads inward. The output is a set of commercial decisions with the account evidence behind them, rather than a list of fixes with no way to rank them.
What's the minimum spend?
£10k+ per month on Google Ads. Lower than the £25k+ threshold for ongoing management, deliberately. Below £10k, SKU-level data gets thin enough that the modelling produces noise rather than findings, and I'd tell you that rather than take the work.
How long does it take?
Two weeks from receiving account access and your margin data through to the readout call. Very large catalogues or multi-market setups can run slightly longer, and I'll tell you that upfront rather than after.
What do you need from me?
Cost of goods at SKU or product-family level, shipping costs, return rates, payment and finance fees, your view on which products are hero or end of line, and read access to Google Ads, Merchant Centre and your ecommerce backend.
The cost data is a hard requirement rather than a nice-to-have. Without it this becomes the platform-level audit described above, which isn't what you'd be paying for.
What if I can't produce clean margin data?
Say so on the sense check call. It's more common than you'd think, particularly where shipping and returns sit outside the product costing.
Building that view is frequently the single most valuable thing a brand does in this whole process, and it's work I can help scope. What I won't do is run the audit around the gap and present the result as a profit analysis.
Do I have to work with you afterwards?
No, and the audit isn't priced as a route into something else. It's a standalone product. Plenty of the findings are things an in-house team can action without me, and the roadmap is written so they can.
Can I give this to my in-house team or another agency?
Yes. You own it. It's written to be actioned by whoever is running the account, and the roadmap is sequenced by dependency so it makes sense to someone who wasn't on the calls.
Do you audit Performance Max and Shopping?
They get the deepest scrutiny, because that's where most D2C spend sits and where the feed and the account stop being separable. Asset group segmentation, catalogue exposure, brand cannibalisation, impression share against target headroom, and the feed conditions underneath all of it.
What if you don't find anything?
It hasn't happened, and the reason is structural rather than lucky. Almost every account I look at was built platform first and business second - targets set on ROAS, budgets set on what the dashboard rewarded, feeds built for approval rather than for search. Measured against contribution margin and new customer economics instead, there's essentially always a gap.
If your account genuinely is clean on those terms, that's a finding worth having too, and you still keep the SKU-level model and the roadmap. But I'd be surprised, and I'd tell you plainly on the sense check call if I thought it was likely.
Find out what your account is actually returning.
Two weeks, one fixed fee, and a set of commercial decisions at the end of it rather than a list of settings to change.
- Account and Merchant Centre reviewed as one problem.
- Modelled against your margins, not the platform's targets.
- Yours to keep and action, with or without me.