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Paid Ads — who pays for what

Ad spend goes to Google on your own account and StockSweep never bills for it. How the spend governor protects your budget, and what the ROAS floor actually does.

Last updated: September 22, 2026

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Paid Ads lets StockSweep run clearance campaigns against your dead stock. Because it spends real money, the first thing to be clear about is whose money, on whose account, and who can stop it.

Estimated time: 4 minutes

What you'll accomplish

  • Know exactly who pays for ad spend and who bills you for it
  • Understand the spend governor and the three limits it enforces
  • Understand why a campaign is not judged on its first few days
  • Know how to stop everything immediately

Requirements

  • Plan: Pro or Enterprise.
  • Your own Google Ads account, connected to StockSweep.

Who pays

You pay Google directly, on your own Google Ads account. StockSweep does not resell ad inventory, does not mark up your spend, and does not bill you for it. Your StockSweep subscription is a flat monthly plan price and does not change with how much you spend on ads — there is no commission, no percentage of ad spend, and no usage charge. See Plans Overview for what your plan does cost.

Practically, that means: the campaign budget you authorise is charged to your Google account by Google, on Google's billing cycle, and appears on your Google invoice. StockSweep's role is to decide what to advertise, keep the product feed accurate, and stop the spending when it should stop.

The spend governor

The governor is the part of the system whose only job is to stop campaigns that are losing you money. It enforces three things.

1. The lifetime cap, held at 90%

Ad platforms overshoot. Google documents daily spend running up to roughly twice a day's budget, and reports spend hours late. A system that stopped at 100% of your authorised cap would therefore stop above it.

StockSweep holds at 90% of the lifetime cap instead, so the platform's overshoot lands inside the number you actually authorised rather than past it.

2. The ROAS floor, judged on matured days only

A campaign is paused when its return on ad spend breaches the floor — the suggested default floor is 3.5×.

Two rules make that judgement fair:

  • A day is not judged until it has aged 7 days. Offline conversions are uploaded daily and Google credits them for up to 90 days after the click. A fresh day shows the spend without the sales it produced. Judging it would pause exactly the campaigns with the most conversions still in flight — the best ones.
  • The breach test is 3 of the last 5 matured days, not a consecutive streak. A strict streak resets on a single good day, which lets a campaign that alternates just below and just above the floor bleed indefinitely without ever tripping.

3. Feed price parity

If the price in the ad feed does not match your live storefront price, the SKU is dropped from the feed rather than advertised at the wrong price. Merchant Center suspends accounts for misrepresentation, and a suspension takes down your other campaigns too — so a mismatched SKU is never rounded past.

Stopping everything

The operator kill switch that disables the Paid Ads component deliberately does not disable the job that pauses campaigns. A kill switch that also disabled the stopper would be a kill switch that cannot kill anything: turning the feature off must stop further spending, not strand campaigns that are already spending.

You can also pause or stop campaigns directly in your own Google Ads account at any time. It is your account — StockSweep's access is a convenience, never a lock-in.

Verify it is working

  • Open Actions → Paid Ads to see campaign status, spend to date against the cap, and the current ROAS reading.
  • Active campaigns are reconciled against Google roughly every 15 minutes; the closer a campaign is to its cap, the more a reporting delay would cost, which is why active campaigns are read more often than idle ones.
  • Cross-check spend against your Google Ads account — those are the authoritative numbers, since that is where the billing happens.

Troubleshooting

A campaign paused itself

Check the ROAS reading over the last five matured days. Three of them below the floor is the designed trigger. This is the governor doing its job, not a fault.

Products are missing from my ads

The most common cause is price parity: the feed price and storefront price disagree, so the SKU was dropped rather than risk a Merchant Center suspension. Re-check the product's live price and let the feed resync — feeds sync on roughly a 30-minute cadence.

The connect step will not complete

Connecting Google Ads requires app-level Google Ads API access that must be provisioned before the connection flow can complete. If the Connect step fails or returns you to a Google error, this is not something to retry — contact support and we will tell you the current status rather than leave you guessing.

FAQ

Does StockSweep take a percentage of ad spend?

No. Your plan is a flat monthly price. Ad spend is billed to you by Google and StockSweep takes no cut of it.

Does ad spend count toward any StockSweep usage limit?

No. StockSweep's plan limits cover things like email volume, API keys and automation rules — not money spent with an ad platform. See Plan Limits & Usage.

Who owns the campaigns and the data?

You do. They live in your Google Ads account and remain there if you stop using StockSweep.

Why is my ROAS still showing for a paused campaign?

Conversions keep arriving after the click for up to 90 days, so a paused campaign's ROAS can continue to improve as late conversions are credited.