1. Your Quality Score Is Costing You

Quality Score is a 1-10 rating Google gives each keyword based on three factors:

Expected click-through rate

Landing page experience

Ad relevance

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Anything under 7/10? You're overpaying massively for every click. Here's why it matters.

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Ad Rank = Quality Score × Bid. 

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A competitor with a 10/10 quality score bidding £1.50 will outrank you even if you're bidding £2 with a 5/10 score. They pay less and rank higher.

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Start breaking keywords into tighter ad groups so your ads are laser-relevant to each search term. If you sell dresses, don't lump "floral dress" and "red mini dress" together - give them separate ad groups with tailored ads. 

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Better relevance = Better Quality Score = Lower CPCs.

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2. Your Collection Pages Are Killing Conversions

Shopping ads send traffic to product pages. Search ads usually send traffic to collection pages.

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Most brands obsess over optimising their product pages but completely neglect collections. That's a problem when Search is your growth channel.

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One brand I looked at had a 0.73% conversion rate on product pages but only 0.54% on collections - nearly 35% lower.

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Check your Shopify analytics (Sessions by Landing Page report). 

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Compare product vs collection conversion rates. If there's a gap, optimise your collections: reduce bounce rates, surface best-sellers higher, make navigation effortless.

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3. Your Pricing Doesn't Support Search

Search campaigns typically have higher CPCs than Shopping. If your AOV is £20-30 with thin margins, Search probably won't work for you.

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But if you've got room to increase prices or healthy margins, it changes everything.

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One brand we worked with was stuck at £60 AOV with 40% margins - they couldn't afford to bid competitively. 

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We gradually increased prices to £90 AOV with 60% margins. Their profitable target ROAS dropped from 5.8x to 3.8x, meaning they could now bid more aggressively and actually win auctions.

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Important things to start considering:

• Stop giving away free shipping for no reason - use it as a threshold to increase AOV instead. If you have a £50 AOV, set your free shipping threshold to £60+. This doesn’t drop CVR% in our tests, it boosts AOV and your margins as a result.
• Test price increases incrementally (don't tank your Shopping performance)
• Remember - lower ROAS doesn't mean lower profit if your margins support it

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