The Client
H2O Water Sports is a specialist e-commerce retailer focused on premium water sports equipment. Despite investing heavily in Google Ads over several years, the business had seen limited return—largely due to poor attribution and generic campaign management by prior agencies.
The Challenge
H2O had worked with several national agencies who applied a standardised fee model—charging a fixed management fee plus a percentage of ad spend. This approach incentivised spend over performance and offered little customisation or strategic input.
Worse, analytics was misconfigured, attribution was broken, and campaign performance was being measured almost entirely on clicks—not conversions or revenue.
Our Role
We were brought in to clean up the mess and implement a conversion-focused strategy that would finally tie spend to sales.
- Rebuilt Attribution from the Ground Up
We scrapped the existing tracking and implemented our in-house attribution methodology. This enabled the business to clearly track every online sale—and later, even in-store sales—back to specific campaigns, keywords, and channels. - Campaign Takeover & Audit
With accurate data flowing, we took over day-to-day management of all Google Ads activity, including Shopping campaigns. We audited every campaign, removing waste, correcting structures, and rebuilding for profitability. - Single Keyword Ad Group (SKAG) Strategy
We introduced SKAGs to tighten keyword relevance, improve Quality Scores, and refine bidding at a granular level—focusing on profit, not just volume. - Integrated E-Commerce Reporting
We developed a monthly Google Analytics and e-commerce reporting schedule, tying together online transactions and in-store sales driven by digital activity. For the first time, the client could see how online marketing affected walk-in sales.
The Outcome
- Annual revenue grew from $2M to over $4M in four years
- Full visibility into campaign ROI and keyword-level profitability
- Accurate tracking across both online and offline sales
- Agency-client alignment based on outcomes, not ad spend
Before → After Snapshot
| Before | After |
|---|---|
| % of ad spend fee model | Custom flat-fee structure based on scope |
| Clicks used as success metric | Sales and ROAS measured at keyword level |
| Broken attribution | Fully rebuilt GA & e-commerce tracking |
| $2M annual sales | $4M+ annual sales after 4 years |
