The Google Ads ecommerce account checklist I run every quarter
Ecommerce Google Ads accounts have more moving parts than service business accounts. Seasonal demand, product feed changes, shopping vs search dynamics, and the complexity of Performance Max all create more places for things to go wrong - and more opportunities to find gains that compound.
A quarterly review is more strategic than the weekly operational checks I run on every account. Weekly I am looking for anomalies, adding negatives, checking spend pace. Quarterly I am asking whether the overall architecture and strategy still makes sense. Here is the structure I follow for ecommerce accounts specifically.
Product feed health
Start with Merchant Center diagnostics. What percentage of your product catalogue is disapproved or limited? Any disapproval rate above 5 percent is worth investigating. Common causes are price mismatches between your feed and live website prices, missing GTINs for branded products, and policy violations in product titles or descriptions. Products that are not approved are generating zero impressions - that is invisible lost revenue.
Check your best-selling products specifically. Cross-reference your top 20 revenue products in your ecommerce platform against their Merchant Center status. A disapproval on a high-revenue product is more important than ten disapprovals on low-volume items. Prioritise by commercial impact.
Shopping vs Performance Max split review
Quarterly is the right cadence to review whether your campaign type allocation still makes sense. For your highest-margin, highest-volume product categories, are you running Standard Shopping with appropriate priority settings and bid controls? For categories where you want incremental reach and have sufficient conversion data, is Performance Max structured correctly with the right audience signals? The split should reflect deliberate strategy, not default settings from when campaigns were first built.
Seasonal budget review
Look at your conversion data by month for the last two years. Identify the demand peaks and troughs for your specific category. Are your campaign budgets calibrated to match that seasonal curve, or are they flat allocations that underspend during peaks and waste during troughs? A simple seasonal budget plan - higher allocations in months with historically higher demand - prevents you from being budget-constrained during your best trading periods.
Bidding strategy health check
For each campaign, check whether smart bidding strategies have sufficient conversion data to operate effectively. A campaign that received 8 conversions last month is below the threshold where Target ROAS bidding is reliable. Either consolidate it with a related campaign to pool conversion volume, or switch to a less constrained strategy while volume builds. Automated bidding working with insufficient data is worse than no automated bidding.
ROAS targets vs actual margins
Product margins change. Promotions run. Shipping costs shift. Quarterly is the right moment to verify that your ROAS targets still reflect your actual margin requirements. A 400 percent ROAS target set when your gross margin was 40 percent may be inadequate if margins have compressed. Recalculate your minimum viable ROAS from current margin data and update targets accordingly.
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