Revenue

Return-on-ad-spend

Since working with us

Aqua Training Bag is the world’s leading heavy punch bag. It is the perfect training tool for boxers, trainers, professional fighters, and everyday fitness enthusiasts. By utilising water in place of sand, Aqua Punching Bags provide a number of unique benefits.

Overview:

The brand was acquired by new owners in January 2024. Historically, activity was in place for key channels with mixed results.

Activity wasn’t segmented by the variance in product price, this meant that it wasn’t possible to control acquisition costs in-line with business goals.

Things we identified:

We started by reaching the highest intent users first. This meant focusing on Google search and Amazon. Ensuring the brand was present here meant that in-market demand was captured which leads to the highest cost-efficiency.

Restructuring campaigns by average order value and top sellers, meant that acquisition costs and budgets could be scaled in a way that was commercially viable.

Once we saw viability we began to introduce additional activity via Meta and Microsoft to increase sales volume further, whilst retaining viable profitability levels.

Changes we made:

Our strategy saw an uplift in revenue of +50.20%.

Focussing spend onto the right products, alongside other account optimisations led to a increase in return-on-ad-spend of +17.11% across the same average order value.

We have a robust and growing sales engine driving acquisition in the core market of the US.

We’re now running activity and seeing viability in new markets such as Canada, as we continue to help the client scale.

The momentum we created:

"With our recent acquisition of the brand, we were keen to see sales volume increase but most importantly maintain a level of return that was viable so that we could begin to recoup our investment.

The ProfitSpring team has outperformed both in terms of sales volume and return across both of our core acquisition channels.

They’re now helping us move into new geographic markets and looking at opportunities for other brands which we’re looking to add to our portfolio."

Aqua Training Bag

New business revenue

Google Ads new business sales volume

Google Ads new business revenue

Starpeak is a specialist insurance distributor across niche markets and businesses such as pet business insurance, event insurance and sports travel insurance. They consist of three established brands known for being experts in unique products called Protectivity, Sports Cover and a Les Mills Partner with 100,000 policyholders across the group.

Whilst account performance was at an acceptable level, we identified that the Google Ads bidding strategies weren't aligned to the broader business goals that Starpeak had.

With a focus needing to be on new business revenue, existing strategies were focussing on a target cost-per-acquisition which is a much shorter term approach.

Enabling the algorithm to consider deal size and revenue means that ad spend and bidding in the auction can be aligned to the objectives of generating the highest return more effectively.

Getting this structure in place would allow spend to be utilised more effectively but also means that as budget is scaled, commercial viability remains.

We took a phased approach of introducing new bidding strategies and managing in targets. This was essential to ensure that large, radical changes didn't disrupt the commercial performance for the client.

Once we had successfully implemented new bidding strategies, we experimented with landing page optimisations to make the messaging clear and concise, to improve the user journey.

Across Jan-Apr 2024, Google Ads saw a +66% increase in new business sales volume, and +81% increase in new business revenue YoY.

Through increasing conversion rates with optimised landing pages, the brand is now in a strong position to expand out to secondary volume driving channels such as Meta.

Landing page conversion rates being higher, will offset the often lower buying propensity of a user who is targeted via paid social.

"We worked with ProfitSpring to ensure that our account structure in Google Ads was optimally aligned to our business goal of optimising for new business sales and revenue.

Following the strategy being implemented, across Jan-Apr 2024 we’ve seen a huge +66% increase in new business sales volume and +81% increase in new business revenue YoY.

ProfitSpring working with our in-house team continues to deliver high performance as we begin to look at new markets and channels to acquire customers.”

Testimonial

Starpeak

Lead conversion rate

Increase in conversion rate

Decrease in Cost-Per-Acquisition

Bluechain is a software startup that brings control, flexibility and security to billing & payments - helping you to boost your business' cash flow, reduce admin and focus on growing your business.

As a new solution to the market, potential users whilst they have a need for the solution, are unlikely to know that the service is available.

This meant that search volume was very low and hard to capture in a high performing channel like paid search. Therefore, a demand generation strategy was the most effective route to market.

Our strategy consisted of engaging, educational creative across different platforms, to drive new user acquisition.

We rolled out a comprehensive Meta ads strategy, targeting small business owners and those with an affinity to AMEX. This enabled us to reach those who we knew were likely to have the pain points or would like the benefits of Bluechain’s solution.

Through creative testing on ads we identified that the biggest jumps in performance would come from optimising the landing page and sign up process.

We wireframed to create a high performing landing page for ads activity. This enabled us to increase budgets whilst maintaining a viable level of commercial performance.

We also analysed the user experience of the sign up process, identifying opportunities to increase efficiency of sign up through to active users.

