How We Build a Google Ads Account From Scratch for an Ecommerce Brand
When we build a Google Ads account from scratch, we do not start by opening Google Ads and creating campaigns.
We start with the business.
Before we decide what to run, we want to understand the products, bestsellers, margins, average order value, break-even acquisition cost, customer profile, strongest markets, existing Meta performance and the creative angles that are already working.
Then we build the measurement layer. Conversion tracking needs to work before the first meaningful dollar is spent, and Merchant Center needs to give Google accurate product information.
Only after that do we build the campaigns.
For a typical ecommerce account, our initial structure centres around non-branded Shopping for new customer acquisition, branded Search for brand protection, and high-intent non-branded Search to capture additional demand. We keep the first version of the account deliberately focused. Performance Max, broader audiences, YouTube and Demand Gen are introduced when the account has earned enough data and scale to use them properly.
That order is deliberate.
We have built accounts from $0 on Google to hundreds of thousands of dollars in attributed revenue. The common process has not been launching more campaigns. It has been giving Google the right business information, the right conversion signals and a clear job to do at each stage.
TL;DR
Our process for building an ecommerce Google Ads account from scratch is:
Understand the brand, economics, products, ICP and existing acquisition channels.
Set the commercial KPI before we spend.
Build accurate purchase tracking.
Optimise Merchant Center and the product feed.
Start with the products and market most likely to win.
Separate branded demand from new customer acquisition immediately.
Use Shopping as the primary ecommerce acquisition engine, supported by high-intent Search.
Introduce PMax after the account has useful conversion data rather than making it the entire strategy on day one.
Expand into additional products, regions and top-of-funnel campaigns only after the core structure works.
Keep scaling while performance stays inside the business's actual commercial targets.
We don't use one universal campaign template.
The principles stay consistent. The account itself is built around the business.
What do we need to know before building an ecommerce Google Ads account?
Before we build anything, we need to understand how the business already makes money.
This is the part I think gets skipped when someone treats Google Ads as a technical setup exercise.
When speaking to prospects, I regularly ask founders about their margins, AOV, break-even CPA, bestsellers, existing channels and the amount they can actually afford to pay for a customer.
Those answers determine the account.
One ecommerce founder we spoke with had launched a new product in May. The first month did roughly $50,000 at around break-even while they tested product-market fit and creative. Once they found the winning Meta concepts, the brand jumped to roughly $400,000 in revenue.
At that point, Google made sense.
The product had already been validated. The creative worked. There was proven demand. The founder knew the AOV was around $100 and had roughly $40–$45 available to acquire a customer.
That gives us something concrete to work with.
We are not asking Google to discover whether the business has a viable product. We are asking Google to find additional customers for a business that already has evidence people want what it sells.
This is why I don't agree with blindly launching Google Ads because somebody read that every ecommerce company "needs Google."
Sometimes Meta should come first.
For a lot of ecommerce brands, Meta is the initial distribution engine. It gives the business a way to test products, offers and creative quickly. Once that works, Google adds a different form of acquisition because customers can now find the brand while actively searching for the product or comparing alternatives.
We have spoken with multiple founders in exactly that position: Meta was working, revenue had already been established, and Google was barely being used.
An established streetwear business came to us after building a strong brand without relying heavily on Google. As competition increased and customer behaviour changed, the team started looking for additional growth levers. They weren't suddenly trying Google because the brand was failing. They were using it because a more mature acquisition model needed more than one channel.
That context changes how we build the account.
If Meta has already identified a winning angle, we don't ignore it.
If a particular product drives the majority of store revenue, we don't give every SKU equal priority.
If the brand has a $45 break-even CPA, we don't build toward an arbitrary ecommerce benchmark we found online.
If Australia is already the strongest market, we don't immediately divide the budget equally across four countries.
We build around what is already true about the business.
Our onboarding process is essentially a brand, offer and market analysis before an account build. We want to understand the team, ICP, products, bestsellers, margins, existing Meta campaigns and the angles that customers already respond to.
Then we create the Google structure from that information.
As I've explained directly to prospects, there is nothing cookie cutter about that part of our process. We build the account from scratch based on what we believe will work for that specific business.
What numbers do we establish before we spend money?
We establish the business's acceptable acquisition economics before we set the scaling target.
I don't like starting an ecommerce account with a random target ROAS.
A 4x ROAS can be excellent for one business and unacceptable for another.
The right target depends on the margin structure, AOV, repeat purchase behaviour, cash flow and what the company is actually trying to achieve.
We have clients where a lower ROAS is commercially acceptable because the economics support it. Other businesses need substantially more efficiency.
