Case study Results / E-commerce · IT retailer
£55,000 of spend. £591,000 back.
An independent UK computer hardware retailer, spending hundreds a month rather than thousands, in a category with thin margins and giant competitors. Since 2019 the account has returned £591,200 of tracked revenue on £55,249 of spend. Anyone can have a good month. This one has held above ten times over for seven years.
10.70x since 2019 · 18.31x best year · £591,200 tracked revenue · seven years
One of thirteen case studies, published from more than a hundred accounts since 2021. We publish the ones we can put a source against. See all thirteen →
01 The starting point
Tight margins, no room for waste.
Computer hardware is a brutal category for paid search: thin margins, price-comparison shoppers, and national retailers with buying power an independent cannot match. At a few hundred pounds a month there is no budget to learn with. Every click has to be a plausible buyer of a product that actually makes money.
The interesting number here is not the peak, it is the floor. The account has not had a losing year since revenue tracking went in.
02 What we did
What we did
Consolidated the account. Campaigns were split far more finely than the data could support, so no single campaign ever gathered enough signal to optimise against. Consolidating gave the bidding something to learn from.
Fixed the tracking before anything else. A purchase conversion that fires once, on a real order, with the real order value attached. Everything downstream, every bid, every budget call, is only as good as that one number.
Made the feed worth showing. Titles that match how people actually search for components, correct categorisation, clean pricing and availability. In Shopping and Performance Max the feed is the ad copy, the keyword list and the bid signal all at once. Most small retailers never touch it.
Ran Performance Max on the feed, not on everything. A full asset load sends PMax chasing every surface Google sells, which is where small e-commerce budgets go to die. Kept close to the product feed, it behaves like Shopping and shows against purchase intent.
Concentrated spend on products that can pay. Not every line earns its click cost. Budget went to the products where margin and demand both cleared the bar, rather than spread evenly across the catalogue for the sake of coverage.
Small budget? It can still run properly.
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