A look at the work.

We were hired by a friendly agency we've done business with before to audit a client's Google Ads account. It was hitting ROAS benchmarks, generating conversions, and keeping the client happy, which is exactly why the gaps stayed invisible. When an account looks like it's working, agencies may let things ride, even when there's juice left to squeeze.

The problems we found weren't in the execution. They were in the structure. Branded campaigns were propping up the blended CPA and hiding the true cost of non-branded acquisition. The best PMAX campaign ran at 32% impression share with room to scale, while another burned budget at a $185 CPA. Outside of PMAX there was no standard search, no dynamic search, no shopping — entire categories of demand with nothing to catch them.

Google's recommendations were set to auto-apply. That isn't optimization. It's letting the auctioneer set your bids.

We audited the full account, documented six structural issues, and delivered a seven-step plan to rebuild it. No budget increases required — the efficiency was already there, waiting to be unlocked.

A shift from reactive to proactive management. Lower CPCs through search-intent alignment and Quality Score, with no rise in bids. Controlled, testable scaling driven by structure rather than spend. With a top campaign stuck at 32% impression share and another running unchecked at $185, the performance left on the table was material.

A direct-to-consumer meat subscription — ethically raised product from a Maine farm, delivered to families across the US. The fundamentals were strong: a compelling founder, a loyal early base, a product that earns repeat purchases. What was missing was marketing discipline. The question was whether a regional Northeast brand could scale nationally. This is often the case with temperature-sensitive consumables.

Luckily, this was not our first rodeo. We came in as Fractional CMO and growth partner: daily strategy, ownership of the full marketing platform, and the mandate to hire, manage, and — when needed — fire agencies and freelancers. We ran Google Ads in-house (Search, PMAX, Shopping, and feed), oversaw Meta through an agency partner, and led lifecycle, performance creative, and attribution.

Over 18 months we built the growth engine. The brand adopted the tagline we wrote, "the easiest way to eat better meat," unifying the message across ads, email, web, and packaging. We templated the founder's voice to hold trust at scale, and rebuilt attribution from last-click to an ecosystem model that matched how customers actually bought. Platform thinking replaced channel silos.

By the end of our engagement, the brand was shipping to more than half the continental US and tracking toward a $20M run rate — 16,632 new customers, with cost per subscriber down by 81.8%.

Our client runs one of the largest luxury consignment platforms in Canada — high AOV, high intent, deeply trust-sensitive. They came to Channelshift for Google Ads, with an account underperforming its category and the awareness that it could do more.

We built the Google Ads operation from the ground up: campaign architecture, Shopping, branded and non-branded search, and PMAX. Over 18 months, blended ROAS reached 27×, and Shopping hit 62.9×. At month 12 the client added Meta to our remit. We rebuilt that account, launched a retargeting program that returned 789 purchases at an $8.29 CPA and 181× ROAS, and drove 2,709 purchases from cold prospecting. Across both platforms, the account generated $7.9M CAD in tracked conversion value in the first year. 

Years of over-complication without oversight had left the Google account of one of the biggest producers of exotic fruits in the US with 108 campaigns, layers of overlapping targeting, a half-dozen data feeds, no coherent structure, and no logic connecting spend to outcome. Budget burned with no one watching.

We came in for what amounted to a rescue. We audited the full account, documented the structural failures, and made the call not to optimize what existed. The right move was to start over. Six campaigns are now run, where 108 ran before. Brand search CPA is $2.80. ROAS is over 2.2× for new customers and 3.3× for returners. The business is stable and primed for growth.

High-consideration furniture and luxury interiors don't behave like DTC. Lead quality dictates everything; volume is a distraction. When we arrived, there was no way to tell Google which leads had converted — no qualification data flowing back to bidding, no link between what happened in the showroom and how the algorithm spent.

We rebuilt the tracking infrastructure, defined lead-qualification signals, and closed the loop between the sales team and the campaign. The account now optimizes for leads that close, not leads that fill out a form.

A share of our work is managed on behalf of agencies — their clients, their brand on the reports, our execution underneath. We don't discuss which agencies or which clients. The arrangement works because we're not competing for the relationship. We're just buying the media.

Agencies come to us when the work outgrows in-house capacity, when a client demands a specialist, or when they need someone who can step in without disrupting the relationship. We manage the account. We stay invisible.