Solved: Strategy advice needed to scale Google Ads account.

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! Really glad the initial thoughts were helpful. It sounds like you're in a great position, hitting £20k a month at a 6x ROAS with PMax is a solid start, especially in a competitive market like high-end audio equipment. A lot of people would be very happy with that.

Scaling up to £50k a month is defintely achievable, but it’s not just a case of bumping up the budget on the one campaign and hoping for the best. That’s usually the quickest way to see your ROAS fall off a cliff. To get there, you'll need a more structured and thought-out approach. I'm happy to give you some more detailed thoughts on how I'd tackle this, based on what's worked for us with other high-value eCommerce clients.

This is gonna be a bit of a long one, but I wanted to give you a proper, detailed breakdown of my thinking. So grab a cuppa.

We'll need to look at the 'PMax Paradox' when scaling...

Okay, so first things first. The PMax campaign is your golden goose right now. But Performance Max has a bit of a paradox. It’s brilliant at finding pockets of customers when you give it a clear goal and a reasonable budget, just like it’s doing for you now. The problem is, it's a 'black box'. You feed it assets and a budget, and Google's algorithm does its thing across Search, Shopping, Display, YouTube, and the rest. You have very little real controll over where your money is actually going.

When you start to agressively scale the budget, you're giving the algorithm a lot more rope. It will start looking for conversions in wider, less-qualified audiences. It might start spending a lot more on Display or YouTube to hit your budget, which are naturally lower-converting placements. Your cost per acquisition (CPA) will almost certainly rise, and that lovely 6x ROAS will start to drop. I've seen it happen time and time again. You might scale revenue, but your profit margin gets squeezed hard.

This doesn't mean we ditch PMax. Not at all. It's proven it can find customers. But relying on it as your *only* tool for growth is a huge risk. The stratgey for scaling from £20k to £50k is about building a more robust, diversified, and controllable machine around your PMax campaign, using it as a foundational part of a bigger picture rather than the whole thing.

I'd say you need to build out from the black box with granular campaigns...

The core of the plan is to take back control. We're going to systematically carve out the best performing parts of what PMax is likely doing, and run them as seperate, dedicated campaigns. This lets us controll the budget, bidding, and messaging with much more precision. This is how you scale intelligently.

1. Standard Shopping Campaigns: Your New Foundation

Before PMax, we had Standard Shopping. And it still has a massive role to play. I would launch a set of Standard Shopping campaigns to run alongside PMax. The goal here is to segment your products so you can be more strategic with your budget.

Your high-end audio store probably has a mix of products: some are best-sellers, some have high margins, some are entry-level items. Lumping them all into one PMax campaign means a £200 set of headphones gets treated the same as a £5,000 amplifier. That doesnt make sense.

I would structure it using campaign priorities. It's a classic and effective technique. Here’s a rough idea:

• -> Campaign 1 (Low Priority, High Bid): Best-Sellers. This campaign contains only your top 10-20 products that you know sell well. We give it a high bid to make sure we always show up for them, but a low priority.
• -> Campaign 2 (Medium Priority, Medium Bid): Brand/Category Campaigns. Here, you'd break things down. You might have a campaign just for "KEF Speakers," another for "Naim Amplifiers," and so on. This allows you to see exactly how much you're spending and making on each major brand. You can adjust budgets based on which brands are most profitable. You could also do it by category (e.g., Turntables, Streamers, Home Cinema).
• -> Campaign 3 (High Priority, Low Bid): Catch-All. This campaign contains all your products. It has a low bid and a high priority. The way priorities work means that if someone searches for something specific in your other campaigns, those will show first. If the search is more generic, or for a product not in the other campaigns, this one will catch the traffic.

This structure gives you enormous control. If you know Naim products have a 40% margin but Sonos only has 20%, you can allocate your budget accordingly. You also get access to the Search Terms report in Standard Shopping, so you can add negative keywords to stop wasting money on irrelevant searches (e.g., "repair," "reviews," "used"). This is a lever you simply dont have with PMax.

2. High-Intent Search Campaigns: Picking the Low-Hanging Fruit

This is probably the most obvious, but often overlooked, expansion. You need to be bidding on the exact names of the products you sell. Someone searching for "buy Devialet Phantom I 108dB" isn't browsing; they are ready to purchase. They know the product, they know the price point, they are at the very bottom of the funnel.

I'd create campaigns broken down by brand, and then ad groups for each product model. For example:

Campaign: Search - Bowers & Wilkins
    -> Ad Group: B&W 805 D4
       - Keywords: "bowers and wilkins 805 d4", "buy b&w 805 d4", "805 d4 speakers price"
    -> Ad Group: B&W Formation Duo
       - Keywords: "b&w formation duo", "bowers wilkins formation speakers", "formation duo uk"

These campaigns won't have massive volume, but they will be incredibly high-converting. The ROAS here should be even higher than your 6x average. This is pure demand capture. You're just putting your shop in front of people who are already knocking on the door. It's a must-do for scaling revenue predictably.

