There’s a quiet problem sitting inside most Google Ads accounts right now. Money going out. Nothing coming back. And nobody’s talking about it — not because it’s hidden, but because most people don’t know where to look. This week, I’ve got four things worth your attention, starting with a methodology that could genuinely change how you think about your ad budget.

The 20% of Your Budget That’s Working Against You

A smart piece of analysis published over at jack.tm caught my eye this week. It introduces something called a Waste Score — a formula for identifying which parts of your Google Ads spend are delivering zero return, and ranking them by how bad the damage actually is.

The maths is straightforward: take what you’re spending, factor in how far short of your target ROAS it’s falling, and you get a number that tells you exactly how much of that spend is wasted. The analysis uses a real account as an example — £65,734 in total spend, generating £280,841 in revenue at a 4.27× ROAS. Sounds decent. But buried inside that account is £10,114 of identified waste. That’s 20% of the budget delivering nothing back.

More telling is what the device breakdown reveals. In one campaign, desktop ads were running at 7.42× ROAS. Mobile? Zero. Same campaign, same budget — just split across devices performing at completely opposite ends of the spectrum. By addressing that alone, and working through 17 specific actions, the projected ROAS jumps from 4.27× to around 5.05×.

What this means for your business: If you’re running Google Ads right now, there’s a good chance a chunk of your budget is doing absolutely nothing. Not a little bit. Nothing. The goal isn’t to slash your budget — it’s to stop routing money into the parts of your account that have no chance of converting, and redirect it to the parts that do. That’s how you grow revenue without spending a penny more.

This is one of the first things I look at when I audit an account. It’s unglamorous work. But it pays for itself fast.

You’re Optimising the Wrong Half of the Funnel

Here’s something that most e-commerce businesses get wrong, and I see it constantly. You spend weeks obsessing over your ad creative, your targeting, your bidding strategy. You test headlines, adjust audiences, tweak bids. And your conversion rate stays flat. Your cost per acquisition keeps creeping up.

Sam Tomlinson put it bluntly in his newsletter this week: 80% of marketing effort goes into the pre-click stuff — creative and targeting — but 80% or more of what actually drives conversions happens after the click. Your landing page. Your product page. The experience someone has once they’ve left Google and arrived on your site.

Most brands are sending highly targeted, carefully crafted ads to completely generic landing pages. A Shopify product page that wasn’t designed to convert. An Unbounce page crammed with everything except a clear reason to buy. The ad does its job. The page doesn’t.

What this means for your business: If your conversion rate hasn’t improved despite months of ad optimisation, stop looking at the ads. Look at where you’re sending people. Does the landing page match the promise in the ad? Is the path to purchase obvious? Is there friction — too many steps, too much noise, not enough trust signals?

The clicks are there. The money is leaking somewhere between “click” and “thank you page.” That’s where your attention needs to go.

You’ve Got About Two Seconds. Make Them Count.

If you’re running video ads — or thinking about it — this one’s important. Avinash Kaushik published a piece this week on video creative strategy across YouTube, TikTok, and connected TV, and there’s one number in it that should reset how you approach every video ad you make.

Humans spend roughly 12 seconds of active attention per hour on social video. Per hour. So when your ad appears, the window is almost comically small. The first two seconds determine whether someone gives you six. Those six seconds determine whether they give you fifteen. Miss the first two, and it’s over — they’re already gone.

The implications are clear. One message per video. Not two, not three. One. Lead with it immediately. Don’t build to it. Don’t warm up. Don’t introduce your brand and then get to the point. Start at the point.

Platform matters too. YouTube is what Kaushik calls a “pull medium” — people are there to watch something specific. Your ad is interrupting that. Treat it accordingly. TikTok is the opposite — native, casual, looks-like-content or it gets ignored. What works on one platform will often bomb on the other.

What this means for your business: If you’ve been repurposing the same video across every platform and wondering why it’s not performing, this is why. And if your videos are still taking five seconds to get to the product? Cut to it. You don’t have five seconds. You have two.

The Underused Trick That Can Cut Your CPMs by Up to a Third

Last one this week, and it’s genuinely underused. Sam Tomlinson also covered whitelisting — sometimes called creator licensing — in his newsletter, and the numbers are worth paying attention to.

Instead of running your Meta or YouTube ads directly from your brand account, you run them through a creator, influencer, or publisher who has an affiliation with your brand. The result? CPMs and CPCs drop by anywhere from 20% to 35%, in some cases. The reason is psychological — the same ad feels less like a billboard and more like a recommendation when it comes from a real person rather than a faceless brand account.

Here’s the thing that surprised me: roughly nine in ten accounts that could be doing this aren’t. And you don’t need to be working with celebrities or macro-influencers. Micro-creators — people with between 5,000 and 50,000 followers in a niche relevant to your product — often outperform the big names because their audiences actually trust them.

What this means for your business: If you’re spending £20,000 a month or more on Meta or YouTube, this is worth exploring. The infrastructure isn’t complicated. The savings are real. And in a market where ad costs keep going up, a 20–35% reduction in what you’re paying per impression is genuinely meaningful.

The Takeaway

Four different topics this week, but they’re all pointing at the same thing: most e-commerce businesses aren’t losing money because they’re not spending enough on ads. They’re losing it because of inefficiencies they haven’t found yet — wasted spend, broken post-click experiences, creative that doesn’t respect the medium, and distribution tactics left on the table.

The fundamentals of paid advertising haven’t changed. Spend less on what doesn’t work. Spend more on what does. Make the whole journey — ad to landing page to purchase — as frictionless as possible. Do that consistently, and the results follow.

If you want to dig into any of this for your own account, get in touch. That’s exactly what I’m here for.