Case study · PPC audit · Matchaday.sk · Slovak online store selling matcha
Why orders were falling: weakening demand and frequent changes in Google Ads
Orders at the matcha store had been falling month after month since spring, and the client needed to name why. An independent PPC audit separated the impact of the market from the impact of how the ad account was managed, and set out what needed to change before the main season.
- Brief
- Audit of the drop in orders before the main season
- Period analysed
- January to October 2026 against last year
- Deliverables
- Report, data to verify, call
- Audit by
- Karel Huk personally, independent PPC specialist
01 · What the client was dealing with
Is it the market or the account?
Orders had been falling since spring and the account went through a series of changes in the meantime. Without separating the causes, there was no way to decide whether to fix the campaigns, rebuild them or just ride out a weaker market. The answer had to be backed by data and ready fast. The audit ran before the winter season started.
02 · What I checked
Seven possible causes, two confirmed
I checked every possible cause in the data: Google Ads, Shoptet, GA4, GTM, Keyword Planner and Google Trends.
- Demand for matchaWhat I checked: Search volume by month and by query intent, checked against Google TrendsVerdict: Cause
- Competitors taking shareWhat I checked: Auction market size, impression share and click share outside the brandVerdict: No
- Target and budget changesWhat I checked: The account change history and the impact of each change on spend against a campaign it did not touchVerdict: Cause
- Competitors on the brandWhat I checked: Who bids on the store’s name and what brand visits costVerdict:
- Purchase trackingWhat I checked: Shoptet orders against Google Ads conversions, changes in GTM and conversion actionsVerdict: No
- Website and purchase funnelWhat I checked: Conversion rate of paid visits and the funnel in GA4Verdict: No
- Campaign settingsWhat I checked: Campaign structure, targeting and setup errorsVerdict: No
03 · Market
The market is shrinking, the store is holding its share
Diagram · What search orders are made of
Matcha search volume
below last year since spring
How many searches the store turns into purchases
better than last year
Demand for matcha is shrinking year over year after last year’s boom. Search volume has been below last year since spring, and it is not just seasonality: in the same months last year it grew. Google Trends shows the same turn as Keyword Planner.
Competitors are not taking the store’s share, the whole market is shrinking. The store has no say over the market. It does have a say over how much of the smaller demand it captures, and that is where the account comes in.
04 · Account
Changes came faster than the campaigns could settle
Diagram · Why the impact of changes could not be assessed
A change to the return target or budget
Performance responds to the new settings, but conversions come in with a delay
The next change comes before the impact of the previous one can be assessed
The algorithm never got time to approach the new target, and no change could be assessed fairly.
Within a few months the account went through a series of changes to return targets and budgets, all meant well to improve return on ad spend, but together they threw the bidding algorithm off. Strict return targets and lower budgets held the campaigns back exactly when the market was weakening and the store needed to invest its way out of it.
05 · What came out of it
Clear causes
The client knows why orders fell and can separate the impact of the market from changes in the account.
No rebuild
The campaign setup is sound. The brakes were targets, budgets and the pace of changes, not errors in the account.
What to change
The client knows what to change in the account and handed the recommendations to the team that runs the campaigns.
The client got
- A report backed by data
- Data to verify in a spreadsheet
- Recommendations on what to change
- A joint call on the results
„Potrebovali sme oddeliť vonkajšie vplyvy trhu od zmien v účte. Karel nám za pár dní dodal krátky a prehľadný report podložený dátami a na spoločnom hovore ho do hĺbky vysvetlil. Teraz vieme, prečo objednávky klesli a čo treba v účte zmeniť. Za nás stopercentná spokojnosť.“