47.66° N 117.43° W Summit · Profitable Growth
Google Ads for multi-brand retailers
When you sell other companies' brands, the shopper can buy the exact same item from the brand, a marketplace or the dealer down the road. I build the account around what you can control: margin by brand, a feed that matches your store, ads that follow each dealer agreement, and a product page that gives people a reason to buy from you.
01 The problem
A brand that sells only its own products sets its own price and keeps its own margin. A dealer doesn't. The advertised price is often fixed, the margin changes from brand to brand, and the same product shows up in the same Shopping results from several stores at once.
Most dealer accounts are still built like a single-brand store: one campaign, one target, revenue as the goal. That setup rewards whatever sells fastest, which is rarely what makes you the most money, and it can't see the difference.
The 99.4% figure is from my ecommerce tracking accuracy benchmark, which measured 3 stores (N = 3).
02 The diagnostic
In priority order. The later fixes depend on the earlier ones being right.
A single Performance Max or Shopping campaign spends where it already sells, which is usually your biggest brand's best sellers. The rest of the catalog barely serves, and you can't see which brand the money went to.
Every dealer agreement sets a different margin. A ROAS target that is profitable on your best-margin brand loses money on the thinnest one, and the account can't tell them apart because it only sees revenue.
Products you can sell show as out of stock in Merchant Center, items are missing GTINs, and titles are copied straight from the brand. Google either disapproves the product or shows it for the wrong searches.
Many brands restrict how authorized dealers advertise: no bidding on the brand name, no advertised price under MAP, specific wording for promotions. Accounts that never read those terms put the dealer relationship at risk for a few clicks.
The shopper can find the same description and the same photos on the brand's site and at five other stores. If your page adds nothing, the click you paid for goes to whoever ships fastest or gave them a reason to stay.
Add-to-carts and duplicate purchase tags counted as conversions make every brand look profitable. Smart Bidding then optimizes toward carts, and the margin math above is built on the wrong number.
03 The playbook
Six moves in the first 90 days, tracking first, because every margin decision after it depends on counting sales correctly.
I start with the tracking: one purchase conversion, deduplicated, matched against the orders in the store. Cart events stay as signals, never as conversions. The method is The Tracking Stack.
Before restructuring anything, I build one sheet: each brand you carry, its margin to you, its advertising rules from the dealer agreement and its share of revenue. That sheet sets the campaign structure and the targets.
Brands go into campaign groups by margin tier, using custom labels in the feed, so each group gets a target it can make money at. A brand with thin margin gets a stricter target. The long tail gets its own budget instead of whatever is left over.
Availability that matches what you can sell, GTINs on every item, titles rebuilt around how people search: brand, model, variant, size. Disapprovals cleared and the unpublished part of the catalog brought back in.
Your product page has to add something the brand's page doesn't: real stock, shipping speed, a comparison against the model next to it, setup help, a showroom or pickup if you have one. Those facts go into the page and into the ads.
Shoppers on the same product check several dealers before they buy. Retargeting and browse-abandonment email bring them back with the reasons from step 05, not a discount that eats a margin you already mapped.
04 Engagement levels
Every account starts with the free audit or a 30-minute call where I tell you which one fits. Pricing here is directional. The real quote comes on the call.
Tracking Sprint
The measurement fix. One deduplicated purchase conversion reconciled against your orders, so every decision after it is made on real sales.
One-time project
Imagery + Shopping
The Shopping, Performance Max and feed program, run on margin by brand, with quarterly imagery refreshes so your product pages stop looking like every other dealer's.
Ongoing · month-to-month
Fractional Marketing Lead
The whole commercial program. Google, Meta, email and the storefront run as one system, planned around which brands you want to grow.
Ongoing · month-to-month
05 Fit
Who this is for
Who this isn't for
Selling your own brand? The ecommerce page covers that.
Ready to talk
Send me the account and I'll tell you within 24 hours where the spend is going by brand and what the tracking is really counting. Same person on the call as on the keyboard.
Or email hi@connercrowe.com.
FAQ