How can I identify if my paid search campaigns are losing money?

The spend-to-revenue gap against Shopify or your CRM

Where to find it: open Google Ads at the campaign level for the last thirty days. Pull total cost. Then open Shopify under Analytics, Reports, Sales by traffic referrer, and filter to Google paid. For a service business, pull closed-won revenue from the CRM filtered to Google paid source. Set the same date range in both tools.

Threshold: Google Ads will almost always report higher revenue than Shopify or the CRM, because Google counts assisted conversions on a longer attribution window. A gap under 25 percent is normal. A gap above 40 percent means Google is taking credit for revenue that other channels produced.

What to do: trust the Shopify or CRM number, not the Google number. Recalculate ROAS using the platform-of-record revenue figure. If the campaign was profitable at a 4x Google-reported ROAS and the Shopify-reported ROAS is 2.3x, the campaign may already be underwater. Run the math in the profit calculator before changing bids.

When blended CPA climbs above the LTV-adjusted target

Where to find it: blended CPA is total ad spend across all paid channels divided by total new customers acquired in the same window. Pull spend from Google Ads, Meta, and any other platform. Pull new-customer count from Shopify Customers report filtered to first-order customers, or from the CRM by first-touch date.

Threshold: blended CPA needs to sit under contribution margin per customer over the first 12 months of LTV. For a Shopify brand with a 60-dollar AOV, a 45 percent contribution margin, and a 1.6x repeat rate, that ceiling is roughly 43 dollars. For a service business with a 4,000-dollar average contract and a 35 percent margin, that ceiling is closer to 1,400 dollars. If blended CPA crosses the LTV-adjusted ceiling, the account is buying customers at a loss even when individual campaigns look fine.

What to do: cut the campaigns sitting above the ceiling first. Reallocate to the campaigns sitting under it. The free 25-page audit walks through the LTV-adjusted CPA math for a Shopify store and a service business side by side. The vertical-specific reads are at /for-home-brands/furniture for Shopify furniture brands and /for-service-brands/law-firms for legal practices.

Why search-query relevance under 75 percent is a structural leak

Where to find it: inside Google Ads, open the Search terms report at the account level. Set the window to ninety days. Sort by cost descending and export the top 200 queries with their cost column.

Threshold: read every query and tag it as relevant or irrelevant to the product or service. Sum the cost of the relevant queries and divide by total cost. Healthy paid-search accounts on tight match types score 85 percent and up. Broad-match heavy accounts often score in the 50s and 60s. Anything under 75 percent is a structural leak, not a tuning issue.

What to do: a relevance score under 75 means the keywords and match types are pulling traffic the campaign was never designed to serve. Tighten match types before adding negatives. Add audience signals on any Performance Max asset groups. A single ninety-minute pass on a 75-percent account often lifts the score above 90 within two reporting cycles.

Confirming conversion-tracking integrity across all three reports

Where to find it: three places. The Google Ads conversion column. The Shopify or CRM revenue figure for the same source and date range. The GA4 conversion count for the same window.

Threshold: the three numbers should land within 10 to 15 percent of each other once attribution windows are aligned. A 30 percent or larger discrepancy between any two of them means tracking is broken, duplicated, or both. Common causes: missing enhanced conversions, a conversion action set to count every conversion instead of one, a server-side tag firing alongside a client-side tag, or a CRM source field that defaults to direct.

What to do: until tracking is clean, no decision made on the data is reliable. The tracking stack framework covers the de-duplication contract and the conversion action settings that resolve most of these mismatches. Fix tracking before declaring a campaign a loser.

Calculating contribution margin after ad spend by campaign

Where to find it: this number does not live inside Google Ads. Build it in a spreadsheet. Pull revenue attributed to the campaign from Shopify or the CRM, subtract cost of goods sold or service delivery cost, subtract payment processing, subtract ad spend, subtract any other variable cost tied to the order or contract. What remains is contribution margin after ad spend.

Threshold: positive is the minimum bar. A campaign delivering a positive ROAS on Google’s read but a negative contribution margin after ad spend is losing money on every order. This happens most often on free-shipping promotions, deep first-order discounts, or service businesses paying high CPCs for low-margin contract types.

What to do: rank every campaign by contribution margin after ad spend rather than by ROAS. The order will look different. The bottom of that ranked list is where the losing campaigns live. Pause or restructure them before touching anything in the middle. The wasted-ad-spend library covers the most common patterns that drag this number negative.

The check I run first

Conversion-tracking integrity. The other four checks rely on numbers that need to be trustworthy before any of them mean anything. A paid-search campaign that looks like it is losing money is often a tracking problem in disguise. A paid-search campaign that looks like it is winning is often the same problem from the other side. Fix tracking, then run the spend-to-revenue gap and the contribution-margin math. The losing campaigns surface inside an afternoon.

Two losing campaigns surfaced by the five checks points to the restructure path above as the next step. Four, and a diagnostic call is the highest-leverage move from here.