What a Google Ads Agency Should Do in the First 90 Days for an Ecommerce Brand
A month-by-month view of the first 90 days with a new Google Ads agency: what should happen, in what order, and what you should see.
In the first 90 days, a good Google Ads agency should fix your tracking, clean up your feed, cut obvious waste, rebuild only what needs rebuilding, and then start growing what works. In that order. The first month is about foundations. The second is about structure. The third is about growth. If your new agency launches a full rebuild in week one before checking tracking, be worried.
Here is what each month should look like for an ecommerce brand, and what you should expect to see.
Before day one: access and an audit
A good start happens before the contract begins. The agency should ask for access to your Google Ads account, Merchant Center, Google Analytics, tag manager and your store platform. Everything should stay in your name, with the agency added as a user.
It should also have audited your account and told you what it found. If you have not seen that yet, ask for it. Our free Google Ads audit is one example of what that looks like.
Month one: foundations
Tracking. This comes first because every other decision depends on it. The agency should check that each purchase is recorded once, at the right value, and compare Google Ads purchases with your store’s orders. It should check which conversion actions steer bidding, and switch off soft actions that inflate the numbers. If you use enhanced conversions or server-side tagging, it should check those too.
Feed health. In Merchant Center, the agency should fix disapproved and limited products, and look at titles, product types and missing attributes. Big feed rewrites can come later. Month one is about stopping the obvious leaks.
Search terms and negatives. The agency should read your search terms and exclude searches that will never buy. This is often the fastest way to cut waste.
Brand and non-brand. It should split reporting so you can see how much revenue comes from people searching your name, and how much from new demand.
What you should see: a written list of what was found and fixed. Cleaner numbers. Cost may drop as waste is cut. Do not expect revenue to jump yet. Sometimes tracked revenue even falls in month one, because duplicate or soft conversions are removed. That is the truth showing up, not a step backward.
Month two: structure
With clean data, the agency can decide how the account should be built.
Campaign roles. Search, Shopping and Performance Max should each have a clear job. A common setup separates brand search, non-brand search, and product campaigns, so they do not compete for the same shopper. Our guide on Performance Max vs Search for ecommerce covers the trade-offs.
Product groups. Products should be grouped by what they earn and how they sell, not by your site menu. Custom labels in the feed mark margin bands, bestsellers, seasonal lines and new products, so budget can be pointed at the right group.
Feed improvements. Titles rewritten to lead with what people search for. Product types that match how shoppers think. Better images where Google flags problems.
Bidding. Targets set from your real margins, not a rule of thumb. The agency should know roughly what you can afford to pay for a sale on each product group.
What you should see: a clear account structure you can understand when it is explained to you. Changes made in stages, not all at once, so the effect of each can be seen. Weekly notes on what changed.
Month three: growth
Now the agency can push.
Budget toward winners. Money moves to the product groups and campaigns that earn it.
New demand. Non-brand search terms that convert get their own control. New product groups are tested.
Creative and landing pages. Ad copy tested. Performance Max assets refreshed. Where product pages are holding back conversion, the agency should say so, even if it does not build pages itself.
A plan for the next quarter. By the end of month three you should have a written view of what worked, what did not, and what comes next.
What you should see: a report that ties cost and tracked revenue to the changes made. A clear split of brand and non-brand. Specific next steps.
Red flags in the first 90 days
- A full rebuild in week one. Rebuilding before checking tracking means decisions are made on bad data.
- No word about tracking. If the agency never mentions it, it may not have checked it.
- Only good news. Month one almost always finds problems. An agency that reports none probably did not look.
- A promised number. Nobody can promise a revenue figure before running your account.
- You cannot see what changed. Every change should be visible in the account’s change history and summarized for you.
If you see several of these, our guide to signs your Google Ads agency is wasting money goes deeper.
What good looks like over time
The first 90 days set the foundations. Real growth in ecommerce usually builds after that, as campaigns learn and the feed improves. Patience is not the same as drift, though. You should see clear progress in the quality of the account by day 90, even if revenue is still building.
For a sense of what longer runs look like: an ecommerce retailer we worked with grew from $133,365 in tracked Google Ads revenue in January 2022 to $1,172,647 in December 2022. A lithium battery brand has run with Nathan Synoground from 2018 to 2026, with $2.1M in spend and $16.0M in tracked revenue. Every account is different, and these are not promises. They are what the work can lead to when the foundations are right.
Start with the audit
The first 90 days go faster when the audit is done before day one. Request a free Google Ads audit and you will see what we would fix first. To see how we run accounts after that, read about Google Ads for ecommerce, or go back to our ranking of Google Ads agencies.