How I Think About PPC.
Ryan Stubblefield, Founder, Waymaker Technologies — PPC Management for E-commerce Brands
I'm a business owner first. That matters more than any certification, platform trick, or bidding strategy I could put on this page.
Before I ever managed a dollar of ad spend for someone else, I was managing my own. My money, my margins, my risk. When a campaign doesn't work, I don't get to hide behind a slide deck or blame the algorithm. I feel it the same way you do — in the bank account. That shapes everything about how I approach paid advertising. I don't optimize for metrics that look good in a report. I optimize for profit.
Most agencies and most PPC managers have never run a business. They've run campaigns. There's a difference. Running a campaign means hitting a ROAS target, keeping cost-per-click in range, and showing up to the weekly call with a chart that trends up and to the right. Running a business means understanding that a 12x ROAS on a product with 15% margins is worse than a 6x ROAS on a product with 50% margins. It means knowing that revenue without profit is just expensive cardio. I think about your ad spend the way I think about my own — as an investment that needs to produce a return after all costs are accounted for, not just the ones that show up in Google Ads.
Products, not campaigns
Here's the thing most PPC people get wrong about ecommerce: they think in campaigns. I think in products.
A campaign is just a container. What matters is what's inside it and what's not. If you have 30,000 products in your catalog and you throw all of them into a Performance Max campaign with a $500/day budget, Google will show ads for whichever products its algorithm feels like showing that day. Maybe your best-selling chrome bumper gets a few impressions. Maybe a part that's never sold in its life gets just as many. The algorithm doesn't know your business. It doesn't know which products make you money, which ones are dead inventory, and which ones are about to be discontinued. You do. Or at least, you should — and your campaign structure should reflect that knowledge.
I segment by product performance, not by campaign type. Which products have actually sold? Which ones have high margins? Which ones get a ton of views but never convert — and why? The answers to these questions determine what goes into which campaign, how much budget it gets, and how aggressively I bid on it. A product that's converted 50 times in the last year earns a different level of investment than one that's never sold. That sounds obvious. But go look at most ecommerce ad accounts and you'll find every product getting equal treatment, competing for the same budget, with no one asking whether any of them deserve to be there at all.
Concentration over distribution
The biggest mistake I see in ecommerce PPC — and I see it in almost every account I audit — is dilution. Spreading a limited budget across too many products, too many campaigns, too many platforms, and too many audiences. The result is that nothing gets enough budget to work.
I'd rather spend $10,000 a month on 500 products that I know can sell than spread that same $10,000 across 30,000 products and hope the algorithm figures it out. Concentration means every dollar goes to a product with a track record. It means your Shopping campaigns aren't losing 80% of their impression share because the budget is diluted across thousands of products that have never generated a sale. It means when someone searches for exactly what you sell, you actually show up — because your budget isn't being eaten by irrelevant queries that a tighter structure would have blocked.
This doesn't mean I ignore new products. It means I give them a separate, controlled budget to prove themselves. If they earn conversions, they graduate into the main campaigns. If they don't, they get pulled before they waste real money. Discovery is important, but it doesn't get to eat the revenue budget.
Funnels aren't a theory
I use a three-funnel system: top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel. Every campaign has a defined role in the customer journey. None of them compete with each other.
Top of funnel finds people who don't know you yet. Middle of funnel stays in front of people who are actively shopping. Bottom of funnel closes the sale when someone is ready to buy. Each funnel has its own campaigns, its own products, its own budget, and its own success metrics. A top-of-funnel campaign isn't supposed to hit an 8x ROAS — it's supposed to introduce your brand to someone who's never heard of you so that a bottom-of-funnel campaign can close them two weeks later.
The system also extends across platforms. Google captures search intent. Meta handles visual discovery and retargeting. Microsoft duplicates Google Shopping at cheaper click costs. Criteo closes cart abandoners across the open web. Each platform does what it's built for. I don't force a platform into a role it can't play, and I don't dump the entire budget into one channel because it's familiar.
Whether a specific account needs the full funnel system or a simplified version depends on the budget. A $150/day account can't support eleven campaigns across four platforms — you'd starve every one of them. But a $1,000/day account absolutely can, and should. I scale the structure to the budget, not the other way around.
The feed is the foundation
In ecommerce PPC, your product feed is more important than your campaign settings. The feed determines what Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Criteo know about your products — titles, images, descriptions, prices, availability, categories. If the feed is wrong, everything built on top of it is wrong. Bad titles mean bad search matching. Missing images mean low click-through rates. Incorrect prices mean disapprovals. No custom labels mean no segmentation.
I use custom labels in the feed to control which products go into which campaigns, to signal margin information to smart bidding, to organize products by brand or make, and to flag items for testing. The labels are what turn a flat list of 30,000 products into a structured system where every product has a defined role. Most people treat the feed as a technical chore. I treat it as the strategic layer that everything else depends on.
I don't trust the algorithm blindly
Smart bidding, Performance Max, Advantage+ — these are powerful tools, but they're not strategies. They're execution layers. You still need to tell them what to optimize for, which products to prioritize, which audiences to focus on, and which queries to avoid. The algorithm is very good at optimizing within the constraints you give it. It's terrible at setting those constraints for itself.
When I use PMax, it's for a specific purpose with specific product sets, brand exclusions, and audience signals. When I use smart bidding, it's after the campaign has enough conversion data to learn from — not from day one on an empty account. When I use broad match, it's with tight negative keyword lists built from months of search query data. The tools are only as good as the structure around them.
What this means for you
If you're looking for someone to log into your Google Ads account, click a few buttons, and send you a report every month — I'm not the right fit.
If you're looking for someone who thinks about your ad spend the way you think about your business — as money that needs to come back with more money attached to it — then we should talk. I build systems that are designed to produce profit, not just traffic. I structure accounts around the products that actually sell, not the ones that look good in a catalog. And I measure success the same way you do: by what shows up in the bank account, not what shows up in a dashboard.
Ready to talk about how your PPC could actually work?