Automotive E-commerce
UK automotive retailer · Google Ads (Search + Shopping)
Tripled Google Ads spend across 24 months while holding ROAS in the 12-14x band every single month. Latest month delivered 13.1x on £26k spend.
By the numbers
Where we started
The client was running profitable Google Ads at a stable 12x+ ROAS but couldn't push more budget through the account without efficiency collapsing. Every time spend went up, incremental performance fell off a cliff — classic symptom of an account structured around top-line revenue rather than margin contribution.
The brief was simple on paper, hard in practice: triple the spend. Hold ROAS above 10x. Don't waste a month getting there.
The approach
Restructured the feed around margin, not revenue
We rebuilt the product feed using custom labels tied to gross margin rather than SKU hierarchy. High-margin parts went into their own Shopping campaigns with aggressive bid targets; thin-margin SKUs were capped or excluded. This let us scale spend into categories where extra budget still returned incremental profit.
Tiered ROAS targets by product group
Instead of one blanket ROAS target, we ran tiered targets per product group — lower ROAS on bestsellers to capture volume, higher ROAS on niche high-margin lines to protect contribution. Spend flowed to whichever tier was performing each week, automatically.
Weekly search term reviews, compounding negatives
Every week we pruned the search terms report. Over two years the negative keyword list grew to several thousand terms — a continually sharpening filter that stopped wasted clicks before they could accumulate.
Feed and landing page quality as ongoing workstream
Ad performance is only half the equation. We worked alongside the client's team on title structure, image quality, category pages and product feed hygiene — so every extra click landed on a page that was set up to convert.
What happened
- March 2024 baseline: £8.7k spend → £108k revenue, 12.3x ROAS, 364 orders at £24 CPA.
- March 2025 (after year one of optimisation): £16.6k spend → £240k revenue, 14.4x ROAS, 794 orders at £21 CPA. Spend up 90%, revenue up 122%, ROAS climbed.
- March 2026 (latest month): £26k spend → £341k revenue, 13.1x ROAS, 1,174 orders at £22 CPA. Spend tripled vs baseline, revenue 3.2x, ROAS still double-digit.
- Across the full 24-month period, ROAS never dropped below 10x in any single month. The account has generated more than £4M in tracked Google Ads revenue.
- The most recent three-month window delivered a combined £965k in revenue on £75k spend — a 12.9x blended ROAS at the highest sustained spend level in the account's history.
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All figures pulled directly from the client's Google Ads account for the 24-month period ending March 2026. Client name anonymised pending permission; real data available on request.