Loom & Ledger: 34% lower CPA while adding 2.3× profitable spend headroom
A DTC home goods brand was scaling Google Ads on inflated platform ROAS. We rebuilt measurement, stripped branded-search credit, and found the profitable growth hiding underneath.
- 34%
- Reduction in blended CPA
- 2.3×
- Increase in profitable spend headroom
- 94%
- Of spend tied to a verified conversion path
The situation
Loom & Ledger had grown to $1.2M per month in Google Ads spend and was told by the platform that it was returning 5.1× ROAS. In the warehouse, contribution margin told a different story: the account was breaking even at best.
The gap came from three sources — branded search claiming demand it did not create, duplicate conversion events inflating counts, and Performance Max absorbing credit for traffic that would have converted anyway.
What we changed
Measurement spine first. We rebuilt server-side tagging, deduplicated purchase events, imported Shopify order margin back into Google as an offline conversion, and switched bidding from revenue to contribution margin.
Branded separation. Branded search moved into its own campaign with an accurate baseline. Once separated, it accounted for 38% of reported conversions and 11% of incremental ones.
Performance Max audit. Asset groups were mapped to real product lines, brand traffic excluded, and a 30-day geo holdout run across three markets to measure true incremental lift.
Query-level pruning. 1,900 low-intent search terms removed; budget reallocated to the 140 terms with the best margin-adjusted conversion rate.
The results
Blended CPA fell 34% over 90 days on flat spend. Once the measurement was honest, we found headroom to increase media spend 2.3× while holding CPA — growth the team had previously believed was saturated.
The account now runs on a margin target, reviewed weekly, with incrementality tests scheduled each quarter.