This DTC brand had cycled through multiple agencies since 2023. By December 2025 its Google ROAS had dropped to 2.7×. The previous agency had scaled Demand Gen spend without efficiency guardrails. Multiple Performance Max campaigns were competing with each other, AI Max was pulling search into uncontrolled territory, and remarketing campaigns were effectively running as prospecting. Nothing documented what had been tried or why.
Diagnosed before prescribing. Consolidated competing Performance Max campaigns, disabled AI Max (later re-enabled as a controlled test with proper negatives), added ROAS guardrails to every Demand Gen campaign and fixed remarketing targeting. Then scaled methodically: mirrored Meta’s top-performing creative formats on Google, concentrated spend in core markets (CA, TX, NY) and ran a 60-day search-term audit across 4,000+ queries, surfacing 10 new high-ROAS keywords including terms converting at 541–1,754% ROAS.
ROAS recovered from 2.7× to 3.51× while spend increased 37%. Demand Gen alone drove 1,200+ attributed branded searches in Q1, evidence that upper-funnel investment was creating downstream search demand. Google Ads AOV rose 19.3% year over year.
