Campaign audit, audience restructuring, funnel-matched creative, and product-specific landing experiences across Google Shopping, Search, and Meta - resulting in a 38% CPA reduction and 2.4x ROAS improvement within 60 days.
When CPA climbs and ROAS declines quarter over quarter while campaigns are actively running, the instinct is often to increase budget or refresh creative - but those interventions treat the symptoms rather than the cause. Source for Sports was spending consistently across Google and Meta with campaigns that were technically active and generating results, but the efficiency metrics were moving in the wrong direction over time, which is the pattern of a campaign structure that was never properly built rather than one that has been exhausted by market saturation or competitive pressure. A full audit of the campaigns, the audience structure, the creative, and the complete path from ad click to purchase was the necessary starting point before any optimization decisions were made.
The audit identified three compounding problems that were each reducing efficiency independently while reinforcing each other in ways that made the root cause difficult to isolate from within the existing structure. Audience targeting was too broad and not segmented by purchase intent, which meant budget was being spread across users at very different stages of the buying process with the same messaging and bidding strategy. Creative was not differentiated by funnel stage, so awareness-stage users were being served the same conversion-focused ads as users already in a purchase mindset, which drove up costs on clicks that were never going to convert at the rate the campaigns were bidding for. And high-intent traffic for specific product categories was landing on generic category pages that required additional navigation before reaching the relevant product, creating drop-off at exactly the point where conversion probability was highest.
The campaign structure was rebuilt from scratch across Google Shopping, Search, and Meta with audience segmentation as the organizing principle rather than platform or budget allocation. Users at different stages of the purchase funnel were separated into distinct audience segments with separate creative, separate bidding strategies, and separate landing destinations matched to the specific stage and intent signal of each segment. This meant each dollar of spend was working within a targeting and creative context designed for that specific audience rather than a generic campaign structure trying to serve all stages simultaneously with the same parameters.
Product-specific landing experiences were built for the top-revenue categories, replacing the generic category pages that high-intent traffic had been landing on. Each landing experience was structured around the specific product or category the user had searched for or engaged with in the ad, removing the navigation step between the ad impression and the relevant product and reducing the drop-off that had been occurring between click and purchase. Continuous optimization ran weekly against CPA and ROAS targets rather than click-through rates or impression volume, keeping the focus on the metrics that reflected actual business performance rather than platform-level engagement signals that can look healthy while revenue efficiency declines.
With audience segmentation, funnel-matched creative, and product-specific landing experiences working together rather than independently, CPA dropped 38% and ROAS improved 2.4x within 60 days of the restructured campaigns going live. The speed of the improvement reflected the extent of the structural problems in the original setup rather than any single tactical change - when audience, creative, and landing experience are all misaligned simultaneously, fixing all three together produces compounding gains rather than incremental ones, because each improvement amplifies the effect of the others rather than operating in isolation.