Case study · Eco-friendly e-commerce
Finding the 99.9% of search spend that was never going to convert.
A South African eco-friendly home and laundry products brand was spending on Google Ads search campaigns that looked busy but were quietly leaking budget on terms that would never produce a sale.
The challenge
The account was running, conversions were happening, but cost per acquisition was sitting above target ($62 against a $50 goal) and monthly conversion volume was short of where it needed to be. A surface-level glance said “it\u2019s working.” A real look said otherwise.
What we found
A 30-day search-term report on one generic campaign returned 734 rows across 612 unique terms. 99.9% of those terms, accounting for 98.6% of the spend, had produced zero conversions. The budget was being consumed by competitor brand names, wrong-product-format searches, and adjacent informational queries that were never going to buy.
Separately, a discovery campaign meant to drive broad reach had a broken landing-page URL and tracking, so it could not be optimised or trusted.
The approach
46 phrase-match negatives were added in one structured pass: 22 competitor brand names, 17 wrong-product-format terms, and 7 off-category queries. The broken discovery campaign was replaced with a dedicated, tightly targeted Search campaign built around genuine high-intent buyer queries, while the broad-reach channel was repaired and left to do its own job.
The results
This is ongoing work, not a one-time cleanup. Search-term hygiene is reviewed on a cadence so the account does not drift back into waste, and CPA continues to be pulled toward target month over month.
The takeaway
A busy-looking account is not the same as a working one. The single most valuable thing you can do for many e-commerce accounts is find the spend that was never going to convert and stop it, then rebuild structure around the searches that actually buy.
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All figures are from live Google Ads accounts. Client identity withheld by request. Results reflect specific market conditions and business context; individual outcomes vary.