We exceeded the KPIs given and created a scalable acquisition model for Bluechain to grow with.

We increased the conversion rate of new user acquisition by 50%.

Through optimising ad creative and the post-click experience, we also reduced cost-per-acquisition by 65%.

We’re now looking at supporting channels and opportunities to help scale the business further.

"We're achieving a cost-per-acquisition of half of what we were initially hoping to target. That's enabled us to continue to invest and scale up our business with confidence.

We know why it's working, when it is, and why it's not when it isn't, which is hard to find in other agencies."

Bluechain

Revenue increase

Decreased in Cost-Per-Acquisition

Increase in Revenue

Made4Fighters has been the leading online specialist retailer of Combat Sports clothing, equipment and accessories in the UK since 2007. Initially finding their roots in the Boxing & MMA markets, in recent years they have expanded their offering to include a vast range of products for all martial arts and fitness disciplines

With campaigns segmented by device type and using manual bidding strategies, the Google Ads account structure was outdated, and not aligned to commercial performance.

On the shopping side, as commonly is seen, lower value products were taking a high percentage of spend and whilst converting, deflating the potential return, due to starving higher value, popular products from being served.

Meta activity wasn't in-play which was missing a huge opportunity given the sector and how visually appealing many of the brands and associated content is. 

We restructured the core of the Google Ads account based on margin groupings. This allowed us to implement a target return-on-ad-spend that would be viable for the client.

High volume brands which drive a significant proportion of the businesses revenue were broken out to ensure that budget was always available.

Adding remarketing and prospecting via Meta, alongside seasonal push campaigns, captured additional demand for those who were in-market but hadn't searched via Google or where we weren't present.

Our activity saw a +222% increase in revenue YoY with a -18.96% decrease in cost-per-acquisition.

The structure that's now in place enables us to scale budget whilst maintaining profitability for the client.

Having core activity in a solid place means that we're able to focus on proactive opportunities for the client such as identifying competitor pricing and website optimisations.

With search established, we're able to continue to build out the demand generative side via paid social, opening up further revenue opportunity.

"Previously we were working with a large national agency and performance was dwindling. Since working together, we have seen profitability drastically increase whilst also seeing volume of sales increase significantly at the same time. ProfitSpring is proactive in tailoring campaigns to meet our specific needs and has exceeded targets, as a result, has become a key partner in our strategic planning."

Made 4 Fighters

A few years ago, I found that the same themes of conversation would come up when working with clients, pitching services or training other advertisers.

I wanted to work on explaining these areas in a more concise way as the specialist (myself in particular) tends to default to the detail and a rather in-depth explanation because that’s what we’re immersed in day-to-day. Whilst this is useful when working from specialist to specialist, it isn’t always the easiest for someone like a business owner to digest.

I started by writing long form every morning from 6-7:30 am on whatever topic I had in mind. Initially, I was just getting everything out of my head. I could see the core parts were there, but the structure didn’t flow so it likely didn’t when I verbally spoke about it.

I’d then start to revise by considering a better way to say the same thing but more clearly to someone who potentially has no prior understanding of the topic.

Once I was happy with what I’d written, I did a final pass-through just to make it the most concise possible version.

I found a great professional writer/proofreader on 

 and asked not just for the amends to be made to the content I wanted to release as blog posts but also to give me a summary of the thematic issues I was making to strengthen my awareness when writing in the future but, more importantly, when I’m talking. 

I found it incredibly helpful having my writing torn apart professionally. I knew I was highly knowledgeable on the subject matter, but if that can’t be expressed and understood by a client, then a fantastic performance will only go so far.

“If you cannot explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it.”

 between how we write, how we think and how we speak.

Writing helps you to organise your thoughts.

You aren’t just working on how you say something; you’re working on developing your understanding of the topic itself throughout the process.

You’re solidifying what you know and how you present your knowledge, which will come across as authentic, confident and clear when you then talk about it to someone else.

I had a number of issues to work on myself. The main one was just going overly complex on the specialism detail.

For me, reeling off for ten minutes about the power of machine learning, the benefits of RSAs, accessing real-time contextual data signals guiding the bidding process and much more (whilst enthusiastic and well-intentioned) isn’t as clear to a client as saying:

We need to start with Google Ads because that’s where we will reach people actively searching for your products and services.

This type of communication makes the world of difference to sales, retention and feeds directly back into your tactical day-to-day work.

It’s not a call for straplines and buzzwords or to not understand the detail. You need to understand the detail as the specialist but the client needs to understand how and why it benefits their business.

Being able to get buy-in onto a concept you want to test or to explain why something is adding value and should be invested in further keeps the engine running and avoids missing revenue opportunities, as it proves the value.

Working on your articulation

It’s long been known and cited in marketing that evoking emotion works to get engagement.

