# Robin Tesselaar

Robin Tesselaar shares practical Google Ads guidance for ecommerce businesses, including beginner tutorials on Google Merchant Center and campaign setup, plus advice on Performance Max, testing, and measuring profitability.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/robin-tesselaar/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robin-tesselaar
- LinkedIn followers: 5,347
- Topics: ecommerce, paid-ads, google-ads, performance-max
- Based on 13 dated posts, latest 2026-10-08

## Summary

Most useful for practical Google Ads guidance on ecommerce setup, Performance Max, testing, and profitability.

- Best for: B2B ecommerce SaaS or brands needing Google Ads advisory or content collaboration.
- Not for: Consumer brand seeking creator-led paid sponsorship for broad awareness and direct sales.
- Check first: Confirm audience data, sponsorship terms, rates, and inquiry route before contacting them.

### Takeaways

- High ROAS can still lose money because margin matters more than headline return.
- Performance Max needs boundaries, margin splits, branded traffic protection, and customer-value signals.
- Merchant Center setup requires verification and correct account connections before Shopping ads launch.

## Main ideas

- **ROAS is not return: accounts can look profitable while losing money**: Robin's central argument is that revenue divided by ad spend ignores the costs that determine whether a campaign made money: cost of goods, shipping, returns and fulfilment. Three consequences follow. Platforms gravitate toward high-volume, low-margin products because they sell easily, so gross profit falls while ROAS looks strong. They also reward warm audiences, allowing a brand-heavy account to attribute conversions that would have happened without the ad. And blended averages hide diminishing returns: a channel with a better headline ROAS can produce less profit on the next increment of spend than one with a lower headline number. Robin recommends profit-on-ad-spend, a break-even ROAS derived from margin, separate branded and non-branded ROAS, new customer acquisition reporting in Performance Max, and nCAC from the CRM.
- **Performance Max needs boundaries and business signals to work**: Robin argues that Performance Max rewards accounts with structure and penalises those that hand it a blank cheque. The recommendations are specific: run a dedicated exact-match branded search campaign so Performance Max competes for cold, non-branded traffic and its contribution becomes visible; split asset groups by margin, giving high-margin products a high target ROAS and low-margin clearance a low one or excluding it, rather than blending margins into a single average; feed CRM lists, high-value purchaser segments and lifetime-value-weighted audiences instead of generic interest targeting; and use conversion value rules so a small sale and a large sale do not send the same signal. Robin also treats search themes as a diagnostic, not a targeting wish list: if Google marks a theme low usefulness, Performance Max already owns those queries, so themes should cover discovery terms not yet captured.
- **Testing is a budget-structure question, not a budget threshold**: Robin rejects the assumption that Google Ads requires thousands a month before testing is worthwhile. There is no minimum budget; what changes with spend is how testing is organised. The framework adapts to what a brand can spend, with campaign structure and budget strategy shifting accordingly. Ask Robin for the specific budget bands and test designs.
- **Skipped setup work leads to disapprovals and wasted budget**: Robin's beginner material prioritises unglamorous configuration: it determines whether campaigns run cleanly. Merchant Center is presented as the starting point for every Google Shopping campaign, not an administrative detour. Details people rush through often return as disapprovals and suspensions. On Google Ads, Robin describes a common failure pattern: a new advertiser opens an account, is pushed into an unfamiliar campaign type, spends a few hundred euros and concludes Google does not work. Robin's counterpoint is that setup, not Google, was usually the problem.
- **Robin's advice puts Performance Max in two roles: a starting point and a campaign that must prove itself**: Robin calls Performance Max a strong starting point for many new ecommerce brands, while still A/B testing campaign types to find the highest ROAS. For every account they manage, Robin checks where spend is going, which placements generate conversions and whether the focus is profitability rather than cheap cost per click. Then they make one change and watch the data. The goal is to move spend toward results, not make the account look complicated. Read alongside Robin's structure-first argument, the advice is clear: Performance Max is a reasonable place to begin only when brand traffic is protected, margins are separated and results are tested rather than assumed.

