01 · The challenge
What was holding growth back.
Cabi is a national direct-seller in women’s apparel and accessories, with a stylist community behind it. What it did not have was a paid program that paid for itself: the previous agency had scaled ad spend significantly without the returns to match.
The brief pulled in two directions: cut wasted ad spend while improving what each dollar returned, then widen organic discovery beyond people already searching the Cabi name. Scaling back while improving returns is the opposite of how most accounts are run.
02 · What changed
One system, built in layers.
Cleaned up the product feed
A top-to-bottom cleanup, so shopping ads on both Google and Facebook had better data to sell with.
Split prospecting from remarketing
Campaigns on each platform split into remarketing and prospecting, so each audience got its own budget and message.
Creative for new vs. returning
One set of creative for new customers, another for returning — so each saw a message written for them, not an average of the two.
Fed Cabi’s own customer data in
More of Cabi’s own customer data went into each platform, so both got better at finding the people most likely to buy.
The platforms’ automation, on top
Performance Max on Google and Advantage+ on Meta, layered onto the segmented structure rather than replacing it.
Built search demand beyond the brand name
Keyword research, metadata, and content work targeted the descriptive searches people use before they know which Cabi product they want.
This work, on the shelf: Paid Ads · SEO & AI Search
03 · The results
The receipt.
From Aug. 1 through Oct. 31, 2023, Google Ads returned $10.92 for every ad dollar. Against the same period in 2022, spend fell 46%, cost per conversion fell 36%, average cost per click fell 39%, conversion rate rose 33%, and return per ad dollar rose 55%.
The lower budget meant 79% fewer impressions — a tradeoff the report states plainly — but the people who did see the ads were more likely to convert.
Search widened beyond the Cabi name, too. Non-branded organic clicks rose 82%, from 2,120 to 4,030, over the report’s last-three-months versus previous-three-months comparison. Month over month, non-branded impressions rose 31%, from 430,000 to 567,000.
Google Ads · Aug–Oct 2023 vs. Aug–Oct 2022
| Measure | Change |
|---|---|
| Spend | −46% |
| Cost per conversion | −36% |
| Average cost per click | −39% |
| Conversion rate | +33% |
| Return per ad dollar | +55% |
| Impressions | −79% |
04 · Why it worked
The system behind the number.
Nothing here was exotic — feeds, segmentation, creative, customer data, search content, and the platforms’ own automation, each pointed at profitable discovery instead of volume. When the goal changed from reaching more people to earning more from the right people, the efficiency followed.