The mandate was blunt: grow revenue meaningfully without a meaningful increase in spend. Six months later, revenue was up roughly 30% and spend was up 6%.
The situation
The client is an established retailer with a large product catalog, selling through its e-commerce site and physical locations. Paid search is its largest digital revenue channel, running across Google Ads and Microsoft Ads.
Heading into 2025 the program had a ceiling. Shopping spend sat in a handful of broad catch-all campaigns sharing blanket return targets, a large share of the catalog had no ad coverage at all, and paid sales skewed toward the regions where the retailer already had a physical presence.
The challenge
At the same time, budgets were tightening. The brief was simple and a little uncomfortable: grow revenue meaningfully without a meaningful increase in spend. That rules out the easy answer, which is to buy growth. It leaves the harder one: find the revenue the account was already leaving behind.
The solution
Rebuilt the Shopping foundation
Everything started with a full audit in early 2025: campaign settings, geographic performance, the product feed and conversion tracking. The audit drove a complete Shopping restructure. Several brand, non-brand and category-level Shopping campaigns replaced the catch-alls, each with its own budget and its own return target. That granularity is what made everything that followed possible, because spend could now be steered product line by product line instead of account-wide.
Put the whole catalog to work
Campaign types the account had never run were layered in over the following months: Performance Max, Dynamic Search Ads, a coverage program for long-tail products that had never been advertised, and a scaled-up Demand Gen effort. By the first half of 2026, close to 40% of paid search revenue was coming from campaigns that had no equivalent a year earlier.
Cut what didn’t pay and fund what did
Efficiency paid for the expansion. Shopping campaigns running below the return threshold were paused, which brought Shopping spend down while Shopping ROAS went up. The freed budget moved into proven winners that had been capped by budget: campaigns returning well above target while losing half or more of their available impression share. The legacy Shopping campaigns grew roughly 30% year over year after the cleanup.
Bid for new customers, and measured it
Bidding shifted toward new-customer acquisition, validated with incrementality testing rather than assumed; the same discipline as treating a target as a contract, not a wish. A new-versus-returning bidding test showed a multiple-fold lift in new-customer sales, and the approach was rolled into the newer campaigns. Measured against a predicted baseline, the incremental lift was a meaningful share of total revenue: growth that would not have happened otherwise.
Kept Microsoft Ads lean
Microsoft Ads was restructured around Performance Max and branded search, with most product listing ads removed. Spend fell by double digits while the channel held its revenue and ROAS rose sharply.
The results (first half of 2026 vs. first half of 2025)
Revenue grew five times faster than spend.
| Metric | Change, H1 2026 vs. H1 2025 |
|---|---|
| Revenue | +31% |
| Orders | +33% |
| Clicks | +32% |
| ROAS | +24% (7.6x → 9.5x) |
| Ad spend | +6% |
Platform-reported, ad-attributed results for January 1 – June 30, 2026 versus the same period in 2025, Google Ads and Microsoft Ads combined.
Why it worked
The growth came from structure, not budget. Rebuilding Shopping so every product line had its own budget and target meant dollars could finally follow performance. Giving the long tail of the catalog ad coverage for the first time found demand the account had never been in front of. Holding every campaign to a return threshold kept the money flowing to whatever earned it. And bidding for new customers on top, with the lift measured against a baseline, meant the added revenue was real incremental growth rather than repeat purchases pulled forward.
None of it required a bigger budget. It required knowing where the budget was already going, and a willingness to move it.
Paid search plateaued?
Most accounts at scale are leaving revenue behind in the structure, not the budget. Get an audit that shows you where it is.