That is why conversations around Google frequently start with questions such as:
What are your margins?
What is your AOV?
What is the break-even CPA?
What is the minimum return you can tolerate?
The KPI needs to come from the business model rather than the advertising platform.
Once we know that number, our scaling philosophy becomes much simpler.
If we are maintaining the KPI and the recent data supports the result, we keep pushing.
If additional spend takes the account outside the commercial target, we diagnose why before pushing further.
The goal is not to achieve the highest-looking ROAS possible.
Our goal is to find the highest profitable level of scale the business and market can support.
Why do we set up conversion tracking before campaigns?
Because Google Ads cannot make good optimisation decisions if we have not clearly defined what a successful customer looks like.
Conversion tracking is one of the few parts of the process I consider non-negotiable.
I would rather delay the campaign launch than spend meaningful money through an account where purchase tracking is unreliable.
For ecommerce, the purchase is the primary outcome we care about.
We still track add to cart and begin checkout because those events are useful diagnostically, but I don't want Google treating an add to cart as equivalent to somebody handing the business money.
The primary conversion needs to represent the revenue-producing action.
We also want transaction value passed correctly.
A $500 order is different from a $50 order. If both conversions look identical to Google, we are withholding information that can help its bidding systems understand customer value.
We also like having a way to cross-check the main conversion event.
In one account, the primary purchase event recorded approximately $830,000 in conversion value, while a separate Triple Whale purchase event recorded roughly $865,000 over the same period.
That is close enough to give us confidence that both systems are capturing the same underlying activity.
I have seen the opposite as well.
Another account had one purchase event recording roughly 847 purchases and $12,000 in conversion value, while another event intended to track the same purchases showed only 582 purchases and around $7,800.
Something was clearly broken.
If we built a scaling strategy around the weaker event, both our reporting and Google's optimisation would be working with incomplete information.
A fresh account gives us an advantage here.
There is no reason to inherit years of duplicate conversion actions, strange account settings and poor optimisation data if we can build the measurement system correctly before launch.
How do we build Merchant Center before launching Shopping?
For ecommerce, Merchant Center is not a task sitting outside the strategy.
It is part of the advertising system.
Google uses the product feed to understand what we are selling and decide which searches should trigger Shopping listings.
That means we care about the product title, description, image, pricing, availability, shipping information and the markets where the feed is actually eligible.
A strong product with a weak feed is unnecessarily hard to scale.
We optimise titles so they clearly explain what the product is and include the attributes customers actually search for. The description gives Google additional useful product context without stuffing irrelevant keywords into the feed.
Images matter as well.
We test whether the product is stronger in a clean product-only format or shown in use. The correct answer changes by category. What matters is that the Shopping listing needs to earn the click before the customer ever reaches the website.
Then we check functionality.
One account we worked on had Merchant Center functioning in Australia but not correctly across several additional markets. The business was capable of selling in those countries, but the feed setup meant Google could not properly access those opportunities.
That is not a campaign optimisation issue. It is infrastructure.
We fixed those foundations before attempting to scale the campaigns. That account later added approximately $1.05 million in revenue from $33,000 in additional Google Ads spend over a 30-day period during a strong Black Friday window.
I don't attribute that outcome to Merchant Center alone. The account was also restructured and the timing gave us unusually strong demand.
The lesson is simpler: trying to scale a broken feed would have left a large amount of available traffic inaccessible regardless of how aggressively we increased the campaign budgets.
Which campaigns do we launch first?
For a new ecommerce Google Ads account, our starting structure is designed around intent and new customer acquisition.
The first two roles we want covered are straightforward:
Non-branded Shopping finds customers looking for the product.
Branded Search protects people looking specifically for the business.
Those campaigns are doing different jobs, so we separate them from the beginning.
Non-branded Shopping is the primary acquisition engine
For most ecommerce brands we work with, Shopping is the core scaling campaign.
The customer sees the product, price and image directly in Google. That makes it especially powerful when someone already has product intent.
We remove the brand name from the campaign so the results tell us whether the product can win against competitors among customers who have not already decided to buy from us.
That distinction is critical.
If somebody searches the company by name, converts and produces an enormous ROAS, that is useful revenue. But it tells us very little about whether we can acquire the next 1,000 new customers.
We want the account structured so we can tell the difference.
Branded Search protects existing demand
I also disagree with the idea that ecommerce brands should simply ignore branded Search because "the customer will find you anyway."
Competitors can bid on your name.
We have spoken with founders who searched their own brand on Google and found another product or competitor sitting above them.
