# Martin Davies

Martin Davies shares advice on Google Ads for ecommerce businesses, with a focus on campaign decisions and measuring profit after costs—not just revenue or ROAS. Davies has also developed an ecommerce profitability calculator.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/martin-davies/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martindaviescolossalsearch
- Topics: ecommerce, paid-ads, google-ads, performance-max
- Based on 11 dated posts, latest 2026-10-08

## Summary

They are most useful for ecommerce Google Ads profitability audits and campaign optimization advice.

- Best for: A B2B ecommerce agency needing a Google Ads profitability audit or optimization plan.
- Not for: Consumer or lifestyle brands seeking paid creator campaigns, product placement or reach-based awareness.
- Check first: Confirm whether they accept paid collaborations and request audience data, formats and terms.

### Takeaways

- Judge Google Ads by profit after product margins, fulfilment, payment fees and VAT, not ROAS alone.
- Check daily impression share before reacting to slower sales, to separate demand from competitors.
- For Performance Max, disable Final URL Expansion, but note a site-structure condition may change this.

## Main ideas

- **Judge Google Ads on profit after costs, not ROAS or blended revenue**: Davies argues that ecommerce businesses turning over roughly £1m–£5m often decide how to spend on Google Ads using ROAS, blended revenue or a sense that activity "feels profitable". Those measures ignore differences in product margin, shipping and fulfilment costs, payment fees and VAT, they say, and miss the bigger question: what does an advertisement actually leave behind? Davies proposes a profit-focused alternative: break-even ROI, gross profit before ad spend, net profit after ad spend and net margin after ads — figures used with clients before any conversation about scaling spend.
- **Before changing campaigns, work out whether demand fell or a competitor moved**: After auditing ecommerce accounts through a slow UK summer, Davies saw businesses respond to weak sales with large, repeated changes to their Google Ads accounts. They argue this makes things worse: campaigns never finish the learning phase before the next edit lands, compounding poor performance as customer demand falls. Davies's priority is diagnosis first — establish the cause, then change strategy to match it.
- **Turn off Final URL Expansion in Performance Max**: Davies names Final URL Expansion as the one Performance Max setting they disable without hesitation for ecommerce, and explains why. Leaving it on, they say, sends traffic to irrelevant or low-intent pages, mismatches ad messaging with landing page content, wastes spend when those pages convert badly, produces inconsistent user journeys, muddies the data used for optimization, and draws clicks to low-margin or clearance items. They also note that restricting which pages Google may use does not work for most advertisers unless the site is exceptionally clean and well structured.
- **Check how much of Performance Max is brand traffic, and be willing to give up short-term ROAS**: Davies raises the contested question of whether to exclude brand from Performance Max and points readers to data before deciding. If brand traffic accounts for a high percentage of Performance Max traffic, they suggest running brand through search campaigns and negating it in Performance Max. Davies acknowledges that reported ROAS may drop in the short term, but argues the business grows as a whole — a trade-off stated openly. The script is other people's work: Smarter Ecommerce (smec) built it and shared it with Davies through Ben Fisher.
- **Attach a checkable tool to the claim**: Across the posts, each one centres on a single decision — a setting to change, a report to run, a script to try or a calculator to use — and names the specific instrument with a link. Davies pairs each argument with a way to test it, rather than offering broad strategy positions or personal narrative. The result is short, decision-led and verifiable.

## Work to read

- [Why ROAS and blended revenue mislead ecommerce advertisers](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/martindaviescolossalsearch_ecommerce-googleads-profitability-activity-7416750878533025792-AtG7)
- [Building the profitability calculator: refunds, ad spend share, per-product profit](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/martindaviescolossalsearch_my-e-commerce-profitability-tool-is-coming-activity-7511818706805518337-A7FU)
- [Slower sales: separating weaker demand from competitor activity](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/martindaviescolossalsearch_ive-audited-a-number-of-google-ads-accounts-activity-7497657556069285888-nnd-)
- [Final URL Expansion in Performance Max: why Martin Davies disables it](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/martindaviescolossalsearch_if-you-run-google-ads-pmax-campaigns-for-activity-7402041229787484160-rFCQ)
- [Should brand be excluded from Performance Max?](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/martindaviescolossalsearch_googleads-googleadsexpert-ecommercetips-activity-7191807290235043843-Cllh)

