PPC for ecommerce: you are paying for people who want to open a store, not shop at one.
“Dropshipping” alone is 145,000 US searches a month, and coupon hunters add another 45,000. Connect your store’s account with one Google sign-in and AdPilot’s AI takes it from there. It works through the account by itself, finds where the margin is leaving, and returns each fix as a card in plain English. Tap approve, or skip it. No PPC knowledge needed.
Start free - no credit cardOne Google sign-in to start · No PPC experience needed · Flat price, never a cut of your ad spend · Free 7 days · You approve every change
Ecommerce PPC leaks in two directions at once.
The first leak is people on the wrong side of the counter. A large slice of search around online retail is people who want to build a store, find a supplier or get a job at one. They are researching a business, not buying a product, and your ads reach them anyway.
The second is quieter and costs more. Shopping and Performance Max spend against a product feed rather than a keyword list, so the usual advice about bidding barely applies. If the feed is wrong, or if brand traffic sits in the same campaign as everything else, your return on ad spend is a number that describes nothing.
AdPilot connects to the account and works through it the way a consultant would before quoting you a retainer. Searches that were never an order. Campaigns claiming credit for sales you had already won. Ads that buy traffic and no revenue. Each finding returns as a card, in plain English. You approve it or you skip it. Nothing reaches your account until you do.
And you stay in control the whole way:
- You approve every change. The AI proposes; you decide. Every budget, bid, keyword, or ad edit arrives as a plain-language card you approve or skip with one tap. Nothing is ever applied on its own.
- A snapshot before every change. AdPilot saves exactly how things looked before anything is touched, so you always have a clean “before.”
- One-click revert. Don’t like a change once it’s live? Undo it in a single click, straight back to that snapshot.
- A full audit log. Who, what, when, the old value and the new value, every change recorded. Nothing hidden.
- You keep the keys. You connect with one secure Google sign-in, and it only ever makes changes you approve. The account stays yours start to finish - you never transfer ownership, and you can disconnect anytime.
Where ecommerce ad budgets actually leak
Real US search volumes from July 2026. This is the universal layer, the waste that shows up in almost every store account regardless of what you sell.
Ecommerce is the one industry where a single list cannot do the whole job, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Your catalogue has its own junk: the DIY version of your product, the used market for it, the brands people confuse you with. The method for finding those is below the list.
| What people search | Searches/mo | Why it is not a client |
|---|---|---|
| dropshipping | 145,000 | Wants to start a store, not buy from one |
| promo code | 26,000 | Hunting a discount, often to use elsewhere |
| coupon code | 12,000 | Same, and rarely loyal |
| discount code | 6,500 | Same again |
| how to make money on amazon | 5,600 | Wants to sell, not buy |
| shopify jobs | 3,600 | Looking for work |
US monthly search volume, Ahrefs, July 2026. Around 199,000 searches a month before your category adds its own.
Negative keywords for ecommerce stores. Free, no email, no form.
Paste this into your account today whether or not you ever use AdPilot. It costs nothing and takes about ten minutes. Then spend another ten finding your category layer: sort your search terms report by spend, filter to zero conversions, and read the top fifty. The pattern will be obvious and it will be specific to you.
- Discount hunters
- coupon, coupon code, promo code, discount code, voucher, voucher code, free shipping code, clearance, outlet, liquidation
- Wants to sell, not buy
- dropshipping, wholesale, bulk, supplier, suppliers, distributor, manufacturer, private label, how to sell, how to start, reseller, jobs, careers
- Making it themselves
- how to make, diy, homemade, pattern, sewing pattern, tutorial, recipe, plans, template, instructions
- Second hand and rental
- used, second hand, preowned, refurbished, thrift, rental, rent, hire, ebay, craigslist, facebook marketplace, poshmark
- Repair instead of replace
- repair, fix, replacement part, spare part, manual, instructions, warranty claim, troubleshooting
- Not buying today
- images, pictures, wallpaper, meaning, history of, wikipedia, is it worth it reddit, free
Two cautions. “Review” and “vs” are late-stage buying signals for anything expensive, so do not block them if you sell considered purchases; block them only for impulse categories. And never add your own brand as a negative anywhere except in campaigns you deliberately want brand-free, because that is how stores accidentally stop bidding on themselves and hand the traffic to a reseller.
Ecommerce PPC: five things that matter more than your bids
- The feed is the campaign. In Shopping, titles, product types and attributes do the work that keywords do in Search. A store with a tidy feed and clumsy bidding beats a store with clever bidding and a messy feed almost every time.
- Send the value, not just the sale. If every order reports as one conversion, bidding treats a $12 order and a $400 order as identical and dutifully chases the cheap one. Passing revenue with each conversion changes what the algorithm optimises for.
