Ecommerce & D2C
Brands that need stronger customer acquisition, measurement that reconciles with the order table, and growth that survives contact with product margins.
Ecommerce advertising →Independent performance marketing consultant
Independent Performance Marketing Consultant for Growth-Focused Businesses
I'm Vijay Bhabhor. I work directly with businesses on Google Ads, Meta Ads and SEO — with a focus on profitable customer acquisition, measurement you can trust, and organic growth that holds up when the ad spend pauses.
Based in Surat, India, working with brands here and in the US, UK, Canada and Australia. No account managers in between — the person who decides what changes is the person you talk to about it.
17+
years in digital marketing
100+
brands and projects
5
markets: India, US, UK, Canada, Australia
Who I work with
Built for Businesses That Need Marketing to Perform
I work best with businesses that already have a product, service or market worth growing, and want a senior specialist involved in the decisions behind acquisition rather than just the execution.
Growth-focused businesses
Already investing in marketing and looking for better account strategy, tracking and performance — often after a period where spend rose and results did not.
Diagnose a problem →In-house marketing teams
Teams with capable people who need senior audits, consulting or a second opinion on a decision nobody internally can settle.
Consulting support →Agencies
Agencies holding the client relationship who need experienced specialist paid media capability behind it, delivered and reported under your own brand.
White-label delivery →What I do
Three Core Areas of Expertise
The right mix depends on how your business acquires customers, how much demand already exists in search, and what is worth building for the long term. Very few businesses need all three at once.
How I think about marketing
The Work Starts With the Business, Not the Ad Platform
A campaign can have an excellent click-through rate and lose money on every order. An SEO strategy can double traffic without producing a single additional enquiry. What separates a good marketing decision from an expensive one is usually settled before anyone opens an ad account.
So I look at the acquisition channel alongside the conversion tracking, the margins, what a customer is actually worth and whether the offer stands up — then decide what to optimise. It is a slower start and it avoids the most common outcome in this industry, which is twelve months of diligent work on the wrong constraint.
Business economics first
Return on ad spend, acquisition cost, margin, conversion rate and customer value decide whether a campaign is working. Platform metrics describe activity, not outcomes — and a 5× return can still leave nothing behind once cost of goods and returns are counted.
Measurement before optimisation
Automated bidding spends against the conversion signals it receives. Where those are wrong, the system does not merely misreport — it confidently buys more of whatever produced the error. Tracking gets verified against your own orders before anything gets scaled.
Direct specialist involvement
You work with the person responsible for the strategy and the optimisation, not a coordinator relaying it. That limits how many clients I take on, which is the trade I have chosen to make.
Experience
Experience Built Across Platforms, Markets and Business Models
The value of experience is not the number of years by itself. It is knowing that broad match on an ecommerce account with thousands of weekly conversions is a reasonable bet, and that the same setting on a B2B account generating twelve leads a month spends a quarter's budget confirming what you already suspected.
Saree D2C · Shopify
Surat, India · SEO
Categories were named the way the business thought about stock rather than the way customers search. Rebuilt the category structure around occasion and fabric intent, then implemented product structured data across the catalogue.
₹0 → ₹4.2L
Home décor · WooCommerce
India · Meta Ads
Around ₹8L monthly revenue, entirely organic, with no paid acquisition at all. Built and connected the catalogue, separated prospecting from retargeting so acquisition cost stayed readable, and planned ahead of the festival season.
₹8L → ₹35L
Electronics · custom platform
India · SEO + Google Ads
A large catalogue almost entirely dependent on Google Shopping, with product pages that had never been optimised. Resolved 78 technical issues, rebuilt the Merchant Center feed to match on-page data, and worked through 12,000 product pages.
62% less ad spend
Beauty D2C · Shopify
United Kingdom · white-label
A UK agency held the client relationship but had no in-house ecommerce paid social capability. Rebuilt the account and took over ongoing management under their brand, starting with catalogue and conversion tracking work.
2.1× → 3.8×
These are individual outcomes from particular starting points, not averages and not what any other account should expect. Timeline and scale depend on domain history, platform, existing authority, product margin and competition — and two of the four benefited from conditions that made growth easier than typical, which is noted above rather than left out.
Ecommerce specialisation
Deep Experience With Ecommerce Growth
Ecommerce is my strongest area, particularly where paid acquisition, analytics and organic search have to work on the same product and category pages.
What makes stores different is that pages are generated from catalogue data rather than written by hand, so the product feed becomes an advertising asset and architecture becomes an SEO constraint. A single clean feed serves Shopping, Performance Max and Meta catalogue advertising at once — which is worth knowing before paying to build it three times.
The other thing stores get wrong is judging performance on averages. A healthy overall return routinely conceals a best-selling line sold below its real cost, because automated bidding finds whatever converts most easily and that is usually the cheapest, thinnest-margin item in the catalogue.
Platforms & tools
Categories worked in
How I work
A Straightforward Process From Diagnosis to Execution
Five stages, in this order. The sequence is the method — each one can invalidate the analysis that would have followed it.
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Understand
Business model, goals, how customers actually decide, what a customer is worth, and what the current marketing setup is doing. None of this lives in an ad platform, and all of it determines what a good result looks like.
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Diagnose
Accounts, tracking, campaigns, organic visibility and the conversion path. Where platform figures and your own records disagree, that disagreement is usually the first real finding rather than a rounding difference.