## Brand relationships

- **Profitability Calculator** (owned_business)
- **Smarter Ecommerce (smec)** (mention)
- **Colossal Search** (mention)

## Partnerships

Martin Davies's posts do not offer a partnership or sponsorship. Across five of their own LinkedIn posts, they share practical Google Ads advice for ecommerce businesses and promote a self-built ecommerce profitability calculator. The posts include no media kit, rate card, sponsorship policy or brand-collaboration example, and state no inquiry route; no official sponsor page is available here. Buyers should ask whether they accept paid collaborations and request available formats, rates and a contact route.

## Alternatives

- Robin Tesselaar: Choose Robin Tesselaar when the disagreement is about the metric, not campaign settings. The posts explain why a 4x ROAS campaign can lose money while a 2x campaign can be the most profitable, and identify three ways ROAS misleads: it ignores margins and favours high-volume, low-margin products; it rewards warm, returning audiences that would often have converted anyway; and its average hides diminishing returns, so a channel with a 5x headline can deliver only 1.5x on the next pound spent while a 4x channel returns 3x. The recommended alternative is concrete: POAS (gross profit divided by ad spend), a break-even ROAS of 1 divided by gross margin—2.86x at a 35% margin—new-customer acquisition share from the CRM, nCAC over the last 90 days, and marginal rather than blended ROAS. The Performance Max post adds five structural moves: a dedicated exact-match branded search campaign so Performance Max competes only for cold traffic; asset groups split by margin, with different targets for high-margin and clearance lines; CRM and high-value purchaser lists as signals; conversion value rules so a $20 sale and a $200 sale are not treated as the same signal; and search themes used to diagnose queries the campaign does not yet own. Choose this option when the deliverable is a rebuilt measurement and bidding framework, particularly if the client's Performance Max blends margin into one average that favours whatever sells most easily.
- Jordan Fry: Choose Jordan Fry when the question is what the ads actually caused. The posts explain that Conversion Lift is now self-serve on Search and Performance Max, without a Google representative: Google holds back a group of users who never see the ads and compares them with users who did, so the gap represents sales the ads caused rather than sales they took credit for. The worked example is a brand search line at 10.1x ROAS and $242K of revenue in September; the point is that a dashboard cannot show how much of that would have happened anyway. The second post covers Google's Target ROAS calculator, based on profit margin: a 15% margin returns 6.67x, break-even at 1 divided by margin; if the real margin after shipping, returns and fees is 12%, break-even rises to 8.33x—with the same account and campaigns, but a very different bid. The advice is to treat the calculator as a floor, not a target, and not to change live bids based on a beta tool alone. Choose this alternative when the agency needs to test or price an incrementality claim before defending brand ROAS to a client, or tie a target ROAS to real margin rather than account history.
- Josh Gregory: Choose Josh Gregory when the likely problem lies in the system around the ads, not the ad settings. The reviewed scaling post covers what breaks once budgets pass roughly GBP 25K-30K a month on Meta or Google—falling ROAS, climbing acquisition costs and unpredictable results—and identifies where the money goes: no working path for cold audiences once warm buyers stop covering the budget; Google and Meta planned in isolation, so clicks and customer journeys overlap; and no lifetime-value or offer strategy behind paying more for a new customer. The listed fixes are structural: weekly creative testing cycles, margin and CAC checks before budgets rise, offers that make sense for first-time buyers, a funnel mapped from awareness to purchase, and landing pages built to convert cold clicks. The second post explains how spend can dilute performance when it rises too quickly—broader targeting, weakened best audiences and lower conversion rates—and recommends tighter campaign structure to control budget, audience signals and exclusions to keep targeting sharp, and alignment between search terms, product feeds and creative. The posts also state an inquiry route not mentioned by the other reviewed creators: free Google Ads audits for ecommerce brands over the following month, arranged by message.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/