Hawthorne Ads runs Google Ads for retailers. We bid on contribution margin rather than revenue, which means the accounts we manage sometimes look worse in the Google Ads interface and considerably better in your management accounts.
We work exclusively in Google Ads, and exclusively for retailers. Everything we know is about selling physical product profitably, at scale, across a catalogue that changes every week.
In Shopping, the feed is the campaign. We rebuild titles, attributes and custom labels around margin and stock position, then structure campaigns so your best products get the budget and your worst ones stop quietly draining it.
Performance Max will happily spend your budget on shoppers already walking through the door. We separate brand traffic, split asset groups by product family and margin tier, and hold the automation to account with experiments rather than faith.
Generic category search is where retail budgets go to die, and brand search is where agencies go to claim credit. We manage both honestly, with brand reported separately so nobody confuses defending your name with growth.
The channels that create next season's demand rather than harvesting this one's. Product-led video and feed-linked Demand Gen, measured on incrementality and new customer acquisition rather than on last-click revenue.
Disapprovals, price mismatches, missing GTINs and shipping configuration errors quietly remove products from the auction entirely. We monitor the whole catalogue daily and fix the causes rather than the symptoms.
A reporting layer joining Google Ads cost to cost of goods, delivery, returns and payment fees. It produces one number — contribution profit by product and by campaign — and that is the number we optimise against.
The first two produce no new campaigns at all, which is unusual and occasionally unpopular. They are also the reason our accounts hold up in year three.
We ask for cost of goods, delivery cost, return rate and payment fees at product level. Most retailers have never seen Google Ads performance net of all four, and the ranking of their best products usually changes once they do.
Titles, attributes, GTINs, images, disapprovals and custom labels. Nothing in Shopping or Performance Max works properly until the product data is correct, and in our experience it almost never is.
Campaigns rebuilt around margin tiers and product families rather than around the way your website navigation happens to be organised. Brand separated so automation cannot claim credit for it.
Spend shifts in planned increments with an experiment behind each one. We would rather take three weeks proving a change than three days guessing at it and a quarter unwinding it.
A weekly trading call with your buying and merchandising team, and a monthly contribution profit report that reconciles to your management accounts. If the two disagree, we fix the report rather than explain it away.
Selected engagements. Client names withheld under commercial confidentiality. Figures are twelve-month like-for-like and drawn from client management accounts, not from the Google Ads interface.
Half the catalogue was being advertised below true margin once delivery and returns were counted. We excluded 2,100 products from Shopping and Performance Max, moved the budget into the profitable third, and the business made materially more money on slightly less turnover.
Returns ran at 41% on one product family and 8% on another, and both carried the same target return on ad spend. We built return-adjusted targets by family using custom labels, and let Smart Bidding optimise against a number that reflected reality.
Demand arrives in an eleven-week window and stock runs out unevenly. We built pacing that reads stock levels daily and pulls spend off lines about to sell through, so nothing was advertised into an out-of-stock product page.
One platform, one sector. We have turned down software clients, agencies, property companies and three separate cryptocurrency businesses. Not out of principle in every case — simply because we would have been average at the work, and there is no shortage of agencies willing to be average.
They excluded a third of our catalogue from Shopping. It was the most profitable quarter we have ever had.
“The first thing they asked for was our cost of goods file. No Google Ads agency had ever asked.”
Finance DirectorApparel, multi-market
“Our buying team now joins the Google Ads call. That would have been unthinkable two years ago.”
Head of E-commerceGarden & outdoor
“Their monthly report reconciles to our management accounts to the penny. It is the only one that ever has.”
Group Financial ControllerSpecialist retail group
Send us read-only access to your Google Ads and Merchant Center accounts and a cost of goods file, and we will show you which products are making money once delivery and returns are counted. It takes us about a week, it costs nothing, and the analysis is yours regardless of what happens next.
Request an account review