by Austin LeClear
on December 15, 2025
Here’s something that shouldn’t make sense: an e-commerce business getting 60% more new customers during their slowest months than they did during peak season.
But that’s exactly what happened when we restructured the Google Ads account for Ron Henry, owner of Golf Course Lawn Store.
Ron sells fertilizer and lawn care products online. If you know anything about that business, you know it’s brutally seasonal. Spring and summer are booming. Then comes autumn, and sales start sliding toward what Ron calls “the abyss of no sales and unhappiness.”
So how did we flip the script and generate better results when the odds were stacked against us?
In this post, we’ll walk you through the exact strategy. Prefer video? Check out This Google Ads Strategy Got Him 60% More Customers in His WORST Season on YouTube:
Still with us? Good, let’s dive in.
The Problem With Most Google Ads Accounts
When Ron came to us, his account was a mess. And honestly, it looked like most accounts we audit.
He had four or five Performance Max campaigns broken out by product categories. Google reps had convinced him that Performance Max was the end-all solution for his e-commerce brand. So he built his entire strategy around it.
The problem? He couldn’t scale.
Every time he tried to give his campaigns more budget, they wouldn’t spend it. He was stuck. Revenue wasn’t growing. New customer acquisition had flatlined.
Ron had done what most advertisers do — he followed best practices, listened to Google’s recommendations, and ended up with a fragmented account that looked busy, but wasn’t actually performing.
Sound familiar?
Why ROAS Is a Lie (Sort Of)
Here’s where things get interesting.
When most people talk about Google Ads strategy, they obsess over ROAS and Performance Max. These have become the north stars for e-commerce businesses everywhere.
But here’s the thing: high ROAS is often a bad sign, and Performance Max is not the ideal solution if you’re looking to scale.
This may sound backwards, but it makes sense when you consider this: Your highest ROAS campaigns are almost always your brand campaigns. Why? Because you’re targeting people who already know you. They were going to buy anyway. More than half of that traffic is usually existing customers coming back for repeat purchases.
So when we see someone with an account with an 8x ROAS who asks why they can’t scale, we already know the answer. They’re not actually acquiring new customers at the rate they think they are. They’re just remarketing to warm audiences and calling it growth.
With Ron, we threw ROAS out the window as our primary metric.
Instead, we focused on one number: new customer acquisition cost.
Building the Foundation (Before Looking at Ads)
Before we made a single change to his campaigns, we did something many advertisers skip entirely.
We got into the backend data.
We connected his Shopify data to our tracking sheet. We analyzed his actual margins. We used an app called By The Numbers to pull customer cohort analysis — who his top customers were, who had lapsed, what his true lifetime value looked like.
This data told us exactly how much Ron could afford to pay for a new customer and still be profitable.
That number became our guiding light. Not ROAS. Not conversion rate in Google’s dashboard. The actual cost to acquire a customer who would generate revenue for his business over time.
The Next Step: Shutting Off Brand Campaigns
One of the first things we advised Ron to do was shut off his brand search campaigns completely.
Why? Simple: When we looked at the auction insights report, no one was bidding on his brand name. Zero competitors.
So why was he paying Google for the privilege of showing an ad when he’d get that traffic anyway through organic search?
We shut it off. Watched the data. Nothing changed. Backend orders stayed the same. New customer acquisition stayed the same.
That was money we could now redirect toward actually growing the business.
The Feeder Strategy: A Smarter Way to Structure Campaigns
Next, we consolidated Ron’s fragmented Performance Max campaigns into a much simpler structure. Instead of treating Performance Max as his primary customer acquisition tool, we repositioned it.
Performance Max became a remarketing campaign.
Meanwhile, we shifted budget toward standard shopping campaigns targeting cold traffic. The idea is simple: use Shopping ads to reach new potential customers who have never heard of you. If they don’t convert immediately, Performance Max picks them up on the remarketing side.
This is called a feeder strategy. Standard Shopping feeds cold traffic into your funnel. Performance Max remarkets to those users across display, YouTube ads, and other placements.
The difference in results was immediate.
Instead of Performance Max gobbling up budget on warm audiences and inflating ROAS numbers, we were actually reaching new people. And we could track exactly what we were paying to acquire them.
The Results: 60% More Customers in the Off-Season
Ron’s business typically peaks in spring, then slowly declines through summer and falls off a cliff by fall. August is always worse than July. September is worse than August. That’s just how seasonal businesses work.
But after implementing this strategy?
August sales were higher than July. First time ever in the history of his business.
And when we compared new customer acquisition during the off-season to what he was getting during peak season, he was up 60%.
Read that again. During his worst months, he acquired 60% more new customers than during his best months under his old strategy. This was the first time ever in the history of the business that sales had been higher in August than they were in July.
That’s not a slight improvement. That’s a complete transformation in how his Google Ads account was functioning.
Why This Matters for Next Year
Here’s what gets us excited for Ron.
All those new customers he just acquired? They’re probably going to come back.
His data shows customers don’t just buy once. They return multiple times. So the 60% increase in new customer acquisition during the off-season isn’t just a Q4 win. It’s setting up a massive Q1 and Q2.
Those customers will reactivate when spring hits. They’ll buy again. And again.
That’s how you build a real business. Not by chasing the highest ROAS. Not by letting Performance Max run wild on your warmest audiences. But by systematically acquiring new customers at a cost that makes sense, knowing they’ll generate lifetime value.
Final Thoughts
If your Google Ads strategy is built entirely around ROAS, you’re probably leaving growth on the table.
The advertisers who scale are the ones who understand their backend numbers. They know what a new customer is worth. They know what they can afford to pay. And they optimize their campaigns around that — not whatever metric Google’s dashboard wants to highlight.
Ron’s account looked “bad” by conventional standards. Low ROAS. Simple structure. But the backend data told a completely different story.
Sometimes the best strategy isn’t the complicated one. It’s the one that actually grows your business.
