How a 3-phase PPC rebuild grew a UK pet brand's sales 736% in 5 months

Market: United Kingdom  |  Category: Pet supplements  |  Period: June to October 2024

The starting point

When we took the account over in June 2024, the brand was losing money on every ad it ran. Ad spend was £1,137.15. PPC sales were £626.77. Total sales across the whole account were £1,075.61.

True ACoS was 105.72%. The account was spending £1.06 in ads for every £1.00 of revenue, measured across the entire business, not just the ad-attributed portion.

The deeper problem was conversion. The listing took 1,038 sessions that month and converted 3.66% of them. Clicks were 418 against 1,031,043 impressions. CPC was £2.72, and it cost £29.93 in ad spend to produce a single order.

Organic ranking was poor, category relevance was weak, and the listing had no standing against the established UK pet supplement brands.

The 3S approach

We ran the account through three deliberate phases: Spending, Stability, Scalability. Each phase has a different job, and the ACoS you should expect from each is different. Judging phase one by phase three’s numbers is how most turnarounds get pulled before they work.

Phase 1: Spending, June 2024

The job in month one was relevance, not profit.

• Targeted large established competitors in the pet niche to borrow their traffic
• Launched broad and phrase match campaigns to find which keywords actually convert
• Ran category and competitor ASIN targeting to establish presence in the category
• Rewrote the listing around the keywords that mattered for organic discoverability
• Pushed spend at impressions and page views on purpose

June closed at 181.43% ACoS and 105.72% True ACoS. That was the plan. One month of deliberate loss bought the keyword data and category relevance, and we knew exactly what month two had to do with it.

Phase 2: Stability, July to August 2024

The job now was to take the cost out without losing momentum.

• Relaunched campaigns around exact match and tighter targeting
• Cut bids on keywords that had proven they do not convert, moved that budget to the ones that do
• Built reviews to lift conversion on traffic we were already paying for
• Kept impressions growing while cost per click came down

July 2024: £939.97 spend, £1,268.40 total sales, 154.80% ACoS, 74.11% True ACoS, 8.64% conversion rate.

August 2024: £686.98 spend, £1,859.29 total sales, 70.78% ACoS, 36.95% True ACoS, 9.61% conversion rate.

August is the month the account turned. Spend came down 40% from June while total sales went up 73%. CPC fell from £2.72 to £1.78. Cost per order fell from £29.93 to £9.81. True ACoS improved 69 points in two months, from 105.72% to 36.95%.

Phase 3: Scalability, September to October 2024

With a profitable base, the job became volume without breaking the economics.

• Brought in Sponsored Brands and video ads alongside competitor targeting
• Expanded into complementary pet categories to widen the addressable audience
• Kept pushing organic rank so growth did not have to be bought twice
• Scaled on the numbers, not on instinct

September 2024: £1,300.01 spend, £4,917.05 total sales, 42.14% ACoS, 26.44% True ACoS.

October 2024: £1,978.05 spend, £8,997.16 total sales, 49.07% ACoS, 21.99% True ACoS.

October is worth reading carefully. ACoS went up, from 42.14% to 49.07%, while True ACoS went down, from 26.44% to 21.99%. That is the signature of a healthy scale. We paid slightly more per ad-attributed sale, and the business as a whole became more profitable because organic was carrying more of the load.

The organic order count tells that story plainly. In June the listing took 15 organic orders. In October it took 168.

The results

Across five months:

• Total sales grew 736%, from £1,075.61 to £8,997.16
• Organic sales grew 1,006%, from £448.84 to £4,966.31
• Organic orders grew 1,020%, from 15 to 168
• True ACoS fell 84 points, from 105.72% to 21.99%
• Conversion rate on the listing rose from 3.66% to 14.74%
• Cost per order fell 78%, from £29.93 to £6.44
• Five-month totals: £6,042.16 in ad spend against £18,117.51 in sales

Why it worked

Here is the number that explains the whole case. Sessions only doubled, from 1,038 to 2,090. Sales went up 8.4 times.

Growth did not come from buying more traffic. It came from converting the traffic the listing already had. Unit session percentage went from 3.66% to 14.74%, which is four times as many visitors turning into buyers. That is what the listing rewrite, the review building and the tighter targeting were actually for.

The second thing is that organic outran PPC. Organic sales grew 1,006% against PPC sales at 543%. By October, £4,966 of the £8,997 was arriving with no ad spend behind it. That is what the Spending phase was buying. A month at 181% ACoS looks like waste on a report. What it bought was the keyword data, the category relevance and the early velocity that made months three, four and five possible. Cut that phase short and the account stays where it started.

The third thing is that we never optimised for ACoS on its own. ACoS rose in October and we let it, because True ACoS, the number tied to the profit of the whole business, kept falling. An account managed to ACoS alone would have pulled spend back at exactly the wrong moment.