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Prioritise
Identify the few changes most likely to move business performance, rather than producing a list of thirty low-impact tasks. I would rather hand over three findings that matter than thirty that contain them.
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Execute
Implement the agreed changes across the relevant channels and measurement systems — either directly, or specified clearly enough that your developers can act on them without a follow-up meeting.
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Measure & improve
Track outcomes against the business measures we agreed, document what changed, and revise priorities on evidence. Real data usually contradicts part of the original plan, and that is the useful part.
Knowledge & experience
What I Write About
I publish practical analysis from actual campaign, SEO and ecommerce work — how faceted navigation quietly consumes crawling on a large catalogue, why a falling cost per lead is often bad news, what changes when Merchant Center data is wrong. Not definitions of terms you could look up anywhere.
Topics run across Google Ads, Meta Ads, technical and ecommerce SEO, conversion tracking and measurement.
Also useful
If something specific is going wrong right now, the marketing diagnostics section works through the common problems by symptom — falling traffic, traffic without leads, rising acquisition cost, reporting that does not match reality — and points to what to check first.
About Vijay
Why I Chose the Independent Consultant Model
I started in digital marketing over seventeen years ago and have been working in paid search since 2009 — long enough to have run accounts through the rename from AdWords, the arrival of automated bidding, and the shift from keyword control to goal-based campaigns.
Working through agencies and marketplaces for much of that time taught me where the value actually sits, and where it leaks. It sits in the judgement calls: which constraint is binding, whether the conversion data can be trusted, what the business can afford to pay for a customer. It leaks in translation — a strategist decides, a coordinator relays, an executor implements something adjacent to the original intent, and by the time results come back nobody can say which decision produced them.
Working independently removes those layers. The person who diagnosed the account is the person in it and the person you question about it. The honest trade-off is capacity: I take on fewer clients than an agency could, and I would rather say no to work I cannot do properly than accept it and staff it thinly.
The problems I enjoy most are the ones where the obvious answer is wrong — an account that looks well run and still loses money, a store where organic traffic grew and revenue did not, a lead-gen business where the cheapest leads turned out to be the most expensive customers. Those take unpicking rather than optimising, and unpicking them is the part of this work I would still do if it were not the job.
I'm based in Surat, Gujarat, which matters less than it used to — most of my accounts are outside the city and several are outside India. What it does mean is that businesses in Surat can meet in person, which some prefer before handing over an advertising budget for the first time.
At a glance
- Role
- Independent performance marketing consultant
- Specialisms
- Google Ads, Meta Ads, SEO, ecommerce marketing, conversion tracking
- Based in
- Surat, Gujarat, India
- Markets
- India, United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia
- In paid search since
- 2009
Common questions
Before You Get in Touch
What does Vijay Bhabhor specialise in?
Google Ads, Meta Ads and SEO, with the deepest experience in ecommerce and D2C. Alongside the channels themselves, a large share of the work is conversion tracking and measurement — making sure the data campaigns optimise against corresponds to what the business actually received.
Do I work directly with Vijay?
Yes. There is no team the work gets delegated to and no account manager in between — the person who diagnoses the account is the person working in it and the person you talk to about it. The honest trade-off is capacity: I take on fewer clients than an agency, so I am not always available immediately.
What types of businesses do you work with?
Mostly ecommerce and D2C brands, growth-focused businesses already investing in marketing, and selected service businesses. I also work with in-house marketing teams needing senior audits or consulting, and with agencies on a white-label basis. What matters more than sector is whether there is validated demand and a business that can handle more of it.
Do you work with businesses outside India?
Yes — accounts targeting the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia alongside Indian ones, some directly and some white-label through agencies. Everything is managed remotely and reviewed through shared data. What genuinely differs between markets is cost per click, competitive density and buyer expectations, so targets and creative are set per market rather than carried across.
Can you work alongside our existing marketing team?
Yes, and it is a common arrangement. That might mean handling paid search while your team owns content and the website, auditing an account someone else manages, or advising on strategy while your people implement. What matters is that responsibilities are defined clearly enough that nobody is optimising against someone else's changes.
Do you manage Google Ads, Meta Ads and SEO together?
Where it makes strategic sense, and often it does not. Most businesses should not run all three at once — a store with a conversion problem gains nothing from adding a second paid channel, and a business with no organic base may need paid working first. The three overlap most usefully in ecommerce, where the same product pages and product data serve all of them.
Can I start with an audit or consultation?
Yes, and it is usually the sensible way in. A one-off audit gives you an independent diagnosis with a prioritised view of what is limiting performance, with no ongoing commitment. Consulting suits teams who want direction while implementing themselves. Ongoing management makes sense once we both know what the work involves.
Do you guarantee rankings or ROAS?
No, and I would be wary of anyone who does. Results depend on your offer, pricing, website, competition, algorithm changes and the auction — most of which nobody controls. What I can commit to is a defensible priority order, honest reporting reconciled against your own records, and telling you early if I think the budget belongs somewhere other than where you are planning to put it.
Let's talk
Have a Marketing Problem You Want an Experienced Second Opinion On?
Tell me what you are trying to achieve, what you are currently doing, and where you think things are getting stuck. If I can help, I'll tell you how. If I don't think I'm the right fit, I'll say that too — it is a more useful answer than a proposal.
- Direct communication
- No obligation
- Clear scope before engagement