## Work to read

- [Most Google Ads accounts are not profitable. They just look profitable.](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/robin-tesselaar_most-google-ads-accounts-are-not-profitable-activity-7466071600522510337-6l4g)
- [PMax works when the accounts winning share the same structure](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/robin-tesselaar_pmax-works-when-the-accounts-winning-shares-activity-7449705604626989056-UaGo)
- [How to Create Google Merchant Center | Tutorial for Beginners 2026](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/robin-tesselaar_how-to-create-google-merchant-center-tutorial-activity-7508466021134061568-wkdJ)
- [How to Connect Shopify To Google Merchant Center | Tutorial for Beginners 2026](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/robin-tesselaar_how-to-connect-shopify-to-google-merchant-activity-7503399758234030080-zF6W)
- [How to Run Google Ads for E-Commerce in 2026 (Beginners Tutorial)](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/robin-tesselaar_how-to-run-google-ads-for-e-commerce-in-2026-activity-7505929286520819712-MTFj)
- [How To Test Google Ads at ANY Budget Level](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/robin-tesselaar_how-to-test-google-ads-at-any-budget-level-activity-7511010078494330880-Ze-D)
- [PMax is a strong starting point in Google Ads.](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/robin-tesselaar_pmax-is-a-strong-starting-point-in-google-activity-7500479421850476545--MVA)

## Partnerships

The posts disclose no brand partnerships, sponsorship formats, rates or media kit. Robin Tesselaar shares educational Google Ads tutorials and commentary for ecommerce businesses, with no sponsored placements, affiliate disclosures or labelled collaborations. They write from the perspective of someone managing Google Ads accounts for ecommerce brands, suggesting client-service work rather than creator sponsorship inventory, but publish no service offering, pricing or terms. There is no official partnership or sponsorship inquiry page, form or contact route. For a paid advisory or content collaboration, brands would need to make direct contact and agree terms privately. Confirm scope, deliverables and disclosure expectations with Tesselaar before planning a campaign.

## Alternatives

- Martin Davies: Choose Martin Davies when the client's first problem is diagnosing why a Performance Max account underperforms or whether branded search is inflating results. The posts cover two specific decisions. One is splitting brand out of Performance Max: run a dedicated branded search campaign with exact-match keywords and negatively exclude brand from Performance Max, then use a brand-versus-non-brand report to see how much brand traffic the campaign already owns. The other is using an impression-share-by-day report to distinguish a market-wide demand drop from a competitor taking share. For a SaaS client whose Performance Max account looks strong mainly because it is buying branded traffic, the brand-exclusion method is a direct starting point.
- Jack Paxton: Choose Jack Paxton when the client's issue is an unexplained sales drop or when catalog and retention economics are the real constraint. The posts give a triage order for a sudden revenue drop: check whether tracking agrees across Shopify, GA4, and Meta; check the store conversion rate; check what changed in the ad account; then check seasonality and external context. They also describe a home goods client case that cut retargeting from 65% of spend to 25%, added LTV-weighted audience inputs from Klaviyo, built a post-purchase sequence, raised the free-shipping threshold, and removed weak SKUs from the catalog feed. That feed cleanup is the closest work in the comparator set to Merchant Center and Shopping feed decisions, but it appears as part of a growth case rather than a feed setup tutorial.
- Jordan Fry: Choose Jordan Fry when the client's decision needs measurement proof rather than another campaign setup. The posts cover self-serve Conversion Lift for Search and Performance Max to test how many sales the ads actually caused, a warning that brand search ROAS is the easiest number in the account to make look good, and a margin-based Target ROAS method that treats Google's profit-margin calculator as a breakeven floor rather than a target. The method recalculates breakeven when real margin differs after returns, payment fees, and shipping: a 15% margin gives 6.67x breakeven, but a 12% real margin moves it to 8.33x. For a SaaS client that needs to know whether a Performance Max account is genuinely profitable, this is more useful than setup guidance.

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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/