How it works, in detail.

Setting up a shop

The application keeps one list of steps per shop, and shows you the next one on every page. Connecting one shop never waits on another.

1. Your shop. Give it your website address. It reads your public product list — names, prices, stock, categories, photographs.
2. Your products. Check the list came through. Let the application choose what to advertise, or pick the products yourself.
3. Where your ads show. Search for countries, regions or towns the way Google does, and include or exclude each one.
4. Connect Google Ads. Sign in with the Google account that owns the ad account, then pick the account.
5. The website plugin. Optional but strongly advised: it counts your orders so Google can learn which clicks became sales.
6. Budget and margin. The most you will spend in a day, and what you keep from a sale.
7. Build. Google checks everything first; then it is written into your account, paused.
8. Turn ads on. The only step that spends money.

How a bid is worked out

Every product has a ceiling — the most a click on it can cost before the sale stops being worth having. The application works it out from four things: the price, your profit margin, how often that kind of product turns a click into a sale, and a safety factor so you make money rather than break even.

A $150 product at a 10% margin leaves $15 of profit. If one visitor in 67 buys, a click is worth about $0.22 at break-even — so the application will not pay more than about half that. This is why a thin margin means a low bid: the arithmetic is not negotiable, and bidding past it is how shops lose money on advertising without noticing.

Where keywords come from

From your own products. The application reads each product's name the way a buyer would say it and turns that into keywords, then blocks the searches that never end in a sale — how-to questions, repairs, spare parts, downloads, jobs, and anything naming a product you do not stock.

Searches for used and refurbished goods are deliberately not blocked: for many shops those are real buyers.

Why some products get more attention

Products earn their advertising. A product nobody has bought yet is listed and watched. One that starts selling gets keywords of its own. One that cannot make money at any sensible bid — no price, out of stock, or too thin a margin — is left out, and the application tells you which and why.

What it will never do

• Spend anything before you press the button.
• Bid more than a product can afford.
• Let the campaigns' budgets add up to more than your daily figure.
• Delete a campaign, an ad group or an ad — they are paused, never removed.
• Touch, change or report on campaigns it did not create.
• Show ads in a place you have taken off the list.

Counting your orders

Google bids better when it knows which clicks became sales. The Search Ads Connector plugin adds the Google tag to your WooCommerce shop, reports each order's value, and lets the application check the whole chain is working. It reads no customer details: how many orders and how much, never who.

Getting access

The beta is small and free. Tell us about your shop and we will say honestly whether this will help it.