I joined this brand as it walked into one of its slowest quarters. It sells gloves, pads and training gear to fighters across the UK, the USA, the Gulf, Europe, Central Asia and Scandinavia, and it goes up every day against some of the biggest names in the sport.
On paper, the business was healthy. In the ad accounts, it was bleeding. For every pound of revenue, 35 pence was going straight back into advertising. The margin only works at 22 pence or less. Sales were dropping by around 40% a day, and nothing the team tried was holding them steady.
Three problems, all at once
When I dug in, it wasn't one issue. It was three, all landing in the same quarter:
- The ad accounts were working against the margin. Performance Max and Meta conversion campaigns were chasing cheap clicks instead of high-value buyers, so the spend went up and the order value stayed low.
- A website migration had broken SEO. The different language versions of the site had started competing with the main domain. Instead of adding up, years of search authority were being split into pieces.
- Email wasn't pulling its weight. For a brand with a large customer base, email was bringing in just 2% of sales. That's money left sitting in the inbox.
There was also no live view of stock, so ads kept pushing products that were about to run out.
A slow quarter can't wait for a six-week onboarding.
The plan: survive first, then grow
A normal agency onboarding takes weeks. This brand didn't have weeks. I've led turnarounds for a lot of declining businesses, and the pattern is always the same: stop the losses before you try anything clever. So I set a 30-day survival plan with four rules.
Audit everything before touching anything
I went through the Google and Meta accounts line by line. Fixing what's already broken is faster than launching new campaigns on top of it.
Protect the margin, not the volume
Not every product deserves the same budget in a bad quarter. I split the catalogue into three tiers: top performers got aggressive bidding, mid-tier products ran for efficiency, and weak sellers dropped to minimal spend until the account was stable.
Repair the site so organic search could recover
I fixed the migration errors so the language versions supported the main domain instead of fighting it. Authority started flowing back to one place.
Rebuild email in parallel
I rewrote the drip sequence to move people from first purchase to repeat purchase. That's revenue that doesn't cost a penny in ad spend, which matters most when ad costs are too high.
The new campaign structures were live by day three. That speed was deliberate, because every day of delay was another day of losses.
What happened next
Within 14 days, the ad cost of sale fell from 35% to 25%. Over the rest of the year it averaged 20%, comfortably under the 22% target. The account didn't just recover; it beat its own benchmark and stayed there.
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Advertising cost of sale (ACOS) | 35% | 25% in 14 days, 20% average for the year |
| Target ACOS | 22% | Beaten and held |
| Weekly revenue | Falling | +£20K a week (+25%) |
| Paid engagement | Baseline | +63% |
| Organic share of traffic | 20% | 35% |
| Email share of sales | 2% | 4% |
| Time to first new campaigns | Weeks (standard onboarding) | 3 days |
Revenue followed. The brand added £20,000 in extra sales every week, a 25% lift, in a quarter that usually goes the other way. Once the migration errors were fixed, organic search grew from 20% to 35% of all traffic, and that traffic costs nothing per click. Email doubled from 2% to 4% of total sales.
Alongside the consumer side, the same work brought in more than 20,000 B2B vendor leads over six months, and search and AI visibility grew to drive around 15% of sales.
The lesson
When ad costs run above what the margin can carry, the problem is rarely the creative. It's the structure underneath it: how campaigns are grouped, what the algorithm is told to value, and whether the website is helping or hurting.
Is your ad account eating your margin?
If your cost of sale keeps creeping up and nobody can tell you why, that's exactly what my free audit looks for. I'll show you where the spend is leaking and what I'd fix in the first 30 days.