You probably should create new demand, not just capture it...

Everything we've talked about about so far is about capturing existing demand. People who are already looking for your products. To truly scale to £50k and beyond, you need to *create* new demand. You need to make people who *weren't* thinking about a new Hi-Fi system today, want one tomorrow. This is where you move up the funnel.

1. YouTube Ads for Aspiration

High-end audio isn't just a product; it's a hobby, a passion, a lifestyle. YouTube is the perfect place to tap into this. People go there for reviews, setup tours, and to dream about their next upgrade.

We wouldn't be looking for direct sales here. The goal is to build awareness and drive traffic from highly relevant audiences. I'd test campaigns targeting:

• -> Placements: We'd run in-stream ads on specific, popular Hi-Fi review channels. Think of channels like Darko Audio, The Next Best Thing Studio, or What Hi-Fi?. We're putting your stunning products right in front of an audience of thousands of dedicated enthusiasts.
• -> Custom Audiences: We can build audiences of people who have recently visited websites like your competitors, or high-end audio forums and magazines (e.g., Audiogon, Stereophile).
• -> In-Market Audiences: Google has pre-built audiences for "Home Audio Systems," "Stereos & Home Theaters," etc. These are broader but still effective for reaching people showing buying signals.

The creative here is paramount. You need professional, slick video that shows off the equipment in a beautiful, aspirational setting. No hard selling. It's about showing the beauty of the product and the experience it creates. This is how luxury brands are built. I remember one luxury brand launch we worked on, the focus was entirely on generating views and creating a premium feel, we hit over 10 million views which built a huge top-of-funnel audience for them to retarget later.

2. Display Ads for Visual Reminders

Similar to YouTube, Display ads can work to keep your brand top of mind. We can run visually-led ads on the same kind of websites and publications that enthusiasts read. Imagine a beautifully shot image of a McIntosh amplifier appearing on the side of a hi-fi news website. It's a powerful branding play. Again, the direct ROAS will be low, but its role is to feed your retargeting machine.

You'll need a retargeting furnace to turn interest into revenue...

This is where it all comes together. The traffic you generate from your new YouTube and Display campaigns is gold dust, but most of it won't convert on the first visit. A powerful, multi-layered retargeting strategy is what turns that initial interest into a sale. This is non-negotiable.

We need to segment our audiences and talk to them differently based on how engaged they are. I'd set up seperate audiences for:

• -> All Website Visitors (Last 30 Days): A general brand message, showing off your best-sellers or your unique selling proposition (e.g., "Expert Advice & UK-Wide Installation").
• -> Category Viewers (Last 14 Days): If someone was looking at your "Turntables" page, we show them ads featuring your best turntables. The messaging is more specific. "Find Your Perfect Turntable. View our Rega & Pro-Ject range."
• -> Product Viewers (Last 7 Days): Someone who viewed a specific product page is very interested. We can hit them with Dynamic Retargeting ads showing that exact product they looked at. This is hugely effective.
• -> Cart Abandoners (Last 3 Days): This is your hottest audience. They were one click away from buying. We can hit them with an urgent message. "Still thinking about it? Complete your order now." For a high-end store, I'd avoid offering a discount straight away as it can devalue the brand. Instead, focus on trust signals like "Free Insured Delivery" or "5-Star Customer Support".

This tiered approach means you're always showing the most relevant message to the right person at the right time. It's how you convert the 'maybes' into 'yesses' and maximise the value from every pound you spend on top-of-funnel advertising.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

This is a lot to take in, I know. But scaling isnt a simple process. Here’s a table that summarises the main strategic pillars I've outlined.

As you can see, the path from £20k to £50k is about building a proper, full-funnel advertising system. It's about adding layers of controll and new channels for demand generation, all working together. The overall ROAS for the account might dip slightly from 6x as you invest more in top-of-funnel activity, but a 4.5x-5x ROAS on a £50k spend is £225k-£250k in revenue – a significant increase in total profit from the £120k you're generating now.

Executing this kind of multi-faceted stratgey takes time, constant monitoring, and a deep understanding of how each part affects the others. It's not a 'set and forget' job. You're moving from running a campaign to managing an ecosystem.

That's where a professional consultancy like us can make a huge difference. We build and manage these kinds of systems for a living. We can provide insights that you might not have thought of, handle the complex campaign structures, and take over the day-to-day implementation and optimisation for you, ensuring that every pound you spend is working as hard as possible to grow your client's business.

If you'd like to chat through this in more detail and see how we could apply this specifically to your client's account, we offer a completely free, no-obligation initial strategy consultation. We could have a proper look at the account together and map out a concrete plan of action.

Hope this detailed breakdown has been genuinely helpful for you.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh