No brand campaign.No past visitors to chase.Twice the spend back by week three.
S&G Plus sells nitrile gloves online from New York and started advertising across the US at the end of January 2026. The brand had no reputation outside its home market, almost no traffic and an ad account that had never recorded a sale at its real value. The amounts below are rounded, and every figure comes from the account itself.
- Week three
- the first week the ads returned more than twice their cost: 2.15x on $595
- 2.1x
- return over seven months, $34.5k of sales recorded against $16.7k of spend
- 6
- months in a row, March to August, at 2x or above
- 0
- brand or remarketing campaigns. All 471 purchases came through prospecting campaigns
An account that had spent money, and learned nothing from it.
Sales counted at one dollar
In November and December 2025 the account spent $1,023 and recorded $9 of sales. Purchases were tracked, but each one was worth 1 dollar to Google. A bidding algorithm that optimises for value had nothing to learn from.
Nobody searching for the name
The brand was new to the US, so there was almost no search for its name. No cheap brand traffic existed to carry the account while the rest of it found its feet.
No audience to come back to
With little traffic on the site there was no remarketing list worth building. Every sale had to come from a person who had never seen the brand before the ad.
Only new people, and the money followed the first results.
Purchases with their real value
From 8 February every purchase reached the account with the amount the customer paid. Until then the bidding saw a sale as a flat dollar, or as nothing.
Three prospecting campaigns and nothing else
Product ads, Performance Max and search, each labelled and built for new customers. No campaign bid on the brand name and none targeted past visitors.
Two formats side by side in the first month
In February Performance Max returned 2.39x while the product ads returned 0.51x. From March the product ads caught up and passed it, and after April Performance Max was switched off. Over the seven months the product ads took 72% of the spend at 2.21x.
Search kept on a short leash
Search ads returned 0.86x over the period, less than they cost. They stayed at 12% of spend, enough to keep reading them and small enough that they never set the result.
One slow month, then six at twice the spend or more.
Return on ad spend by calendar month: the sales value Google Ads recorded, divided by what the ads cost. August runs to the 24th, the last day of spend.
February reads low for two reasons. The budget was still ramping up, and the first purchases reached the account without their value, so the month undercounts what the ads sold. From March the range is narrow, 2.05x to 2.39x, including July, when spend was at its highest. These are sales Google attributed to the ads, with no control group, so read them as the account’s own count.
A new market does not need a warm audience to pay for itself in weeks.
Fix what the account learns from before you judge what it buys. Here the first campaigns ran on purchases worth a dollar each, and no bid strategy can find valuable customers on that signal. Once real order values flowed in, the account had a return above 2x within a fortnight.
Run two formats against each other from the first week and move the money by week three. On your launch the winning format may be a different one, and the point of the first month is to find out fast. If you are entering several markets at once, the same order applies to each of them: value tracking first, a small set of prospecting campaigns second, budget moves third. Expect the first month to look worse than the ones after it.
This work was delivered by MTA Group, which Zero Fluff Digital is part of, by the same specialists who would work on your account. The figures on this page come from the client’s Google Ads account, read through the API by the team that ran it. Sales values are the conversion values Google Ads recorded, not figures from the shop, and there was no holdout test. The client is not named and the figures are given as changes rather than amounts, at their scale rather than in their currency. There is no third-party study to link to here, so treat this as weaker evidence than the cases that carry one, and ask us for the workings on a call. The reviews behind our work are public and verified on Clutch, where clients rate the work rather than the agency describing itself.
Measured from 28 January to 24 August 2026.
Launching in a market that has never heard of you? Start with what your account can learn.
30 minutes, no deck. You leave knowing whether your tracking can teach bidding anything yet, and which two formats to test first.
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