Aquatics Retail · Google Ads · 24 months
The Lifeguard Store
Scaled a seasonal aquatics retailer from $1,513 to $14,597 a month in ad spend over two years at a 17.5x blended return — and watched the return fall from 22.6x to 14.5x doing it. Both halves of that sentence matter.
$159,235
Managed spend
$2.8M
Revenue tracked
17.5x
Blended return
9,260
Conversions
The account
A seasonal business, and the season is spring
Lifeguard and aquatics equipment sells when pools open. Demand concentrates in March to June and thins out from September. Every number below moves with that, and reading any single month against the one before it will mislead you.
The numbers
What two years actually bought
Year one: $58,246 of spend returned $1,313,541, a 22.6x return. Year two: $100,989 returned $1,468,160, a 14.5x return. Spend rose 73% and revenue rose 12%.
So what did the extra spend actually return?
3.6x, against a blended average of 17.5x. The second year cost $42,743 more than the first and brought in $154,619 more — divide one by the other and that is the return on the money that was added, not on the money that was already working. It is the number that decides whether to keep scaling, and it is almost never the number in the dashboard.
A 3.6x marginal return is still a good business for most stores. It is also a very different business from 22.6x, and a budget conversation that uses the blended figure will get the decision wrong.
Before you read too much into this
- Year on year is not like for like. Two years of a seasonal account overlap with price changes, stock, and whatever the competition did. The marginal figure is arithmetic on real totals, not a controlled experiment.
- Conversion value is Google’s attribution. It is the number the platform optimises against, so it is the right one for judging the platform — and the wrong one for judging the business. Those are different questions.
- A falling return is not automatically a failure. It is what buying more of a finite pool of demand costs. The failure would be not knowing it was happening.
What this involved
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