I have spent nearly a decade inside Google Ads accounts. And I want to be clear about what that actually means because there’s a big difference between managing ad spend and truly being inside it.
Not advising from a distance. Not reviewing reports someone else prepared. Actually sitting inside the accounts, making decisions with real money, and watching what happens when those decisions play out at scale across hundreds of brands.
That experience adds up. Today, Vysta manages over $200M in annual ad spend across 150+ ecommerce brands with a team of 45 people. We are a Google Premier Partner and made the Inc. 5000 list with 4,000% revenue growth.
But what I’m about to share has nothing to do with those numbers. It’s what those numbers taught me along the way. The lessons that changed how I think about growth, and the ones I wish someone had handed me in year one.
Early in my career, I optimized for ROAS like everyone else. The client wanted 4x, and I delivered 4x. Everyone was happy.
But I started noticing something that didn’t sit right with me. Some clients with great ROAS weren’t growing. Their revenue was flat. Their customer base wasn’t expanding. They were churning through the same pool of buyers over and over again, and the ROAS number was masking all of it.
That’s when I realized that ROAS is a vanity metric if you don’t separate brand from non-brand. A 4x blended ROAS could mean branded traffic is running at 12x and non-branded is sitting at 1.8x. The agency looks great on paper, but the brand isn’t actually acquiring new customers. It’s just remarketing to its existing audience more efficiently and calling it growth.
I ran an audit recently that drove this home in the starkest way possible. A brand was spending $2.2M a year on Google Ads across 472 campaigns. Blended ROAS looked reasonable at 2.28x.
But when I pulled the data apart, $494K, nearly a quarter of their entire annual budget, was being spent on branded queries flowing through Performance Max, Brand Search, and branded Shopping simultaneously. The brand was buying its own customers three times over and had no idea.
No one at their agency had flagged it because the blended number masked the waste. And in my experience, that is not some rare situation. That is what most ecommerce accounts running at scale actually look like under the hood.
Today, the first thing we do with every new account at our Google Ads agency for ecommerce is separate branded from non-branded performance. It takes 30 minutes. And I have never once done it without finding something that the previous agency should have caught years ago.
Systems scale. Talent alone does not. I learned that the hard way.
For the first few years of Vysta, everything ran through me. I knew every account, made every strategic call, and personally managed the biggest brands. And honestly, it worked really well. Until I hit a wall I didn’t see coming.
No matter how good the work was, it could only scale as far as my own attention could reach. And at some point, my attention maxed out.
So I had to figure out how to fix that, and the answer wasn’t just hiring more people. Anyone can hire people. The real fix was building a system that codified how I think about accounts and made that thinking repeatable without me being in every conversation, every decision, every room.
Our 3-phase scaling framework exists because of that wall. Foundation through Search and Shopping. Expansion through YouTube and Demand Gen. Acceleration through landing pages and custom funnels. It is the structure that lets media buyers think the way I think without me being in every room.
We also built a self-replicating training pipeline where Senior Pod Leaders train directly, Junior Pod Leaders shadow and learn to train, and top-performing buyers promote into leadership roles, creating a system that organically grows leaders from within the organization.
That’s how we went from me doing everything to 45 people running 150+ accounts at the same level I would have. It wasn’t easy to get there, but it’s the thing I’m most proud of building.
For years, the received wisdom in ecommerce was that YouTube was a brand awareness channel. Good for impressions, bad for conversion. Google Search and Shopping were where you put your acquisition budget. And not too long ago, I would have agreed with half of that.
Search and Shopping are still the foundation of any serious ecommerce growth strategy. But the ceiling on those channels is lower than most brands realize. Once you have captured all the demand that exists for your products, they stop growing. The only way past that ceiling is to create new demand. And nothing does that better right now than YouTube.
Demand Gen through YouTube is one of the strongest incremental sources of new customer revenue for ecommerce brands right now. Our YouTube ads agency for ecommerce is scaling almost all of our brands with YouTube ads, with some doing $25K per day and others above $100K per day in Demand Gen spend alone.
One account went from $0 in YouTube spend to $43,000 per day, with over 80% of their total Google spend allocated to YouTube. The business grew 30x. We got there by building a structured system with proper creative, intent-based targeting, and landing pages designed specifically to convert YouTube traffic.
Another brand went from $6K per day to $53K per day in just 18 days, from $500K per month to over $3M per month in Google revenue. Almost all of it YouTube.
I’ve been saying for a long time that YouTube is the most underleveraged channel in ecommerce. The results we’re seeing now make me even more convinced of that. The brands that figure this out over the next 12 months will have a significant advantage over everyone still waiting to see if it works.