- Separate brand from everything else. Brand searches convert beautifully because those people already decided. Left in the same campaign as prospecting, they lift the average and hide the fact that your acquisition is losing money.
- Put brand exclusions on Performance Max. Without them, PMax quietly absorbs the traffic you had already earned and reports it as its own success. It is the most common reason a PMax campaign looks like a miracle in month one.
- Let the fourth quarter be its own plan. Competition, click costs and conversion rates all move at once in Q4. A budget and a target ROAS set in August describe a market that no longer exists in November.
What an ecommerce PPC agency charges, and why the bill grows as you do.
Ecommerce agencies usually bill a monthly retainer plus a percentage of ad spend, and ecommerce is the category where percentage pricing bites hardest, because scaling spend is the whole strategy. Ten to twenty percent is the usual range.
Illustrative example. Agencies vary, so check your own contract. The whole calculation is on the page so you can check it against your own contract.
You spend $5,000/month on ads
Ecommerce PPC agency
$2,250/mo
$1,500 retainer + 15% of $5,000 ($750) - on top of the $5,000 Google already takes
AdPilot
$99/mo
Flat, whatever you spend
You spend $25,000/month on ads
Ecommerce PPC agency
$5,250/mo
$1,500 retainer + 15% of $25,000 ($3,750) - you scaled, so their invoice scaled
AdPilot
$99/mo
Flat, whatever you spend
You spend $100,000/month on ads
Ecommerce PPC agency
$16,500/mo
15% alone is $15,000/mo, with the retainer still on top - and it climbs with every good month
AdPilot
$99/mo
Flat, whatever you spend
At those rates the agency clears well past $30,000 in the first year and grows every time you scale. AdPilot Growth is $1,188 a year and it does not move. In a business run on margin, that gap is the margin.
PPC management for ecommerce, shown as cards you approve one at a time.
What you actually pay an ecommerce agency for is the hands-on part. Getting the feed and the campaign structure right, splitting brand from prospecting, digging through search terms for money leaks, writing ads that match the product someone typed. AdPilot’s AI does that work and shows what it based each call on.
Examples of what the cards look like - not results from your account
Builds your campaigns
Build a complete Search campaign for your best-margin category: 3 ad groups, 40 buying-intent keywords, and 8 ads. Built and held until you approve it.
Proposed change
What it’s doing: Writing the campaign end to end, ads included, so you never begin with an empty screen. It only goes live on your approval.
Finds wasted spend
You paid 340 times this month for searches containing “how to make.” Those people are building it themselves, not buying it. Add it as a negative keyword and the spending stops.
Proposed change
What it’s doing: Reading your search terms for money that never turns into an order, then closing the leaks. (A “negative keyword” simply tells Google not to show your ad for that search.)
Tightens your targeting
Your Performance Max campaign is absorbing brand searches people would have made anyway, which is why its ROAS looks extraordinary. Add brand exclusions and see the real number.
Proposed change
What it’s doing: Separating traffic you had already earned from traffic the ads actually created, so the reporting stops flattering itself.
Drafts better ads
Your ads sell the brand. The searches are specific products with specific attributes. Here are 4 headlines built around what people typed, size and colour included.
Proposed change
What it’s doing: Matching the ad to the search instead of to the homepage.
Set up in minutes. No PPC background needed.
You don’t need to know what a “match type” or a “quality score” is. AdPilot does the analysis and explains everything in plain English.
- 1
Connect your Google Ads account
One secure Google sign-in - nothing to install, no API keys, no technical setup. AdPilot analyzes your account and never changes anything until you approve it, one tap at a time. Disconnect anytime.
- 2
Answer a few plain questions
Tell AdPilot your goal - more calls? more sales? a lower cost per customer? - and a couple of simple numbers about your business, like what one customer is worth to you. Plain words, no jargon.
- 3
Approve improvements with one tap
AdPilot reads your account - or builds you a brand-new campaign from scratch - and hands you concrete moves as plain-language cards, each explaining what it does and why. Tap Approve on the ones you like. Skip the rest.
Free 7 days · No credit card · You approve every change · Cancel anytime
A bad week in Q4 does not wait for the monthly report.
Agencies review on a schedule. Peak season does not.
In ecommerce the timing problem is sharper than anywhere else, because a large part of the year’s revenue moves through a few weeks. Finding out in December that November drifted is not a lesson, it is the year.
Catching a bad search term or a broken feed on Tuesday rather than next month is the whole difference. One is steering. The other is reading the map after you have arrived.
AdPilot vs an ecommerce PPC agency
A straight comparison. No straw men.
What you pay
Ecommerce agency: A retainer plus a percentage of ad spend. In ecommerce that percentage is the sting, because your strategy is to spend more.
AdPilot: One flat monthly price. Scale from $5,000 to $100,000 a month and it does not move.
How fast a problem gets fixed
Ecommerce agency: You raise it, it joins a queue, you hear back next week.
