eCommerce Case Study · Anti-Aging Skin Care

$22,800 Into $71,500. In 3 Months.

A premium anti-aging skincare brand came to us convinced Google Ads didn’t work for them. It wasn’t working, but not for the reason they thought. Their entire budget was going to people who already knew who they were.

Google Search, Shopping, YouTube & Discovery

642 purchases

Blended across brand and cold traffic

From restructure to profitable scale

Nationwide

They Thought Google Ads Didn't Work. It Had Never Been Switched On.

The product was strong. Premium anti-aging skincare in a category with real demand and real margin. But their Google Ads account had been running without producing anything they could point to, and after months of that, the conclusion inside the business was that the channel simply didn’t work for them.

They were wrong, and the reason was uncomfortable.

The Account Was Buying Customers It Already Had

Every dollar was going to brand keywords.

The account was bidding almost entirely on searches for the brand’s own name. Those searches convert well, which made the campaign reports look survivable. But people searching for a brand by name have already decided. Most of them were going to buy with or without an ad in front of them.

So the account wasn’t acquiring anyone. It was paying to put a click in front of traffic the website was already earning for free, then counting those sales as advertising performance. No new customers were entering the business through Google. The growth ceiling wasn’t a bidding problem. There was simply no acquisition happening at all.

The tracking couldn’t have caught it.

Conversion actions were set up incorrectly, transactions weren’t being recorded reliably, and there was no single default goal for the account to optimize against. Even if they had wanted to test cold traffic, they had no trustworthy way to tell whether it worked. Broken measurement doesn’t just distort results. It removes the ability to make a decision.

That combination is why the account had been stuck. Brand spend produced numbers that looked defensible, and broken tracking made it impossible to prove otherwise.

Fix the Measurement, Then Build the Funnel That Was Missing

Phase 1 — Rebuild the Foundation

Rebuilt conversion tracking so every transaction was recorded once and recorded correctly
Set a single account-default conversion goal so campaigns were optimizing toward the same definition of success
Corrected the attribution model to give Google’s bidding algorithms the full purchase path instead of a partial one
Cleaned up account-level settings, locations, and campaign hygiene that had accumulated over time

Phase 2 — Build the Acquisition Layer

Brand was already working. The job was to add everything that came before it.

Refined the brand campaign into granular keyword groups. Brand traffic isn’t one audience. Someone searching the brand name behaves differently from someone searching a brand plus product term, and splitting them let us protect efficiency instead of averaging it.
Built mid-funnel Search campaigns with the bid strategy, keywords, and audience layers matched to buyers who were comparing options but hadn’t chosen a brand yet
Launched Shopping across the full catalog as a discovery mechanism. Shopping tells you which products the market actually wants and which search terms bring them, before you commit budget to guessing.
Pulled winning search terms into dedicated campaigns where they could be controlled and scaled directly instead of competing for budget inside a broad campaign
Ran YouTube with UGC creative for cold traffic. Skincare is a category people need to see before they trust it. Real people using the product outperforms polished brand film every time.
Retargeted YouTube viewers through Discovery, catching warm attention while it still existed
Added Display remarketing for site visitors who left without buying
Rebuilt ad extensions across the account to lift CTR and Quality Score

Phase 3 — Scale Once It Was Profitable, Not Before

Optimized keyword and audience selection inside each mid-funnel campaign, product by product
Held the brand campaign above 20X ROAS so it stayed efficient while budget moved toward acquisition
Waited until mid-funnel campaigns were profitable on their own before scaling anything. Scaling an unprofitable campaign doesn’t find profitability. It finds the bottom faster.
Once mid-funnel held, scaled the campaign and the account together

The result was 3.13X blended in three months.

3.13X, and Why That Number Is the Honest One

Three months from restructure to a profitable, scalable account.

3.13X is a blended figure across brand and cold traffic. We could have reported a much higher number by isolating brand, and plenty of agencies do. But brand ROAS measures how many people already wanted you. It doesn’t measure whether advertising is growing the business.

3.13X blended means the account was profitably acquiring customers who had never heard of them. That’s the number that decides whether a brand can scale.

Screenshot of the Performance Data

Is Your Google Ads Account Actually Acquiring Anyone?

If most of your ad spend is going to people searching your brand name, your reports look fine and your business isn’t growing. Those two things can be true at the same time for a long while.

We’ll look at where your spend is actually landing, whether your tracking can be trusted, and what it would take to build a funnel above the bottom of it.

eCommerce Case Study · Anti-Aging Skin Care

$22,800 Into $71,500. In 3 Months.

Ad Spend

Revenue

ROAS:

Time to Result

Market