Every ad platform claims credit for every sale. Meta says they drove it. Google says they drove it. Klaviyo says they drove it. The customer bought once, but three platforms are each reporting the revenue. At some point, you have to stop looking at platform-reported numbers and start asking what is actually working.
Incrementality testing is the only honest answer to that question. We run geo holdout tests, turning off Google in 2 to 3 regions for 2 to 4 weeks and measuring the revenue impact in those regions versus the rest. We choose mid-tier markets representing 10 to 15% of revenue.
If revenue drops proportionally in those regions, Google is truly incremental. If it stays flat, you were paying for traffic that would have come anyway.
We also use Google-only landing pages on separate domains as trend markers. Revenue from a page Meta never touched is clean proof of what Google is actually driving. For our largest accounts spending $500K or more per month, we run Google Conversion Lift studies that Google provides for free.
Most agencies avoid incrementality testing because they’re afraid of what it might reveal about their own work. We run it proactively on every account because we’d rather know the truth than protect a number. That’s a pretty fundamental difference in how you approach this business, and it’s one of the reasons our clients stay with us the way they do.
After a decade of doing this, the pattern I keep seeing is pretty clear. The brands that grow the fastest are not always the ones with the best products or the biggest budgets. They are the ones with founders who are willing to hear uncomfortable truths and actually do something about them.
And in my experience, those uncomfortable truths tend to look something like this:
I sat with a founder recently and showed them that Google and YouTube should be driving 30-50% of their total revenue. They were at 11%. The gap between 11% and 30% represented $12-16M in additional annual revenue. Just sitting there, uncaptured, because nobody had been willing to show them the real number before.
Every founder I’ve shown that number to has had the same moment of silence. The ones who lean in and say fix it are the ones with whom we do our best work.
After managing over $200M in ad spend, the single biggest lesson I keep coming back to is this. The brands that scale are not the ones with the biggest budgets. They are the ones with the best systems behind those budgets.
We took one brand from $0 to $4,500,000 per month on Google Ads in a single month. Over 50% of their sales converted on terms as broad as “Christmas gifts.” That only works when the system behind the account is built to handle that kind of scale and that kind of volume.
Another brand, a personal growth journal company, scaled to $1M per month on Google alone. We attacked every marketing angle and keyword group imaginable, and the results kept coming. Most people would never have guessed that category could do those numbers on Google. But with the right system behind it, it did.
That is why we built Vysta the way we did. Not as an agency that manages ads, but as a company that builds acquisition systems for ecommerce brands. We do the granular work other agencies skip, backed by intelligence from 150+ eight and nine-figure brands. And every year, the system gets better.
By Nate Schneider | CEO, Vysta Paid Media Group
Book a free audit call with Vysta and see how our system can take your Google and YouTube Ads to the next level.
An ecommerce brand should set its Google Ads budget based on contribution margin and target acquisition cost, not a flat percentage. Most established brands invest 5 to 15% of revenue into paid traffic, with Google and YouTube carrying 45 to 65% of that budget at maturity. The right number is the one where your non-branded CPA stays below break-even while conversion volume gives Google enough data to optimize.
Healthy non-branded Google Ads campaigns typically run between 3x and 5x ROAS for ecommerce brands, depending on margins and category. Branded campaigns run much higher but should be capped at 5 to 10% of total spend, because that traffic was largely going to convert anyway. The number that matters most is new customer ROAS, not the blended figure.
Yes. YouTube is one of the strongest incremental new customer revenue sources available to ecommerce brands right now, but only when it is measured correctly. YouTube creates demand that converts later through branded search and Shopping, so last-click ROAS undervalues it. Brands that measure YouTube through blended MER, search lift, and incrementality testing consistently find it outperforms what the dashboard shows.
The most reliable method is a geo holdout test: turn off Google Ads in 2 to 3 mid-tier regions representing 10 to 15% of revenue for 2 to 4 weeks, then compare revenue in those regions against the rest. If revenue drops proportionally, the spend is incremental. Larger accounts can also run Google Conversion Lift studies, which Google provides at no cost for qualifying advertisers.
For most ecommerce brands, Google and YouTube combined should drive 30 to 50% of total revenue. Brands sitting at 10 to 15% almost always have a structural problem, not a channel problem: weak feeds, blended brand and non-brand campaigns, or underinvestment relative to Meta. Closing that gap is usually worth seven to eight figures in annual revenue.
Book a call with Nate Schneider to explore how Google and YouTube ads can drive scalable, measurable growth.
