Google Ads Revenue Rose 46.53% While Spend Fell 16%

The challenge

March 2026 put £623 through Google Ads and got £1.44K back, a ROAS of 231.57%. The real number underneath was the arithmetic of a single order: £28.81 to win one, on an average basket of £66.72. Acquisition was taking 43% of the order it bought, which leaves almost nothing once the product is paid for. The cause was that every item in the catalogue was eligible for the same few hundred pounds, so a low-priced single unit competed for clicks at the same cost as the packs worth three times as much. The account did not need more budget. It needed to stop paying full price for the smallest orders.

What we changed

• Filtered the feed by price so the lowest-value items were no longer eligible, on the basis that a product which cannot cover a £28 acquisition cost should not be bidding for one.
• Moved the core range from Performance Max to Standard Shopping. Below roughly £600 a month there is not enough conversion data for automation to learn on, and query-level control is worth more than the reach it costs.
• Added negatives for low-value modifiers such as sample, single, trial and cheapest. Those searches cost a full click and deliver the smallest possible basket.
• Tiered the Shopping campaigns by priority so the proven range took the query first and the wider catalogue caught only what was left.
• Promoted a free delivery threshold in the ads, set above the existing average basket, so the incentive to add a second item arrived before checkout rather than after.
• Cut the weakest campaign entirely instead of redistributing its budget, on the view that a smaller clean account beats a larger noisy one at this size.

The outcome

• Conversion value reached £2.11K from £1.44K, up 46.53%, on £98 less budget. Spending less normally means selling less; here it did not.
• The account bought its orders for £22.52 rather than £28.81, a 21.83% reduction.
• ROAS finished at 401.23% against 231.57%, a 73.27% improvement, which is £4.01 back for every pound spent rather than £2.32.
• Average order value did the work: an estimated £67 to £90, up around 35%, which accounts for roughly 83% of the revenue gain.
• Order volume was effectively unchanged, moving from about 22 to about 23. This was a change in what the budget bought, not how much.
• At roughly 22 orders a month a few large baskets move every figure on this page, and acquisition still takes a quarter of each order. The pattern needs a longer run before it is a trend.