Paid revenue grew from £139K to £709K in three years as media scaled from £27K to £169K, with the blended return held above 4×.

The challenge

A small, seasonal UK garden retailer with no in-house marketing. Paid media started as a few hundred pounds a week on Meta and Google. The job was to grow it steadily each year, prove the growth was real against store revenue, and keep return above the level the business needed to stay profitable.

The approach

Lead with Google Shopping and Performance Max structured by product category and margin, use Meta for prospecting and retargeting with a Shopify catalogue, add Microsoft Ads as a cheap incremental channel, and judge everything against GA4 and store revenue rather than platform numbers.

What I did

• Restructured Google Shopping into category campaigns (borders, pots, hydrangeas, taxus and more) with Performance Max for all products and for borders.
• Built Meta prospecting, retargeting and catalogue campaigns, with budget split by funnel stage.
• Added Microsoft Ads in 2025 as a low-cost incremental channel.
• Set monthly spend and return targets each year, tracked weekly, with year-on-year comparison built into the report.
• Used Meta's effect on Google Search demand (search lift) to defend Meta budget in softer months.
• Diagnosed and fixed a Google Ads performance drop in 2026 rather than cutting budget.

The outcome

• Purchases from paid went from 741 in 2023 to 2,614 in 2025 to 2,919 by October 2026.
• Media spend grew 4.5× in two years while the blended return stayed above 4×.
• The client has a monthly report they can read in two minutes, with targets set a year ahead.

Attribution limitations

Google figures use GA4 attribution and Meta uses Meta's own, so the channels are not measured identically. Store revenue is the whole business, not just paid. Return has eased as spend has scaled, which is expected, and 2026 is to October only.