How Total Fishing achieved a 70% YoY revenue increase while slashing ad budgets.
Total Fishing is one of the premier fishing tackle retailers in their market. Managing an online and brick-and-mortar operation with over 70,000 active products, they needed a way to control skyrocketing acquisition costs.
(with lower investment)
The Market Headwinds
The macroeconomic challenges forcing a change in strategy.
Exploding CPCs
Google Ads CPCs (Shopping/PMax) saw a massive 61% YoY increase, driving up baseline acquisition costs across the entire catalog.
Aggressive Competitors
A major international competitor entered the market, rapidly capturing top 3 impression share and forcing aggressive bidding wars.
Shrinking Budgets
Heading into Q4, ad budgets were slashed by 30% on Google and 17% on Meta, requiring hyper-efficiency to maintain a target non-brand ROAS of 5.0x.
The Strategy: Eliminating the Black Holes.
Automated Catalog Segmentation
PMK Core analyzed the 70,000+ product feed, combining sales data with ad spend to categorize the catalog. We discovered a massive volume of 'Black Holes'—products eating up 42% of the Google Ads budget while generating zero revenue.
Surgical Exclusions
Instead of pausing whole campaigns, PMK Core's supplemental feeds automatically excluded 'Black Holes' from the main PMax and Meta campaigns. Over 90% of campaigns saw immediate ROAS improvements as budget shifted to viable products.
Parallel Profitability
The isolated 'Black Holes' weren't deleted; they were moved into a highly restricted parallel campaign with a strict ROAS target and a 5% budget cap, forcing Google's algorithm to bid efficiently rather than blindly spending.
The Financial Impact
Waste Eradicated
Wasted ad spend on 'Black Holes' dropped from 42% to just 14% on Google, and dropped to absolute zero (0%) on Meta.
Revenue Growth
+21% GAds Revenue, +70% Meta Revenue (achieved despite a 43% higher platform CPC).
Peak Season Success
During Black Friday, despite a significantly lower total ad investment, overall revenue increased by 28% YoY by focusing solely on 'Champions' and 'Power Players'.