How We Grew Betterbee’s Ad Revenue 157% While Cutting Costs
- Client
- Betterbee
- Industry
- ecommerce
- Services
- Paid Search
- Company Size
- 51 to 200 employees
- Location
- New York
- Engagement
- 16 months, ongoing
- Website
- betterbee.com
The Challenge
An account that looked healthy because one campaign was covering for the rest.
When Betterbee brought us in to manage paid search, the account looked like it was working. The ROAS was above average and monthly revenue was impressive. That was until we realized that one campaign was doing most of the heavy lifting: branded search. This campaign, which showed when someone typed “Betterbee” into Google, returned more than 60 times its cost, and was skewing all the data.
Evaluating the other campaigns, it was clear they were not optimized. Branded terms were showing up as high-converting terms in almost all of them. In most, a large portion of the budget was being wasted on irrelevant terms as well as general industry terms. There was no location targeting or automated account monitoring that would allow us to bid more efficiently across different markets based on product type, season, and location. We also discovered there was no effort being made to attract new customers. Google was largely showing the same repeat customers the ads, making it appear as if the campaigns were knocking it out of the park. The biggest tell was that the client wasn’t feeling that success; in fact, the lack of performance was why they were reaching out. The reason for this mismatch is that they were paying for business they already had and not growing their bottom line.
What We Found
- Budget concentrated on defending the brand name. On Microsoft Ads, every dollar was going to branded terms.
- The non-branded campaigns were underbuilt, underfunded, and far from optimized.
- Location- and time-based conversion tracking wasn’t set up, so spend couldn’t be judged by where and what actually performed.
- No guardrails to catch overspending on expensive search terms as auction prices climbed.
This is one of the most common things we find when we take over an account. Campaigns are set up to drive customers who are already engaging with the brand to the site so ads can claim credit; meanwhile, you see a slip in your organic or direct business. Said another way, you are paying for the customers already in line.
How We Optimized the Account
-
Apr 2025
Lowered branded bids and started tracking the data we needed
Rather than pausing the branded campaign, which could potentially have been highly disruptive, we wanted to wean off it while proving revenue would hold. We switched from using a Target ROAS bid strategy to a top-of-page impression share strategy and capped the maximum cost-per-click below what they had historically been paying. That held visibility while trimming spend.
At the same time we stood up the audience, geographic, and time-of-day tracking the account had been missing, so bids could later be optimized on real data instead of guesswork.
-
May to Jul 2025
Cut branded further and reset ROAS targets with honest data
With a few months of data, we kept lowering the share of impressions we were bidding to win for the branded campaign, watching how organic clicks and revenue responded at each step. As branded spend fell, Search Console showed branded organic beginning to climb to fill the gap. Organic revenue was also increasing and the combined revenue of ads and organic was improving, so we narrowed further, bidding only for new visitors, then only for new visitors in the regions where brand awareness was still worth defending.
Branded cost per click dropped sharply as the ads showed less. With branded no longer inflating the account’s numbers, we finally had an honest read on performance and started applying it: the audience, geographic, and time-of-day data we’d been collecting began feeding into the other campaigns, and we reset ROAS targets across the account to reflect what was actually working.
-
Mid to late 2025
Reinvested savings into new campaigns
With over a thousand dollars a month in savings, we invested in campaigns built to reach people who didn’t already know Betterbee, and added a win-back campaign for customers who hadn’t ordered in a while.
We also increased budget to seasonal categories so they could better capture fast-moving opportunities.
-
Late 2025 into 2026
Tested new opportunities and doubled down on what worked
With branded spend down 98% and the other campaigns seeing savings as well, we pointed budget at new opportunities. We tested new ad formats and new campaign types, funding experiments with the revenue the stronger campaigns were already producing rather than new outside spend.
When campaigns underperformed, we pulled budget from them and moved it to the better-performing ones. The ad account’s overall performance continued to improve, and we had the room to be more aggressive with what was working.