AdPilot: The account is read continuously. A leak becomes a card while the month can still be saved.
Who holds the account
Ecommerce agency: You hand over access. Changes happen and you read about them in the report.
AdPilot: You keep the keys. Every change waits for your one-tap approval, with a snapshot and one-click revert behind it.
Whose numbers you see
Ecommerce agency: A report built by the people being judged by it. Brand and non-brand often arrive blended.
AdPilot: A before and after dashboard on your own account, and you can always look at the raw thing yourself.
Contract
Ecommerce agency: Six or twelve month minimum terms are common.
AdPilot: Month to month, cancel anytime. Free 7 days first, no card.
Free 7 days · No credit card · You approve every change · Cancel anytime
You keep control, and you stop being dependent.
Most store owners never learn how their own Google Ads account works, which is awkward, because ad spend is usually their largest controllable cost. AdPilot is built the other way round. Every card tells you:
- What it changes - for example, pause a search term that spent $418 and returned $61.
- Why it helps - the reasoning, not just the instruction.
- What it is based on - the numbers in your own account.
Approve one and a snapshot is saved first. Then a before and after dashboard shows what happened to return on ad spend, cost per order and revenue, in plain words. After a month or two you know which levers actually move the margin.
Flat, predictable pricing. It never grows with your ad spend.
Start with a free 7-day trial. No card. Pick a plan at the end, or walk away. Every plan is flat, so whether the store spends $3,000 or $100,000 a month on ads, your AdPilot price is the same. We never take a percentage of your spend.
Full plan details on the pricing page.
AdPilot is new - and we’d rather earn your trust than fake it.
We could plaster this page with five-star quotes and a “trusted by 10,000 businesses” banner. We won’t - because AdPilot is new, and inventing proof would be lying to you. Instead, here’s what actually protects you:
- You risk nothing to try it. 7 days free, no credit card. If it isn’t useful, you walk away having spent nothing.
- Your account is never at risk. Nothing is ever applied without your one-tap approval, a snapshot is saved before every edit, every change has one-click revert, and a full audit log records it. The worst case is a suggestion you don’t like - so you just don’t approve it.
- Guardrails you can’t trip by accident. AdPilot never deletes campaigns and never touches shared budgets. Some doors simply don’t exist.
- Built by an operator, not a VC-funded black box. Software made to give small businesses the Google Ads work an agency charges a retainer for - without agency prices or the loss of control.
Judge us on the work, the math, and the safeguards - on your own numbers, not our adjectives.
Questions, answered straight
Does this work with Shopping and Performance Max, or only Search?
All of them. It matters, because most stores have the majority of their budget in Shopping and PMax, where keyword advice does not apply. The levers there are feed quality, campaign structure, brand exclusions and target ROAS, and those are what AdPilot looks at.
Why does my Performance Max campaign look so good?
Often because it is absorbing brand searches you had already earned and reporting them as new. Adding brand exclusions is the standard fix, and the first honest ROAS number afterwards is usually a shock. It is better to have it.
Do I need to send revenue with my conversions?
Yes, and it is the fix that changes the most. Counting every order as one conversion tells bidding that a $12 sale and a $400 sale are worth the same, so it goes looking for cheap ones. AdPilot checks this before recommending any bid change.
How do I find the wasted searches specific to my products?
Open the search terms report, sort by spend, filter to zero conversions, read the top fifty. Ten minutes and the pattern will be obvious. That is exactly the pass AdPilot runs continuously, but there is nothing stopping you doing it by hand first.
Should brand and non-brand be separate campaigns?
Almost always. Blended together, your brand traffic props up the average and hides whether acquisition is profitable. Separated, you get two honest numbers instead of one comforting one.
Our margins are thin. Is paid search viable at all?
Sometimes not, and we would rather say so. If your contribution margin cannot support the cost of a click in your category, no amount of optimisation fixes that. What optimisation can fix is spending the same budget on the products where your margin actually is.
Will AdPilot change anything on its own?
No. Never. AdPilot proposes and you decide. Nothing is written to your account until you approve that specific change with one tap. If you approve nothing, nothing changes.
What if I don’t like a change I approved?
One-click revert. A snapshot is saved before every change, so it rolls straight back to how it was. The audit log shows exactly what happened, old value and new value.
Does the price go up as I spend more on ads?
No. Your plan price is flat no matter what you spend. Unlike an agency, AdPilot never takes a percentage of your budget.
See what your store is actually paying for.
Connect your account with a secure Google sign-in. Answer a few plain questions about your margins and your best categories. Then take specific improvements one approval at a time, each with a snapshot and a one-click rollback behind it. One flat price. No retainer, no cut of your ad spend, no contract.
Start free - no credit cardFree 7 days · No credit card · You approve every change · Cancel anytime