A leading fitness industry brand
Lifted Google ROAS 61% across an 8-month scaling push, by rebuilding the account around Quality Score.
+61%
ROAS lift, trough to exit
+68%
Average Quality Score, below average to above average
$4.5M
Google ad spend stewarded across 8 months
The Result
Google ROAS and monthly spend
July 2023 through March 2024. ROAS in dark; monthly spend overlaid in orange. Engagement period shaded.
What was broken
The brand had a Google account that was over-built. SKAGs (single-keyword ad groups) running on exact match across 23 competing campaigns, manual CPC bidding, keywords sitting at Quality Scores of 2 or under quietly burning budget, and ad copy that did not consistently mirror what users were typing into search. Account-wide Average Quality Score was 4.5, below average. Every click was costing more than it should and ad rank was being suppressed in the auction.
The account was also entering a heavy spend ramp. Monthly Google spend was climbing from a $438K average through the first half of 2023 toward a $728K September peak, and ROAS had started to slide. The structure could not carry the additional volume.
The week the engagement began, the client mandated doubling Google ad spend. I pushed back. The directive stood. That decision is what the September ROAS dip to 1.77 represents on the chart above: spend ramped before the account structure could absorb it. The rebuild work began the same week, and the recovery curve from October through March is the structural work compounding while spend held at the new elevated level.
The Quality Score arc
Google Average Quality Score, biweekly
July 2023 through March 2024. Engagement period shaded. Quality Score is a 1 to 10 score Google assigns each keyword based on expected CTR, ad relevance, and landing page experience. Above 7 is considered strong.
What I did
The structure was wrong. SKAGs on exact match across 23 campaigns starves the algorithm of the breadth it needs to find buyers, and splits conversion signal across too many containers for it to learn from. So the first rebuild was structural: consolidated 23 campaigns down to 8 active ones, killing the dead-weight tail so budget could concentrate on the campaigns actually performing, dismantled the SKAGs, and shifted keyword targeting from exact match to broad match. Bidding moved from manual CPC to Maximize Conversions, which hands auction logic to Google's algorithm and feeds it the conversion data it needs to optimize against. Modern Google accounts scale on signal, not on micromanagement.
Where the budget went
Spend concentration, before and after consolidation
Campaign-level spend distribution, illustrative of the concentration shape. Before, 23 campaigns competed for spend with no clear winners, the top campaign carrying only 28%. After consolidation, 8 campaigns held the account and the top 4 carried 92% of spend — budget concentrated on what was actually working.
Quality Score hygiene next. Every keyword with a Quality Score of 2 or under got removed, and the budget those wasted clicks were consuming got redirected to the winners. That alone moves the account-wide average up, and it stops paying Google premium CPCs on terms that were never going to convert efficiently.
Ad copy moved onto a monthly refresh cadence, with messaging that converted getting promoted and underperformers getting cut. The headline framework used a 50/50 rule: half mirror the top-converting search terms, half sell against the competitive set. That pulled expected CTR up and pulled ad relevance up with it.
Ad Copy Framework
The 50/50 rule for Google headlines.
Every Responsive Search Ad headline does one of two jobs. No filler, no clever brand lines burning impressions.
50%
Mirror the search term
"Personal Trainer Certification"
50%
Sell against the competitive set
"Accredited PT Cert, Self-Paced"
What happened
Quality Score climbed from 4.5 in late July 2023 to 7.55 by the end of March 2024, crossing into above-average territory by December and holding there. The step up in early September is when the campaign consolidation and broad-match shift hit. The continued climb through the fall is the QS-2-and-under purge and monthly ad copy refresh cycles compounding.
ROAS followed the same arc. From a 1.77 trough in September up to 2.86 by exit, a 61% lift, even with monthly spend running 29% higher than the pre-engagement baseline. Across the engagement I stewarded $4.5M in Google ad spend at a $565K monthly average.