01
Audit
Account review, tracking verification, margin data collected from the client.
Paid advertising case study
E-commerce store: rebuilding paid campaigns around margin
How a paid account is rebuilt when spend is rising, traffic looks healthy, and profit does not follow.
Sample case study — replace with real client work
Project overview
An online store spending steadily across Google and Meta with a respectable return on paper. The problem was that the best-selling products were also the lowest-margin ones, so revenue grew while profit stayed flat.
The rebuild grouped products by contribution margin rather than category, moved budget toward what the business actually earned on, and fixed tracking that was double-counting purchases.
Replace this with your own client’s background, the platforms in use, and the state of the account when you took it on.
The client’s challenge
- Campaign structure mirrored the website menu, not profitability.
- Purchase events fired twice, inflating reported returns.
- One catch-all campaign absorbed most of the budget.
- Creative had not been refreshed in months, so frequency climbed.
- No separation between new customers and returning ones.
Approach
Strategy
Get the measurement honest first. Every optimisation before that point would have been guesswork.
- Fix tracking before spending. Deduplicate purchase events and confirm platform figures against the store’s own reports.
- Group by margin. Products split into tiers by contribution, each tier with its own budget and target.
- Separate prospecting and retargeting. So new-customer cost is visible instead of hidden behind repeat buyers.
- Creative on rotation. A steady testing schedule instead of waiting for fatigue to show up in the numbers.
- Feed quality as a lever. Titles, images and attributes cleaned up before bidding was touched.
- Pace, do not lurch. Budget changes in controlled steps to avoid resetting the learning phase.
Delivery
Execution
What actually happened, in order.
02
Rebuild
New campaign structure and product tiers, launched alongside the old account before switching.
03
Test
Creative and audience tests run with enough budget to reach a decision.
04
Scale
Budget moved gradually toward the tiers producing profit, with weekly search-term cleanup.
Stack
Tools used
The stack this project ran on. Edit to match your own toolset.
Results
These boxes are empty on purpose. Fill them in only with figures you can evidence from the client’s own account, and only with their permission to publish.
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Metric one
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Metric two
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Metric three
Useful metrics for a paid project: cost per acquisition, return on ad spend by product tier, new-customer share, and contribution margin after ad cost.
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