Fashion & Accessories · Google Ads, Meta Ads, SEO · 4 years
Petticoat Lane
Cut paid spend by 32% year on year and improved the return while doing it, and moved average organic position from about 18 to about 7. The part most case studies would leave out: the organic revenue has not caught up yet.
$238,587
Managed spend
3.9x
Blended return
18 → 7
Avg. position
131k
Peak impressions
The job
A channel-mix decision, not a paid-media one
The brief was not “make the ads work harder”. It was to reduce how much of the business depended on bought traffic. That means judging the paid account and the organic channel as one system, because improving either one in isolation can make the other look better than it is.
Paid
Less money, better return
Year one: $141,826 of spend returned $517,483, a 3.6x return. Year two: $96,762 returned $402,378, a 4.2x return. Spend came down 32% while revenue came down 22% — revenue fell less than the budget did, which is what taking money out of an account is supposed to look like.
Organic
Page two to page one
Average position went from 17.6 in June 2025 to 6.8 at its best in April 2026, and sat at 9.4 in August 2026. Impressions roughly doubled at the peak, from 58,268 to 130,980 in a month.
The honest part
Did organic replace the paid revenue? Not yet.
No. Rankings improved a lot and impressions roughly doubled, but clicks did not follow — they ran between 452 and 762 a month across the whole period and finished about where they started. Ranking better for broader terms earns impressions from people who are further from buying, so more visibility at a lower click-through rate is exactly the shape you would expect.
Revenue says the same thing. Analytics puts organic at an average of $2,851 a month, $3,681 across the second half of 2025 and $2,660 so far in 2026. Paid, even after the cut, is running near $33,532 a month. Organic is not replacing that on this trajectory, and I would rather write that sentence than a different one.
What that does and does not mean
- Position is a leading indicator, revenue is a lagging one. Getting onto page one is a precondition for organic revenue, not a substitute for it. The next job is the pages that convert the visibility, not more of it.
- Last-click understates organic. A considered purchase gets researched before it gets bought. Read the organic revenue figure as a floor.
- Ecommerce tracking recorded nothing before February 2025, so the revenue series starts there. Those earlier months are untracked, not zero.
- The paid cut is the result that paid for itself. Same revenue per dollar or better, on a third less budget, is money back in the business now — whatever organic does next.
Testimonial
In the Client’s
Own Words
2 minPhyllis Johnson·CEO, Petticoat Lane
What this involved
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