Case study · Google Ads for ecommerce
How we scaled a footwear ecommerce brand's Google Ads revenue from £23k to £539k a year while holding ROAS above 8x
Seven years of a Google Ads programme for a footwear ecommerce brand. Annual attributed revenue grew from £23k in Year 1 to £539k in Year 7 (23.6x). Blended seven-year ROAS held at 8.5x across an account that scaled its media spend 16x in the same period.
- Annual Google Ads revenue £539k (Year 7) from £23k (Year 1) 23.6x
- Annual media spend £64k (Year 7) from £4k (Year 1) 15.8x
- Blended 7-year ROAS 8.5x from — Across the whole 7-year window
- Cumulative Google Ads revenue (7 years) £1.69m from — From account launch
The client
A footwear ecommerce brand, Shopify from day one. Search and Shopping are the largest paid-media channels in the acquisition mix. This case study covers the Google Ads programme specifically, the account was managed as part of a full agency partnership from the outset, but the numbers here isolate the paid-search-and-Shopping performance so the shape of the ad account's own trajectory is legible on its own terms.
The problem
New account at launch, no historical conversion data, no audience segments to work with, and a specialist ecommerce catalogue in a category where paid CPCs would tighten every year as the wider market matured. The brief was familiar: scale the paid programme without letting return on ad spend collapse into the mid-single digits as the account got bigger. Almost every ecommerce Google Ads account in this category has seen ROAS erode over the last five years as Google's product surface shifted (Performance Max, AI-driven campaign types, rising competitor auction pressure). Holding ROAS above 8x at 15x the media budget is the actual test.
The plan: land the fundamentals, then scale without leaking ROAS
Seven years of Google Ads discipline layered over a fundamentals-first account structure. No exotic tactics, every lever worked continuously.
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Campaign structure built for signal
Tight campaign split from Year 1: Brand, Category, Product-specific, Shopping, and later Performance Max as it rolled out. Each cluster given its own bidding budget so learning did not compete across intent types. Structure evolved every year as Google added and deprecated campaign types.
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Shopping feed as its own workstream
Product-feed hygiene and enrichment run as a continuous programme, not a one-off setup. Titles rewritten for search intent, categories aligned to Google's taxonomy, custom labels added for merchandising signals. Feed quality is the biggest single lever on Shopping ROAS and the single input a lot of agencies leave alone after month one.
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Aggressive negative-keyword hygiene
Weekly search-term reviews across the whole account since Year 1. Hundreds of negatives layered on both the campaign and ad-group level over seven years. Cumulative wasted-spend prevention on the account counts into the tens of thousands of pounds saved from irrelevant queries never getting a second impression.
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Bidding-strategy evolution as the account matured
Manual CPC in early Year 1 while conversion data thickened. Maximise Conversions with CPC ceilings from Year 2. tROAS bidding from Year 3 onwards once we had 100+ conversions per campaign. Migrated to Performance Max on the relevant portion of the account as Google introduced it, without letting PMax cannibalise Standard Shopping revenue as it typically does elsewhere.
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Ad copy and creative testing at cadence
Responsive Search Ads refreshed on a quarterly cadence. Headline pinning strategies tied to the highest-performing anchor phrases per cluster. Ad-strength kept in Excellent range across the account, which lifted auction share at no CPC cost. Shopping product imagery reviewed against category peers periodically.
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Reporting tied to revenue, not clicks
Monthly reports built around attributed revenue and ROAS by campaign and product category, with clicks and impressions there as supporting context, not headline metrics. Quarterly strategic reviews with the client focused on where next quarter's media budget was going and why.
The trajectory (seven full trading years)
Annual attributed Google Ads revenue lifted 23.6x from Year 1 to Year 7. Media spend rose 15.8x in the same window. Blended seven-year ROAS across every rand spent through the account: 8.5x.
Source: Google Ads
Source: Google Ads
Two things are worth flagging on the ROAS chart. First, the Year 2 spike (21x) coincided with the COVID lockdowns pushing ecommerce demand into every category and every account, ROAS in this window was an industry-wide phenomenon, not something we did. Second, the shape of the curve from Year 4 onwards is what actually matters: every year has landed in the 7x to 9x band despite spend increasing 15x across the same seven-year window. Holding a stable ROAS while a media budget grows is the actual test of a mature Google Ads programme. This is what it looks like when the fundamentals are running well and there is a full agency workstream behind the account rather than an isolated media-buyer retainer.
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