The Judgment Business: Google Ads for Ecommerce Store Owners

Your dashboard says the ads are working. Your bank account isn't so sure. One account I audited reported 340 conversions in a month. The real number was 47. Nothing looked broken. The ads ran, the reports arrived on time, and the bidding algorithm had been training on fiction for months. Ten years of running Google Ads for ecommerce brands taught me that accounts fail on foundations. Conversion data that doesn't match reality. Product feeds nobody has opened in a year. Campaign structures that flatter themselves. Scaling an account in that state doesn't just fail, it costs you faster, because every problem underneath gets multiplied by the new money you pour in. So this book works in order: measurement first, then the product feed, then structure and targeting, then the ad and the page it lands on, and only then budgets and scale. You'll learn to test your own tracking end to end, spot the bot traffic inflating your analytics, read the search terms report like an operator, and grow spend without watching ROAS collapse. You'll also see exactly where AI earns its place and where it confidently wastes your money. Google will keep changing the buttons. What survives every redesign is knowing which number to distrust, what evidence clears the bar for acting, and when the right move is to do nothing. Fix it. Then scale it.