One founder running a rapidly growing ecommerce brand told me that when he searched his own brand name, the first Shopping result was an Amazon product similar to his.
That is demand he had already spent money creating on Meta, yet another seller had the opportunity to intercept it when the customer moved to Google.
So we protect the brand.
What we do not do is let branded traffic consume the acquisition budget and then report the blended ROAS as though Google created every one of those customers.
Across our accounts, branded activity remains a deliberately small and separated part of the structure.
Our emphasis is on driving new sales, new customers and incremental revenue through non-branded traffic.
Non-branded Search captures demand Shopping misses
We then use Search to target the highest-intent product queries where the economics support it.
If someone searches directly for the type of product we sell, I want a Shopping result and I also want the opportunity to show a strong Search ad.
Shopping normally does the heavier lifting in ecommerce, but Search gives us additional coverage and lets us control the message around specific intent.
On a fresh account, we keep those keywords tight.
We are not trying to prove how many searches Google can find.
We are trying to build clean early conversion data from people with a strong probability of becoming customers.
Why don't we launch the account with one big Performance Max campaign?
Because a fresh account has almost no useful conversion history, and Performance Max becomes more valuable after we have given Google better data to learn from.
PMax is good.
I have seen it perform extremely well.
I have also seen it used terribly.
One of the most common approaches is to launch a brand-new store, dump the entire catalogue into Performance Max, give Google a budget and hope the algorithm works everything out.
We don't build accounts that way.
On an account with little conversion history, we prefer to begin with controlled Search and Shopping activity and establish purchase data first.
Once PMax is introduced, we give it a defined role.
Brand exclusions matter because unrestricted PMax has a tendency to lean into the easiest conversions available, particularly branded traffic. That creates a great-looking ROAS while doing far less new customer acquisition than the founder assumes.
I have described PMax to prospects in fairly simple terms: it can absolutely crush, but if it is not set up correctly, it will go after branded traffic and waste money.
That is why automation comes after strategy.
We decide the customer we want, the products we want Google to push and the traffic we want separated. Then we let automation operate inside those guardrails.
We do not ask the algorithm to design the business strategy for us.
Which products do we put into the first Shopping campaigns?
We usually start with a small group of products that already have the strongest commercial evidence behind them.
For a larger catalogue, that commonly means the top three to five bestsellers rather than every SKU in the store.
The reason is budget concentration.
If we launch 100 products on a limited initial budget, Google has to decide where to allocate spend before most products have enough conversion data to prove themselves.
That can produce some strange allocations.
We have audited accounts where the best products were starved for spend while weak products continued consuming budget.
In one case, the top three products were generating roughly a 12x ROAS, the middle 20 were around 3x, and the bottom 77 were around 0.8x. The account was spending roughly $300 per day on products that were losing money while the winners remained restricted.
I have even seen an individual product showing a 37x ROAS from six conversions after only $10 in spend.
That does not automatically mean I pour unlimited budget into the product. We still need to verify the search terms, margin and available demand.
But it is exactly the sort of signal I want isolated and tested properly rather than buried among 100 other SKUs.
For a new account, concentration makes the learning process cleaner.
We can run the bestsellers hard enough to learn whether they can acquire new customers profitably, while keeping another controlled testing layer for products that have not yet proven themselves.
The objective is not to advertise the whole catalogue.
It is to discover where profitable scale exists.
How do we decide which country to launch first?
We start with the strongest market and separate materially different regions as the account develops.
A brand being able to ship worldwide does not mean every country deserves equal budget on day one.
One ecommerce account we built from scratch had Australia as its natural primary market.
We launched Australia first because that was where the business had the strongest foundation.
As the account proved itself, we introduced the United States, United Kingdom and Canada separately.
Australia continued receiving the larger allocation while the secondary regions gathered data.
That separation mattered because the performance was different enough that combining every country into one campaign would have hidden what was happening.
Eventually, when international volume becomes meaningful, we can separate individual regions even further.
The principle is the same as product segmentation:
Give meaningful differences their own measurement and budget control.
Don't create complexity for the sake of having a sophisticated-looking account, but don't combine materially different markets and then wonder why the data is hard to interpret.
When do landing pages become part of the Google Ads account?
Landing pages become part of our strategy when search intent is more specific than the page the customer is currently landing on.
This came up clearly in one of our furniture account reviews.
The brand was sending a lot of its advertising traffic to a generic homepage.
Our view was that certain search groups deserved their own experience.
If we are bidding on competitor terms, for example, a dedicated comparison page gives us the opportunity to explain why somebody should choose the client's product rather than simply dropping them onto a homepage and expecting them to work that out themselves.