Addressing pain points or aspirations is a go-to, and it certainly works.

There’s a little more nuance to this, though, and we can look to psychology for the answers to why this is the case.

I’d started to notice that in paid search, in particular, it doesn’t tend to be emotionally triggering copy that performs best. As paid social really picked up with conversion optimisation, it also started to showcase that the most pragmatic and direct copy often drives more sales and revenue.

We’re only talking about performance objectives here, not brand awareness. That is qualified leads who want to buy and people who see an ad and then transact on the e-commerce side.

There’s a commonality between paid search and paid social when conversion optimisation is in play.

The user is highly likely to be in-market to buy the product or service.

Pragmatism wins because the user is either already shopping around or is looking to shop.

Anyone who’s worked in sales will tell you:

“People buy on emotion and then rationalise the decision after.”

There’s more truth to this than anecdotal experience.

Daniel Kahneman’s Nobel Prize-winning book ‘

’ outlines this premise in amazing detail.

The synopsis is that we have two response systems. Our instinctive, emotional response system (system 1) and our cognitive rational response system (system 2).

The emotional response system fires almost instantaneously, hence appealing to emotions working well to get engagement.

What gets missed, though, is the very important second system, which is crucial for PPC and paid social.

I think of the rational system as the internal narrative voice that asks questions inside our heads.

If I see an ad for a relevant product on Instagram, the initial thing that stops me from scrolling is 100% the emotionally engaging copy or creative.

What then starts to happen is something like this:

When will I get it?
What happens if it’s the wrong size?
Is it worth the money?
I wonder if it’s on Amazon? And can I get it from there?

These are rational questions that need to be answered.

, if these questions go unanswered, the user is more likely to continue scrolling or click through to the website and then bounce after having to dig for answers.

It’s imperative to performance copywriting and also conversion rate optimisation that consideration is put into these areas. You can do a huge amount of work on getting engagement, only to see it all disappear and not materialise into results.

In paid media, we get billed when we get engagement, so whilst we want clicks, as we can’t have sales or leads without them, the efficiency of click-to-output is where profitability comes from.

 or Microsoft Clarity make it easy to see post-click as you literally see people trying to dig for information or directly survey them as they’re bouncing due to having unanswered questions or doubts.

Search ads tend to address people actively searching for the product or service, so trying to evoke an emotion here isn’t usually necessary. As a metaphor, I’ve come in off of the highstreet, I know what I’m looking for, I’m in the shop, I’m just choosing between brands. Telling me I have a pain point I’m already aware of isn’t effective; telling me why your product is the one I should choose is.

Paid social has an additional challenge. Presuming that targeting is correct and you’re receiving conversion data into the campaign to enable it to be presenting ads to those likely to buy, we still have to utilise emotion to get a fast response to stop the scroll and the distraction.

For me, I find opening a video creative or copy with something that addresses a pain point/aspiration works to get the engagement. This should be followed up with the top rationalisations to avoid a continued scroll or website bounce after the click.

I couldn’t recommend reading this book enough, as it’s transformed the way I write copy and carry out conversion rate optimisation.

It also raises your awareness level of your own responses to situations and those of others. This can be worth its weight in gold when it comes to conflict resolution and people management.

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Having commercial awareness supercharges paid media.

Much like broader business, we’re spending and returning. There will be a desired ratio of the two, which simply is the only thing that means success or failure.

A profitable ROAS when the client wants to 

What is your average order value?
What can you afford to spend to acquire a customer?
Which services are the highest priority based on revenue/profit?


Will give you clear strategic direction and the ability to deploy tactical activity that aligns towards driving real commercial value for your clients.

You don’t have to know all of the answers yourself but you do need to have awareness and consideration.

 and Google have fully moved to a commercial ads position, which is great news for advertisers and businesses alike.

We’re able to bid for revenue and leads at 

Entering the wrong targets in this algorithm area of advertising so frequently leads to the old computer science adage of:

Commercial awareness stops the common scenarios of budget not being prioritised to the 80/20 products and services, running activity that could never have been profitable based on base auction costs or making changes that might be marketing best practice but aren’t viable for the client.

Aligning your activity with the clients’ business elevates you from a service provider to someone who’s adding real commercial value.

You’re also then speaking in a language that they talk in and appreciate, which ties back into section one on articulation.

I’ve been told in the past that I have a very corporate finance way of looking at PPC like this.

It was never something I intended. I was trying to distill conversations around campaign targets and activity to their most fundamental truth—what is objectively not viable and, therefore, what is at least viable.

You don’t need perfection. This is where commercial understanding and profitability tend to go awry. Getting to the above is the 80% you need to take action, get started and find out without chucking a load of time and ad spend at the wall to see what sticks.

