How rebuilding a Search-only Google Ads account into a diversified Shopping, Performance Max and Search structure produced a £4.3M record-breaking year.
What did this account rebuild achieve?
A UK e-commerce retailer grew Google Ads revenue by £2.5M in 12 months after Social Surge rebuilt its Search-only account into a diversified structure combining Shopping, Performance Max and Search, producing a record-breaking £4.3M year, the retailer's best ever.
When this UK e-commerce retailer came to us, its Google Ads account had one campaign type: Search. Text ads, keyword lists, manual structure, the way accounts were built a decade ago. It wasn't badly run; it had simply hit the ceiling that every Search-only e-commerce account eventually hits.
Search captures people who type what they want. For a retailer with thousands of products, that leaves most of the opportunity on the table. There were no Shopping campaigns showing product images and prices at the exact moment of purchase intent. No Performance Max reaching buyers across YouTube, Display, Gmail and Discover. No product feed working as an asset. Every incremental pound pushed into Search bought less than the pound before it, the classic diminishing-returns curve of a single-channel account.
The retailer's question was simple: is this really as big as the account gets? Our audit said no, but the answer wasn't more Search. It was a different account.
Rebuilding an account on top of unreliable data is how agencies destroy things that were working. Before launching anything new, we verified conversion tracking end to end, cleaned up conversion actions so bidding optimised toward actual purchase value, and built a product feed worthy of the catalogue, accurate titles, complete attributes, correct categorisation. The feed is the raw material for everything Shopping and Performance Max do; a poor feed caps performance before the first ad serves.
Shopping campaigns went live segmented by product category and margin rather than dumped into a single catch-all. That structure let us set different efficiency targets for different parts of the catalogue, protecting margin on commodity items while giving hero products room to scale. For an e-commerce retailer, Shopping isn't a nice-to-have; it's usually the single highest-intent placement Google offers.
Performance Max earns its reputation for both brilliance and budget-burning. The difference is control of inputs: curated asset groups, clean audience signals, and product-level oversight so weak SKUs don't quietly absorb spend. We introduced PMax alongside Shopping rather than instead of it, monitored where its traffic actually came from, and expanded it only as the data justified.
Search didn't disappear, it got a sharper job. Brand protection, high-intent category terms and the queries Shopping can't serve. Freed from carrying the entire account, Search efficiency improved while its budget was reallocated to the channels doing the heavy lifting.
The rebuild happened in stages across the year, not overnight. Existing Search campaigns kept trading while the feed and Shopping structure were built; Performance Max entered once Shopping had established clean baseline data to compare against; budgets migrated gradually as each new channel proved itself. That sequencing mattered as much as the structure, it meant revenue never dipped during the transition, and every reallocation decision was backed by side-by-side performance data rather than theory. The client saw each step in the weekly reports before it happened, with full account access to verify the results afterwards.
£2.5M of additional revenue in 12 months, and a £4.3M record-breaking year, the best in the retailer's history. Growth came from structure, not just spend: the account went from one channel with a ceiling to three channels with complementary jobs, each measured, each accountable.
If your Google Ads account is Search-only, you're not competing in most of the auctions your customers actually see. The retailers winning in UK e-commerce run diversified accounts where Shopping, Performance Max and Search each do what they do best. Our Google Ads management service builds exactly that, and our free audit will show you what a rebuild could be worth on your account. Transparent pricing, rolling monthly agreements, no lock-ins.
Book a free PPC audit and we'll map exactly which channels your account is missing, and what they're worth.
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