Advertorial-style pages can work for the same reason.
The campaign tells us what the customer is looking for. The landing page should continue that conversation.
We do not build a new page for every keyword.
We build them when the difference in intent is commercially meaningful.
This becomes increasingly important as spend grows.
The easiest customers will tolerate a more generic journey because they already know what they want.
The next layer of demand needs more convincing.
At that stage, better message matching and landing pages can open traffic that previously looked unprofitable.
What does a successful account look like after the first 60–90 days?
A successful account is not one with the most campaigns.
It is one where we can explain what every campaign does, what customer it is trying to acquire and why the business is spending money there.
One of our clearest examples started at $0 in Google Ads spend.
The brand had only limited Meta activity and almost no branded demand supporting the Google account.
We started with the core ecommerce structure: non-branded Shopping, branded protection, non-branded Search and controlled PMax.
Within the first 60 days, the account generated approximately $266,000 in revenue.
When we broke down the result, 87% of the revenue came from non-branded terms and 13% from branded campaigns.
That distinction is one of the reasons I like this case so much.
It wasn't an existing brand spending heavily on Meta and then letting Google claim the final branded click.
Google was actually being used to acquire customers who were searching for the product rather than the business.
The account reached $369,000 in under 90 days, and when it was later reviewed, it had generated roughly $400,000 in revenue from $91,000 in spend.
Those results are not a benchmark I promise every ecommerce business.
The product had strong demand and the economics allowed us to scale.
What the account demonstrates is the sequence.
We didn't need 30 campaigns on day one.
We started with high-intent acquisition, kept branded demand separate, let Google accumulate useful conversion data and expanded after the foundation proved itself.
When do we add YouTube and Demand Gen?
We add top-of-funnel campaigns after the account has captured enough high-intent demand to justify expanding further.
This is where the structure changes from simply capturing demand to helping create more of it.
At a lower budget, I want the money close to the sale.
If somebody is searching for our exact product today, that click is normally more valuable than showing a cold YouTube ad to somebody who has never heard of the category.
As spend grows, that calculation changes.
The Shopping, Search and PMax layers begin reaching diminishing returns. We have captured a large part of the demand that already exists, so continued scale requires getting in front of customers earlier.
This is where Demand Gen and YouTube become interesting.
If a brand already has winning Meta creatives, we do not always start the creative process again from zero.
We have taken ads that were already working on Meta and moved them onto YouTube through Demand Gen.
In the $369,000 ecommerce account, that is exactly what we did.
The initial Demand Gen campaigns started at a lower return than the high-intent campaigns. That is normal because the traffic was colder.
Within roughly two to three weeks, the transferred Meta creatives were producing a profitable return, and the campaigns continued improving.
We tested creative in small batches rather than uploading everything at once, then separated winners so we could put more budget behind them while continuing to test.
That is how I think about full-funnel Google Ads.
Search and Shopping capture intent.
PMax supports wider coverage and remarketing when controlled properly.
YouTube and Demand Gen expand the number of people entering the buying journey.
The account becomes broader as the budget and data justify it.
How do we scale the account once the structure is working?
We establish the target, monitor the account against it and keep increasing spend while the commercial result holds.
The principle sounds simple because it is.
The difficult part is knowing whether the signal is real.
We look at recent performance rather than trusting one large historical average. We also use third-party attribution data where the client has it, because platform reporting alone does not answer every question.
If the economics remain healthy, we keep pushing.
That approach has produced very different levels of scale depending on the business.
One ecommerce example in our sales material went from approximately $0 to $33,000 in spend and $236,000 in attributed revenue in around 60 days, at roughly a 7x reported return. The brand already had proof of concept on Meta before Google was introduced.
Another client started around $11,000 per month in Google Ads spend.
Over roughly six months, we scaled that account to approximately $222,000 per month in spend, with reported monthly attributed revenue reaching around $1.75 million and ROAS moving from roughly 4x to around 8x.
Those examples also explain why I don't like rigid statements such as "Google Ads stops scaling at X dollars per month."
Every market has a real ceiling.
But I have seen far too many accounts hit fake ceilings created by weak structure, poor data or too much reliance on branded traffic.
Our job is to keep removing those restrictions until we reach the genuine commercial limit.
Where does AI fit into how we manage the account?
We use AI to surface information faster, not to replace our judgement.
We have built an internal agent that analyses data across the Google Ads accounts we manage and outputs recommendations.
At higher levels of spend, there is simply more happening inside the account every day. Having a system capable of surfacing unusual movements or opportunities helps the team process that information faster.
