Case study · Eco-friendly e-commerce

Finding the 99.9% of search spend that was never going to convert.

A South African eco-friendly home and laundry products brand was spending on Google Ads search campaigns that looked busy but were quietly leaking budget on terms that would never produce a sale.

Industry

Eco-friendly home and laundry products, direct-to-consumer

Market

South Africa

Starting point

A running account that was converting, but above its cost-per-acquisition target

Engagement

Ongoing Google Ads management

Headline result

98.6% of one campaign’s search spend identified as producing zero sales, and cut

The challenge

The account was running. Conversions were happening. On the surface, nothing was obviously broken — which is exactly what makes this failure mode so expensive, because nobody goes looking.

Underneath, two numbers were wrong. Cost per acquisition was sitting at roughly R62 against a R50 target, and monthly conversion volume was short of where the business needed it to be. A surface-level glance said “it is working.” A real look said otherwise.

What we found

We pulled a 30-day search-term report on one generic campaign. It came back with 734 rows covering 612 unique search terms — every distinct phrase a real person had typed before seeing an ad.

99.9% of those terms had produced zero conversions. Between them they accounted for 98.6% of the campaign’s search spend.

That budget was not disappearing into nothing. It was going somewhere specific: competitor brand names, searches for the wrong product format entirely, and adjacent informational queries from people who were reading, not buying.

Separately, a discovery campaign meant to drive broad reach had a broken landing-page URL and broken tracking. It could not be optimised, and nothing it reported could be trusted.

The approach

1

46 negatives in one structured pass

Not scattered over months — in one deliberate sweep: 22 competitor brand names, 17 wrong-product-format terms, and 7 off-category queries, all as phrase match so they would hold as new variants appeared.

2

Replace the broken channel rather than patch it

The failing discovery campaign was replaced with a dedicated, tightly targeted Search campaign built around genuine high-intent buyer queries. The broad-reach channel was repaired separately and left to do its own job, judged on its own terms.

3

Make it a routine, not an event

A search-term cleanup is worthless if it happens once. The account is now reviewed on a cadence, because a generic campaign will always drift back toward the cheap, plentiful, irrelevant traffic if nobody is holding the line.

The results

Zero-converting spend found

98.6%

of one campaign’s search spend

Negatives added

46

in one structured pass

Account CTR

4.2%

with CPA pulled toward the R50 target

This is ongoing work, not a one-time cleanup. E-commerce accounts do not stay clean by themselves, and the honest framing of a job like this is that the cleanup buys you a better starting position — it does not buy you a permanent one.

The takeaway

A busy-looking account is not the same as a working one. Impressions, clicks and even conversions can all be moving while the great majority of the money goes to searches that were never going to buy.

For many e-commerce accounts the single most valuable thing you can do is not add anything. It is to find the spend that was never going to convert, stop it, and rebuild the structure around the searches that actually do.

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All figures are taken from live Google Ads accounts and were last verified on 14 July 2026. Client identity withheld by request. Results reflect specific market conditions and business context; individual outcomes vary.