Minimalist
Marketing

Free · 10 minutes · For Shopify and e-commerce brands

The Marketing Clutter Checklist

Ten yes/no questions about your Google Shopping and Performance Max. Every "no" is money Google spends without a reason. Answer honestly — your score shows up as you go, and nothing is sent anywhere unless you ask.

Start the checklist ↓

Do you know your profit after ad spend — not ROAS — for last month?

Gross profit from Google orders minus what you paid Google. If you only know ROAS, you know revenue, not money.

Fix: Export last month's Google-attributed orders, apply your margin, subtract spend. Do it once by hand — it's usually a shock.

Is branded search in its own campaign, separate from Shopping and PMax?

People searching your brand name were going to buy anyway. Mixed in, they make every campaign look better than it is.

Fix: Run brand as its own search campaign and exclude brand terms from Performance Max using brand exclusions.

Does Google know the margin on each product?

Without it, Google treats a £40 sale at 10% margin the same as a £40 sale at 60%. It will happily chase the cheap one.

Fix: Group products into margin tiers with custom labels in your feed, or pass gross profit as the conversion value.

Have you excluded products that lose money when advertised?

Low-price, low-margin items often can't cover a realistic cost per sale. Advertising them is paying to lose money.

Fix: Anything whose gross profit per order is below your average cost per sale goes on a do-not-advertise list.

Has your product feed been improved in the last 90 days?

In Shopping there are no keywords — the feed is the targeting. Titles written for your website rarely match how people search.

Fix: Rewrite your top 20 product titles as brand + product type + key attribute (size, colour, material). Clear any disapprovals.

Are you running on two paid channels or fewer?

Every channel splits budget and data. Five half-funded channels rarely beat one properly funded one.

Fix: Pause the channel with the worst profit after ad spend and move its budget to your best one.

Does your report have five numbers or fewer?

Long reports hide the one number that matters. If profit isn't at the top, it isn't being managed.

Fix: Ask for spend, gross profit, profit after ad spend, new-customer revenue and what changed. Nothing else.

Can you name your five most profitable products on ads?

Not bestsellers by revenue — most profitable after ad spend. They're often different lists.

Fix: Sort products by gross profit minus ad cost over 90 days. Give the top five their own campaign and budget.

Are search terms checked at least every two weeks?

Shopping and PMax match you to searches you'd never choose. Irrelevant ones add up quietly.

Fix: Review the search terms and PMax search categories report every fortnight. Add negatives for anything that spends without buying.

Have you paused a campaign in the last 90 days because it didn't make profit?

If nothing ever gets switched off, nothing is being judged. Clutter builds up one "let's give it another month" at a time.

Fix: Set a test length and a profit target before launching anything. Miss it, switch it off.

Why these ten

Most waste isn't
a bad ad. It's clutter.

Too many channels, too many metrics, too many products advertised because nobody said stop. None of it looks broken in a ROAS report. All of it shows up in the bank. For the full reasoning, read ROAS vs profit: why a good-looking Google Shopping account can lose money.

See how we fix it →