From Invisible to Category Leader: 450% Session Growth in 8 Months
Our client is a premium natural pet food brand offering grain-free kibble and wet food for dogs and cats. Founded by a veterinary nutritionist, the brand had strong product quality and genuine customer loyalty but was largely invisible on the marketplace. Their organic search rank was outside the top 50 for core keywords, and their advertising was limited to a single auto campaign with no structure, no negative keyword management, and a budget of $600 per month.
Sessions were averaging 3,200 per month and ad-attributed revenue was under $15,000. The account had never had a proper keyword strategy, meaning listings were not ranking for commercial-intent search terms. The single auto campaign was burning spend on irrelevant queries while core category terms were underfunded. Conversion rate was acceptable at 12.9%, but without traffic volume it had no meaningful impact on revenue.
We started with a full keyword audit using Search Query Performance reports analysed through AdNexora, identifying 340 high-volume search terms the brand was not targeting. Campaigns were restructured into a tiered architecture: auto campaigns for discovery, broad-to-exact harvesting for keyword migration, and exact match campaigns for the top 40 proven terms. Bids were updated weekly using Ad Console performance data consolidated in AdNexora, negative keywords were reviewed fortnightly, and listing titles and bullet points were optimised to reinforce organic ranking.
Within eight months, monthly sessions grew from 3,200 to 17,600. Ad-attributed revenue grew from $12,400 to $88,400 per month. ACOS improved from 21% to 14.8% as campaign structure tightened. Organic ranking for the primary keyword moved from position 58 to position 11. Total ad spend grew from $600 to $6,200 but ROAS improved from 1.6 to 5.0, meaning every dollar was generating significantly more return.