Two flat years, then a 269% swing in ROAS
A construction supplies brand had run paid search into a wall: two consecutive years of flat conversion and flat return, in a category dominated by one much larger competitor. We rebuilt the targeting from the ground up.
The brief
Flat is its own kind of failure
The client is an established national retailer competing against a marketplace leader with far deeper pockets. Two consecutive years of year-over-year paid search performance had come in flat on both conversion rate and return on ad spend.
Flat is a harder brief than declining. Nothing was obviously broken, which meant there was no single fix to point at. The account was functioning; it simply was not compounding, and every incremental dollar was buying the same result as the dollar before it.
In a category where the competitor can outbid on any head term, buying the same inventory more aggressively was not an option. The only room left was in precision.
What we did
Ultra-granular targeting, everywhere at once
Rather than optimize the account at the campaign level, we segmented it along every axis the platform exposes and let the highest-converting slices earn budget on their own performance.
- Highest-converting products isolated and given their own structure rather than competing inside broad groups
- Geographic segmentation, so spend followed the regions that actually closed
- Age group and device type split out, rather than averaged into a single bid
- Day of week and hour of day scheduled against real conversion patterns
- Ad type and search term segmentation to separate intent from incidental traffic
The numbers
Under twelve months, year over year
| Metric | Change | Reads as |
|---|---|---|
| Return on ad spend | +269% | Result |
| Conversion rate | +46% | Result |
About Gild
Gild Group is a fractional ecommerce team for mid-market Shopify brands. Performance, retention and storefront operations run by one embedded group of senior operators on a fixed monthly retainer. Charleston, South Carolina, since 2014.