Niche E-commerce
UK specialist retailer · Google Ads (Shopping-led)
Small-budget specialist ecom account running at 16x blended ROAS across 28 months. Peak months above 26x. Proof that the Seven Marketing approach works without needing a £20k monthly spend to make the numbers move.
By the numbers
Where we started
Specialist retailer in a niche vertical with a small addressable audience and thin margins on most of the range. The previous setup was running at a reasonable ROAS but couldn't grow — any time they pushed spend beyond about £1,500 a month, ROAS collapsed and they had to pull back.
The brief wasn't to scale it to £10k a month — that would have exhausted the addressable audience. The brief was to squeeze maximum efficiency out of the budget that actually worked: roughly £1,200 a month on average, running for the long haul.
The approach
Accepted the ceiling and optimised below it
Most of our engagements are about scaling spend. This one was the opposite — the job was to hit the spend ceiling every month and extract maximum revenue from it. That meant treating budget as a fixed constraint and optimising every other lever around it.
Shopping-first structure with zero Performance Max
On small budgets, Performance Max hides too much and wastes too much. We ran the account entirely through standard Shopping and Search campaigns so every pound could be traced to the search query and product group that earned it.
Segmented the catalogue by profitability, not category
Niche retailers often have one or two hero SKUs that do most of the revenue. We built the Shopping structure around custom labels that isolated these winners and bid aggressively on them, while keeping lower-velocity SKUs in broader, lower-bid product groups.
Geo and schedule tightening for marginal gains
On a small budget the marginal optimisations matter more. We tightened geo-targeting to the highest-converting regions and built dayparting rules around actual order time patterns. Small individual gains, but they compound when every click is precious.
Steady hand through soft months
Specialist ecom accounts have seasonality and demand shocks. Rather than panic-optimise through soft months (May-September 2025 saw ROAS dip to 5-9x), we held structure, made targeted adjustments, and rode it out. The account came back to 19-28x from October onwards — intervention during soft months would probably have made things worse.
What happened
- 28 months of continuous activity delivering a 16.30x blended ROAS — £557k in tracked revenue on £34k of ad spend.
- 1,504 orders across the engagement at a £23 blended cost per order.
- Peak monthly ROAS of 28.27x in January 2026, with seven months in the 2024-2026 window clearing 20x.
- Most recent three-month window (January–March 2026): averaged 22.3x ROAS on £4.1k spend — £91.8k in revenue from a sub-£1,400/month budget.
- The account has run profitably in every single month of the engagement — not a single month of loss-making spend across 28 consecutive months.
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All figures pulled directly from the client's Google Ads account for the 28-month period ending March 2026. Client name anonymised pending permission; real data available on request.