Knowing what’s break-even and loss per sale from an acquisition perspective removes the anxiety around performance and tells you if what you’re doing is working or not.

When you know you’re on the right track, you’re on it and you can go full speed. When you’re not, you know to act quickly as you’ve set the conditions for break-even and failure.

 and concentrate on being creative, strategic and taking action to grow the account and business that you’re working on.

Commercial awareness

I hope these three areas help show you how you could elevate your skills and, hopefully, your career in paid media.

Each of them has been invaluable to me on my journey and I have long-standing client and partner relationships as a result.

I would recommend picking one and focusing on it only for a period of time to ensure the knowledge and new ground has a chance to avoid becoming overwhelming.

As you develop, each area will support the other, so there’s a compound benefit in pursuing any of them.

Looking for a career change? We’re always open to hearing from great specialists. 

Conclusion

As our team here at ProfitSpring continues to grow, I’ve found myself reflecting back on my career as a specialist, looking at the points of acceleration I had and the compounding elements that went into driving them. Sharing these with the team has been useful to guide development and progression.

I thought it would be useful to share the top three with the broader PPC community. My experiences may benefit anyone looking to transition to a career in paid media, those looking to progress in their roles or move from specialist to agency owner as I have.

Whilst I’ve had training from some really amazing individuals in the industry, I’ve found the real 80/20 lifts for me came from areas that I worked on to support my work but that aren’t directly related to it.

I thought it would be useful to share the top three with the broader PPC community. My experiences may benefit anyone looking to transition to a career in paid media, those looking to progress in their roles or move from specialist to agency owner as I have.



3 Ways To Accelerate Your PPC Career Outside Of Marketing

, the benefits remain the same on Meta. Available through the Facebook 

, the scrollable sitelinks are a great way to introduce additional relevant information to the user.

What are sitelinks?

When users see your ad, they can scroll through the site link options which allows them to navigate to specific pages on your website. 

Site links typically provide two useful benefits:

Offering additional clickable elements when the ad is shown, increases the space taken up by the ad when it’s displayed which increases engagement rate.

They take the user through to somewhere that is specific on your website so reduce drop outs that can occur from the user having to navigate to find further information themselves. This can lead to 

Although the feature is not available across all accounts (at the time of writing), you can find the feature within the 

Meta will scrape your website and recommend site links automatically or you can create them by manually inputting the URLs of the products you want to highlight.

This can be categorised by product, business information or sales.

, we are testing them within our client’s accounts and looking forward to seeing CTR and conversion insights.

Improving navigation for the user

An impactful update within Meta – Sitelinks are now a feature for Feed Ads!

Site links are now available for feed ads in Meta. As the key paid social platform Meta offers huge opportunity for brands looking to acquire customers. This feature offers the chance to send users into the right place, reducing bounce and increasing conversion rate.

Meta ads – Sitelink feature rolled out for feed ads

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ROAS stands as a pivotal metric to define how your campaigns are performing. When running paid campaigns, you’ll have a ROAS target in mind, but what truly defines a “good” ROAS?

Return on ad spend (ROAS) represents the amount of revenue generated by the amount spent on advertising.

 of your advertising campaigns in terms of revenue earned from the different campaigns you run. 

Defining ROAS

A higher percentage indicates a more profitable campaign.

How to Calculate ROAS:

Typically, a 2:1 ROAS is deemed “good” as you’re making more than what you’ve spent on advertising. For every £2 in revenue, you have spent £1 on advertising. However, on average, a 4:1 ROAS is considered more effective.

“Good” varies widely across industries as every business will have a different profit margin to base success on, and you may have products in different marketing stages. You may also have different versions of “good” depending on the channel on which you’re running the activity.

A start-up company might have a small margin and tighter budgets; therefore, running ads on a high ROAS target is key to remaining profitable.

A more established business looking to grow and scale will have more room to 

, increasing sales volume at a higher spend.

 A lower ROAS target usually means you’ll see more volume come through in a Google Ads campaign, but you will be spending more, so it’s key to find your “sweet spot” in terms of profitability and volume. 

Another factor for what a “good” ROAS means to your business would be the type of product and AOV.

A user will have a considered decision-making process for a £500 product compared to a £30 one.

The demand would be lower for the higher-priced product and potentially have a lower conversion rate yet drive a high return when a user does purchase.

The lower-priced product is likely to have higher competition due to being more of an impulse purchase, therefore impacting overall ROAS.

What Is a “Good” ROAS? – Understanding What Makes a Viable Return on Ad Spend

ROAS stands as a pivotal metric to define how your campaigns are performing. When running paid campaigns, you’ll have a ROAS target in mind, but what truly defines a “good” ROAS?

Defining ROAS

How to Calculate ROAS: