Increasing ROAS and Revenue for a Premium Chocolate Ecommerce Brand

This case study is based on Google Ads work completed for an agency client in the Australian e-commerce industry. For confidentiality, the client name has been omitted.

The client is a family-owned artisan chocolate brand selling premium couverture chocolate in a highly competitive market. Because their products sit at a higher price point than mass-market chocolate brands, their paid media strategy needed to do more than simply generate traffic. It needed to attract high-intent shoppers, support seasonal demand, and help convert users who were more likely to purchase premium chocolate products.

The main objective was to improve Google Ads performance by increasing conversion value, strengthening ROAS, and making better use of the client’s paid media budget across key promotional and seasonal periods.

The Challenge

The client was competing against larger, more established chocolate and gifting brands with bigger budgets and stronger brand recognition.

They also relied heavily on paid advertising during major sales periods such as Easter, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, EOFY, and other promotional campaigns. However, not every seasonal period had the same commercial value for the Australian market.

One of the key issues was that previous campaign planning did not fully align ad spend with the client’s strongest revenue-driving periods. This created opportunities to improve campaign structure, seasonal prioritisation, budget allocation, and overall efficiency.

The goal was to build a more strategic PPC approach that helped the brand stay competitive while improving revenue and ROAS.

The PPC Approach

To improve performance, I worked across the client’s Google Ads account with a focus on Performance Max, Search, Display, and Smart campaigns.

The campaign mix included:

Performance Max campaigns for seasonal promotions, best sellers, and ecommerce growth
Search campaigns for branded and high-intent demand capture
Display campaigns for awareness and remarketing support
Smart campaigns as part of the account’s broader paid media setup

The strategy focused on improving campaign quality, reducing wasted spend, and making sure the account was better aligned with the client’s highest-value sales opportunities.

Campaign Optimisations

Performance Max Campaigns

Performance Max was the main campaign type used during the reporting period. Since PMax relies heavily on Google’s automation and machine learning, the focus was on giving the algorithm better inputs and clearer direction.

This included:

Improving asset quality across headlines, descriptions, images, and video assets
Providing a wider variety of creative assets to support stronger ad combinations
Using relevant audience signals, including custom intent audiences, previous converters, and customer lists where available
Reviewing product feed quality through Google Merchant Center
Improving product titles, categories, and custom labels for better ecommerce targeting
Using search themes to guide Google’s automation toward more relevant searches
Applying brand exclusions where needed to avoid inflated ROAS from branded traffic
Using negative keyword controls to reduce wasted spend from irrelevant searches

These optimisations helped improve the quality of traffic being driven through Performance Max while supporting stronger revenue efficiency.

Search Campaigns

Search campaigns were used to capture users with clear purchase intent, especially around branded and product-related searches.

This included:

Reviewing search terms regularly
Adding negative keywords to block irrelevant or low-value queries
Prioritising high-intent keywords
Using smart bidding strategies where conversion value data was available
Improving Responsive Search Ads with stronger headlines and descriptions
Adding ad extensions such as sitelinks, callouts, and price assets where relevant
Layering audiences in observation mode to identify stronger converting segments

The goal was to make sure search campaigns captured demand from users who were already actively looking for the brand or relevant chocolate products.

Display Campaign

Display was used mainly as a supporting channel for visibility and remarketing-style activity.

This included:

Reviewing placements to reduce wasted spend
Excluding irrelevant or poor-quality placements
Using more precise audience targeting
Supporting the broader funnel with visual, benefit-driven creative
Keeping Display activity focused rather than overly broad

This helped prevent Display from draining budget while still supporting awareness and re-engagement.

Tools Used

The PPC work was supported by a mix of paid media, analytics, keyword research, and ecommerce tools, including:

Google Ads
Google Analytics 4
Google Merchant Center
SEMrush
Google Ads reporting and performance data

These tools helped review campaign performance, track ecommerce revenue, monitor ROAS, identify keyword opportunities, and guide budget decisions.

The Results

From 28 December 2025 to 28 June 2026, compared with the previous period, the account recorded strong improvements across key Google Ads performance metrics.

The campaign achieved:

$881K in conversion value
$476K increase in conversion value
468.68% actual ROAS
50.21% increase in actual ROAS
$188K in ad spend
Significant increase in purchases/sales performance

The increase in conversion value and ROAS showed that the campaigns were not only spending more, but also generating stronger revenue efficiency.

By improving campaign structure, seasonal prioritisation, product feed quality, audience signals, creative assets, and search relevance, the account was able to drive stronger ecommerce performance during an important promotional period.

Key Takeaway

This PPC project showed the importance of aligning paid media strategy with customer intent, seasonal demand, and ecommerce profitability.

For a premium chocolate brand competing against larger mass-market players, stronger performance came from more than simply increasing ad spend. The account needed better campaign structure, cleaner targeting, stronger creative inputs, improved product feed quality, and smarter seasonal planning.

By optimising Performance Max, Search, Display, and Smart campaigns, the client improved conversion value, ROAS, and overall paid media revenue performance.

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