Case study · Consumer Goods

Thermos

Global Drinkware Brand

5 months + ongoing

Contribution margin increase: +94%
Revenue growth: +86%
Conversion increase: +86%
Ongoing partnership: 5mo+

Period: Post-restructure period against the preceding equivalent period.
Basis: Contribution margin after COGS, on the corrected conversion baseline once double counting was removed.
Source: Client account data.

How we define and measure these figures

Interrogate this case study

Go on, ask.

It turned out to be wrong. The previous agency's tracking was double-counting conversions, inflating reported ROAS by roughly 40%. Once the baseline was corrected, the account stopped being managed to ROAS at all and moved to contribution margin after COGS.
From buying differently, not just reporting better. Campaigns were restructured by product category and COGS tier, so high-COGS drinkware stopped competing with low-COGS bestsellers for the same budget. Contribution margin rose 94% and revenue 86%, measured on the corrected basis.
Nothing was cut until the numbers could be trusted. No budget decision was made until the baseline was accurate. After that, the account stopped systematically buying the least profitable growth available.
Every optimisation decision would have kept being made against numbers that did not exist, while the account continued to look healthy and underdeliver on the P&L.

Situation

Thermos was spending confidently and growing slowly. Conversions looked healthy, ROAS looked acceptable, and yet the contribution the account returned to the P&L never matched what the dashboard promised.

The brief was not "get more revenue". It was to work out why a profitable-looking account was not behaving like a profitable one.

Diagnosis

The previous agency's tracking was double-counting conversions, inflating reported ROAS by roughly 40%. Every optimisation decision for the preceding period had been made against numbers that did not exist.

Once the data was corrected, a second problem appeared: campaigns were segmented by product type, not by margin. High-COGS drinkware was competing for the same budget as low-COGS bestsellers, so the account was systematically buying the least profitable growth available.

Decision

The call

Fix the measurement first.

Fix measurement before touching spend. No budget decision was made until the baseline was accurate.

Then give each product range a commercial job rather than a shared blended target, so bidding follows margin instead of volume. Creative and landing page experience were already strong and were deliberately left alone.

Execution

Conversion tracking rebuilt and deduplicated, establishing an accurate baseline for the first time.

Account architecture restructured by product category and COGS tier to enable margin-aware bidding.

Targets moved from revenue and ROAS to contribution margin after COGS.

Product feed data improved to support Shopping and Performance Max across the drinkware range.

Result

Contribution margin increased 94% and revenue 86%, measured against the preceding equivalent period after correcting the double-counted conversions.

Because the baseline was restated first, the improvement is a genuine commercial gain rather than an artefact of better-looking reporting.

Principle

An account cannot be optimised faster than its measurement is honest. Correcting the numbers looked like a step backwards for two weeks and was the reason everything after it worked.

Measurement basis and limits

How to read these figures

Comparison: Each figure compares the post-restructure period against the preceding equivalent period in the same account, after conversion tracking was deduplicated. The engagement ran for five months and continues; the figures are not a five-month annualised projection.
Correction versus improvement: The audit identified roughly 40% overstatement in reported ROAS from double-counted conversions. Correcting that is a reporting change, not a commercial gain. The contribution margin, revenue and conversion figures above are measured on the corrected basis on both sides of the comparison, so they are not produced by the correction itself.
What this is not: This is a before-and-after account comparison, not a controlled or incrementality test. Seasonality, pricing, promotional activity and demand were not held constant, so the results should be read as what the account produced over the period rather than as an isolated effect of any single change. Creative and landing pages were deliberately left unchanged.
Facts we do not publish: Absolute spend, revenue, COGS and margin values are the client's and are not disclosed. We publish no client quote for this engagement, and no POAS ratio, because neither is documented in a form we can evidence.

These results came from margin-aware bidding across Search, Shopping and Performance Max. If you want to see how that kind of management is structured, the agency overview sets out the full brief, and the Performance Max management page covers how the PMax side of that work is structured. The Shopping management page explains the product and feed decisions behind the account.