Focus: Margin-Optimized SEM & Performance Scale Client: Confidential E-commerce Brand
When I took over this account, the brand was facing a common plateau: top-line revenue was growing, but net profitability was stagnant. The previous strategy focused on chasing a flat ROAS target across all products, which led to aggressive bidding on high-revenue, low-margin products that drained resources. I also identified significant “waste” spend on items with high return rates and a complete lack of visibility into how ad spend impacted the actual bottom line after shipping and COGS.
I moved the account away from standard platform defaults and implemented my custom Performance Framework to ensure every dollar spent contributed to the bottom line.
Integration of True Margins I began by auditing the client’s unit economics. I integrated their Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) and blended shipping costs into our data layer. Instead of optimizing for $100 in revenue—which might only yield $10 in profit—I restructured the tracking to optimize for Gross Profit. I shifted our North Star metric from ROAS to POAS (Profit on Ad Spend).
Margin-Tiered Campaign Architecture I dismantled the “one-size-fits-all” campaign structure and rebuilt it into Margin Buckets. This allowed me to control the aggressiveness of my bidding based on actual business value. Tier 1 consisted of high-margin items where I used aggressive, uncapped bidding to capture maximum market share. Tier 2 focused on core products with balanced bidding for steady volume. Tier 3 was reserved for low-margin or liquidation stock, where I implemented highly restrictive bidding to clear inventory without losing money.
Advanced Search Query Sculpting Using N-gram analysis, I identified “bleeder” keywords—terms that drove traffic but consistently led to high return rates or low-value customer acquisition. I funneled that “saved” budget into Long-Tail High-Intent keywords, which allowed me to lower the Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) by avoiding expensive, generic auctions.
By shifting the focus from “how much can we sell” to “how much can we keep,” I achieved record-breaking efficiency for the brand:
+38% Increase in Net Profit: Directly attributed to shifting spend toward high-margin SKUs.
-22% Reduction in Blended CPA: Achieved through my aggressive negative keyword layering and query sculpting.
+55% Growth in High-Margin Sales: Validating the success of the tiered bidding strategy.
Efficient Scaling: I successfully increased the total monthly budget by 40% without hitting diminishing returns, as every dollar was tied to a profit-positive auction.