Gym and fitness equipment supplier, Ireland and the UK
Gym and fitness equipment: spend up 96%, return held at 8x
June 2026 performance against the same trading period a year earlier. Spend up 96%, revenue up 77%, and return on ad spend holding at around 8x.
The situation
This client sells gym and fitness products across Ireland and the UK. They came to me with a fairly common problem for a business at their stage. Things were working, the account was profitable, but they were nervous about growth. Every time they had tried to push spend upwards in the past, return had dropped and they had pulled back.
What they wanted was simple enough to say and harder to do. Spend more. Bring in more of the right traffic. Grow revenue. And do all of that without the return on ad spend falling off a cliff.
What I did
Fix the foundations before adding the money
Found the products and places that were actually working
Before touching budgets I went through the data to work out which products were genuinely carrying the account and which locations they were selling best in. There is no point doubling spend evenly across everything when a portion of the catalogue is barely moving. That analysis told me where the extra money should go.
Fixed the product feed
A lot of Shopping and PMAX performance comes down to the feed rather than anything you do in the ad account, and this one had room in it. I worked through Merchant Centre cleaning up the data so Google had a proper picture of what was being sold.
Rewrote product titles using search term data
This is the bit that makes the biggest difference and the bit most people skip. I looked at the search terms that were actually converting, not the ones getting impressions, and rebuilt product titles around that language. If people are searching for something a particular way and your title does not match it, you are leaving money there.
Checked what the competition was doing
Pricing and product placement analysis, so we knew where this client was genuinely competitive and where they were never going to win on price. That shaped where budget went and where it did not.
Managed it tightly, every day
Shopping and PMAX are not campaigns you set up and check on monthly. Scaling spend at this rate means watching it daily and adjusting constantly.
The results
June 2026 against the same trading period a year earlier
Worth saying that the comparison period runs slightly longer than the current one, so if anything these figures understate the growth rather than flatter it.
The numbers that matter most there are the return and the value per conversion, together. Almost any account can spend more money. The hard part is spending nearly twice as much and still getting eight pounds back for every one you put in. Return normally drops when you scale, because you run out of the cheap easy demand and start paying for the harder stuff. Holding it steady while adding €118k of revenue in a single month is the whole result.
The rise in value per conversion is worth calling out too. Cost per conversion went up slightly, by about 8%, but the average order was worth 18% more. So each sale cost a bit more to win and was worth considerably more when it landed. That is a trade you take every time.
What did not go perfectly
Clicks grew 92% but conversions only grew 50%, which means conversion rate came down from 2.79% to 2.19%. That is not a failure, its what happens when you scale. You move past the people who were already looking for exactly what you sell and start reaching people who are earlier in the process or less sure. Some of them buy, plenty do not.
It is worth being straight about it though, because if you only ever look at conversion rate in isolation you would think this month went badly. It did not. It just means the next phase of work is tightening that traffic back up, and that is where the focus is going now.
The takeaway
If you are sitting on an account that works but you are afraid to scale it because the last time you tried the numbers went the wrong way, the problem usually is not the budget. It is that the underlying structure, feed and product data were not ready to carry more spend. Fix those first and the account will take the money.
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