Value-Based Bidding Lifted Google Ads Revenue 29.50%

The challenge

A £1.85K monthly budget bought about 70 orders in July at £26.62 each, worth £5.56K in total at a ROAS of 300.82%. Nothing in that was visibly broken, which was the difficulty. The constraint was what the bidding had been told to do: every campaign optimised for conversion count, so a £40 order and a £200 order carried identical weight, and the budget went where orders were cheapest rather than where revenue was largest. Three campaigns split across thin ad groups then divided those 70 conversions further, leaving each bid strategy with a sample too small to learn from.

What we changed

• Consolidated thin campaigns and ad groups so conversion data pooled in one place. At roughly 70 conversions a month, fragmentation leaves every bid strategy learning from too small a sample.
• Switched bidding from conversion count to Maximise conversion value with a Target ROAS, so the system optimised toward revenue instead of treating every order as equal.
• Placed the campaigns on a portfolio bid strategy, letting budget follow demand across them daily rather than sitting idle wherever the week was quiet.
• Introduced controlled broad match on proven converting terms only, contained by a shared negative keyword list, so value bidding could find new queries without opening the account to irrelevant traffic.
• Added brand exclusions to Performance Max and turned off final URL expansion, stopping it absorbing brand searches and traffic to pages that were never meant to carry ads.
• Set Search campaigns to the Google search network only, removing partner and display placements that spent budget at a lower conversion rate than search itself.

The outcome

• £7.2K in conversion value against £5.56K in July, a 29.50% rise, while spend moved by £40. Both months run 31 days, so no calendar adjustment applies.
• Every pound returned £3.81 in August against £3.01 in July, taking ROAS from 300.82% to 380.77%, a 26.58% improvement.
• Cost per conversion settled at £21.29 from £26.62, down 20.02%: roughly 89 orders in August against 70 in July.
• Average order value held near £80. Optimising for revenue did not tilt the account toward a few large orders; it bought more orders of the same size.
• Revenue rose 29.50% while the budget rose by £40, so the result came from where the money went rather than how much of it there was.
• Google reported conversion value across the three campaigns down £3,093.10 for Aug 21 to Sep 17 against the prior four weeks. A budget under £2K a month stays sensitive to single days, and August's rate has yet to be repeated.