63 Products Out Of 7,000 Were Driving The Profit

The situation

The client came to me with an account that looked fine on the surface. Performance Max was generating sales, spend was steady, and the feed held over 7,000 products. The assumption, as with a lot of accounts, was that Google's automation had already found the right products to push.

The problem was simpler than that. Nobody knew where the budget was actually going.

Performance Max is good at finding customers. It's far less good at showing you how your catalogue performs product by product. With thousands of SKUs in the feed, standard reporting wasn't answering the questions we needed to answer before spending another pound.

Finding the problem

I ran the account through my Performance Max Channel Dashboard, one of the scripts I built to surface the data Google keeps buried.

It flagged the issue within minutes. Out of more than 7,000 products, only 63 were consistently turning a profit. Less than 1% of the catalogue was carrying the whole account.

Then it found something worse. Google Ads was spending around £2,000 a month on two products that weren't selling at all. That budget kept flowing while the products that actually made money fought over what was left.

This wasn't a bidding issue or a keyword issue. It was a visibility issue. Without product-level data at scale, there was no way to see any of it.

The strategy

The first job wasn't growth. It was efficiency.

The dashboard showed exactly where budget should and shouldn't go, so I rebuilt the campaign structure around the products already proven to make money. Budget moved off the poor performers and onto the ones driving revenue.

At the same time I worked through the conversion tracking to clean up the data going back into Google. Better signals in, better optimisation out. Every call was based on the numbers, not a hunch.

The first month

Most businesses expect a jump in revenue the moment changes go live. That's not how this works, and it's not what we were aiming for.

The first phase was about efficiency, not sales. Here's how month one landed:

Revenue dropping looks like a bad result. It wasn't. The business was selling fewer units and making a lot more on each one. We'd cut the wasted spend and put the money where it earned its keep.

That gave us a solid base to build on.

Scaling

With the account running efficiently, we could start scaling properly.

I increased budgets on the proven products and added new campaign structures to bring in more profitable traffic without letting spend run away. Weekend campaigns pulled in leads at a lower cost, so the sales team always had something to follow up without overspending through the quieter periods.

The point wasn't to spend more. It was to put every extra pound where the data said it would earn the most back.

The result

A few months in, the business had its best month on record. Revenue beat the previous best by nearly £40,000.

The growth held because it wasn't built on bigger budgets and hope. It came from understanding how Performance Max was actually behaving, cutting the waste, fixing Google's signals, and building around products that made money.

Why it matters

I see this in ecommerce accounts most weeks. People think they've got a bidding problem. Usually they've got a visibility problem. If you can't see which products make you money, you can't make a confident decision about any of them.

That's the whole reason I built the Performance Max Channel Dashboard. It surfaces what standard Google Ads reporting won't, so you can act on real numbers.

The next script is already in build. My Product Label Automation Script will segment products by performance automatically, so you can build and maintain high-performing campaign structures in minutes instead of hours.

The numbers

• Analysed 7,000+ products in minutes

• Found that 63 products, under 1% of the catalogue, drove most of the profit

• Uncovered £2,000 a month spent on products that weren't selling

• Gross profit up 12%, trading margin up 23%

• Rebuilt the account into a scalable, performance-led structure

• Delivered the best trading month in the company's history, beating the previous record by nearly £40,000