But we still keep a human in the loop.
I have been very clear about this in conversations with prospects: I do not trust AI enough to let it independently make every strategic decision in a client account.
It helps with analysis.
We make the decision.
That matters because automated advertising platforms already contain a huge amount of algorithmic decision-making.
Our value is not in adding another layer of automation and walking away.
Our job is deciding what Google should optimise toward, where it should be allowed to spend and whether what the algorithm is reporting actually makes commercial sense.
What do we deliberately avoid when building a new ecommerce account?
There are a few shortcuts we avoid because we have seen where they lead.
We don't launch without reliable purchase tracking.
We don't dump the entire catalogue into one campaign simply because Google makes it easy.
We don't mix branded traffic into acquisition campaigns and then use the resulting ROAS as proof of new customer growth.
We don't use PMax as a replacement for account strategy.
We don't introduce every campaign type on day one.
And we don't copy the same structure between completely different ecommerce businesses.
A furniture brand with a high AOV, multiple markets and competitor-focused searches needs a different account from a single-product store with a $50 purchase.
A release-based streetwear company operates differently from an evergreen homewares brand.
A business with proven Meta creative gives us information a completely new business does not have.
That is why our process starts before the campaigns.
The more accurately we understand the business, the simpler the first version of the Google Ads account can be.
When should an ecommerce brand wait before building Google Ads?
We recommend waiting when the business does not yet have enough evidence that the underlying offer works or cannot define the economics of acquiring a customer.
Google Ads is not a substitute for product-market fit.
One of the reasons we were confident rolling Google out for the ecommerce founder who had jumped from roughly $50,000 to $400,000 through Meta was that the difficult first question had already been answered:
People wanted the product.
The brand had a winning offer, creative and an established break-even CPA.
Our job was to open a new acquisition channel around proven demand.
That is a much stronger starting position than asking Google to save an offer nobody has successfully bought anywhere else.
We also need enough operational capacity to fulfil the growth.
There is little value in successfully doubling orders if the business immediately runs out of its bestseller, cannot finance inventory or destroys customer experience through fulfilment problems.
The account has to fit the business.
Sometimes that means scaling aggressively.
Sometimes the correct decision is to wait.
Our recommendation
If we were building your ecommerce Google Ads account from scratch tomorrow, I would not begin by asking which campaign type you want.
I would start with:
What already sells?
What is the AOV?
What does it cost to fulfil the order?
What CPA or ROAS keeps the business commercially healthy?
Who is the customer?
What Meta creative already works?
Which products deserve the first dollar?
Which market is strongest?
What do customers search before they buy?
Then we make sure Google can measure a purchase correctly and Merchant Center can accurately represent the product.
From there, the first version of the account should be intentionally focused.
Launch branded protection.
Launch non-branded Shopping around the products with the clearest opportunity.
Use high-intent Search where it adds additional coverage.
Build conversion data.
Then expand.
PMax, broader products, new markets, YouTube and Demand Gen are not separate tricks.
They are later layers of the same system.
Final takeaway
A Google Ads account built from scratch should be simpler than most people expect and more commercially informed than most default setups are.
We do not begin with campaign types.
We begin with the business.
The products, margins, customers, markets and existing acquisition data tell us what the account needs to look like.
Then we give Google strong measurement, a clean product feed and clearly separated campaign roles.
The first objective is to capture high-intent demand and prove new customer acquisition.
The second is to accumulate enough reliable data to expand.
The third is to keep pushing spend while the economics remain inside the business's KPI.
That is the process we have used on accounts that started at zero and grew into significant Google Ads acquisition channels.
The campaigns change.
The principle doesn't:
Understand the business first, give Google clean signals, acquire new customers deliberately, then earn the right to scale.
Frequently asked questions
What campaigns should a new ecommerce Google Ads account start with?
We start with a focused structure built around non-branded Shopping and branded Search, supported by high-intent non-branded Search where the opportunity exists. Shopping handles the core product-acquisition role, while branded campaigns protect existing demand without allowing it to distort new-customer reporting.
Should a new ecommerce brand launch Performance Max immediately?
We don't use Performance Max as the entire strategy on a fresh account. We prefer to establish useful conversion history through controlled Search and Shopping activity first, then introduce PMax with a defined objective and the appropriate brand exclusions.
What do we need from an ecommerce brand before building the account?
We want to understand the ICP, bestsellers, margins, AOV, break-even acquisition cost, strongest markets, current Meta performance and the creative angles already producing sales. Those inputs determine the account structure and the KPI we use when scaling.
Written by Max Crakanthorp, Founder of Kraken Digital