an automotive brand was robbed of $3.5 million by their own google ads agency.
and they had absolutely no idea.
they had been running google ads for over a decade.... generating millions every year.
reports always looked clean and the agency kept saying everything was working.
then they did an end of year review.
70% of all that revenue was coming from people who already knew the brand.
google was basically just showing ads to their own customers.
the agency made sure the CEO never saw the real numbers.
it was all carefully crafted in reports and everything was hidden behind clean-looking dashboards.
when they finally discovered the truth, they shut google ads off completely.
went from $30,000 a month in spend down to $3,700, then nothing.
they came to us as a last resort.
we went through the account and 3 problems were immediately obvious…
1. every single campaign was built around existing customers.
50 campaigns running at once, all going after people who already knew the brand.
the agency built it this way on purpose because familiar customers convert easily and make numbers look impressive on paper.
2. 1,300 out of 3,801 products had not received a single click in months.
one third of their entire catalog is just sitting dead inside the account.
dead products send a signal to google that something is wrong with your brand, quietly dragging down everything else running alongside them.
3. products priced at $900 were sitting in the same campaigns as products priced at $3.
google was being asked to find 2 completely different types of buyers in one place at the same time. it could not do either properly.
this is what we changed:
> we rebuilt the product feed before touching a single campaign.
- titles rewritten around what new buyers actually search for
- images changed to stand out from every competitor
- reviews added where competitors had none
> 50 campaigns became 3.
- one shopping campaign for new customers
- one Performance Max focused entirely on new customer acquisition
- one branded campaign at $10 a day to hold territory
90% of the budget toward new buyers from day one.
> when the shopping campaigns gained traction, we did not launch more.
we increased the budget in what was already working and left everything else alone.
the brand was spending $3,700 a month on Google Ads when they came to us.
in 30 days, they did $299,000 in revenue at a 39x ROAS purely from non-branded traffic.
they had to even slow the budget down because new orders were coming in faster than their fulfillment team could handle.
they now run a single campaign focused entirely on people who have never heard of the brand.