Visible Ads delivered exceptional business growth for Sephra Europe
- Boh Tjarks
- Mar 14
- 7 min read
Updated: Mar 20
1,149.25% ROAS
£2.31m Conversion Value
146.27% Increase Ads-Driven Sales
Visible Ads transformed Chocolate Fountain Warehouse’s (trading as Sephra Europe) eCommerce trajectory, achieving a remarkable 1,149.25% ROAS for their UK Google Ads campaigns throughout Visible Ads delivered exceptional business growth to Sephra Europethe 2025 calendar year. By strategically managing £201k in ad spend, the agency generated £2.31m in conversion value, representing a massive £1.372m increase over the previous calendar year. (2024).
Managing Director David Archer describes Visible Ads as a "trusted partner" whose expertise delivered "outstanding performance" and "exceptional" business growth.
Overall, the client grew from approx. £5m in 2022 to almost £20m in 2025 due to strong B2B channels in all major UK supermarkets (except Tesco).
Visible Ads delivered a 146.27% increase in ads-driven sales revenue. Most significantly, despite scaling the ad budget to capture market share, Visible Ads improved the overall account efficiency, increasing the ROAS by over 1.6 points year-on-year to reach a final 11.49.
Strategy & Objectives
The Visible Ads campaign for Chocolate Fountain Warehouse (CFW) utilised a sophisticated Google Ads strategy to revitalise the brand's D2C presence and build its small business owner (food pop ups) customer base.
Core Objectives
The primary objective was to transform CFW from a state of digital stagnation into a high-growth D2C and small business leader. The core goals included:
Maximising Visibility: Revitalising their online presence through targeted paid search.
Scaling Profitably: Continuously increasing the ad budget while maintaining a strict minimum Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) target across both Google & Amazon.
Driving High-Value Sales: Achieving an aggressive ROI target of over 1000% on Google Ads, ensuring profitable and sustainable growth based on the client’s NPM (Net Product Margin of 24%).
Strategy, Targeting, and Structure Alignment
The strategy for Google Ads was built on precision and performance-led scaling.
1. Audience Insight & Targeting
Segmented Targeting: Visible Ads identified and reached two primary target segments: high-income households (retail customers) and professional catering businesses.
Intent-Based Focus: By leveraging Google Ads’ high search intent, the campaign captured users at the bottom of the funnel who were specifically searching for catering equipment and supplies.
For each segment, Visible Ads created a custom audience using:
1st part data: email addresses from existing customers
Competitor website visitors
Previous converters
Specific in-market and Affinity audiences
2. Channel & Keyword Strategy
Channel Selection: Within Google Ads we opted for running Performance Max campaigns for each individual product category to ensure we captured all available demand from the bottom (shopping ads) and lower middle of the funnel (consideration & desire) stages.
Keyword targeting + custom audiences targeting competitor traffic and 1st party data were implemented as an additional signal using bottom funnel keywords for each category.
3. Overall Planning & Execution
Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)
The strategy went beyond the click; we improved Amazon hero listings and e-com shop product detail pages with better media assets, implemented a product rating system and worked with the client on promotions (via ads extensions) to improve the likelihood of a conversion.
Data-Driven Decisions
The team utilised custom Looker Studio dashboards for real-time live ROAS insights (see link below), allowing for regular budget adjustments to bidding and budget allocation based on live data. The key benefit of these shorter feedback cycles was that we were able to scale spend on high ROAS campaigns and reduce spend on low ROAS campaigns gradually and consistently.
Problem-Solving
Visible Ads resolved technical data feed errors and implemented robust tracking mechanisms to ensure every pound of spend was accounted for.
Client Comms
Weekly performance reports were sent to the client on Monday mornings by email ensuring accountability, transparency and client satisfaction.
Optimisation & Execution
Strategic Execution & "Always-On" Optimisation
A cornerstone of the PPC campaign’s success was the implementation of a permanent improvement process across all asset groups. To ensure maximum performance from Google’s automation, Visible Ads utilised a rigorous three-step A/B testing cycle for all Performance Max (PMax) assets:
Iterative Selection: The original asset group was cloned, and the two weakest-performing headlines, descriptions, images, and videos were identified and removed.
Strategic Replacement: These were replaced with fresh variations based on the highest-performing creative elements.
Performance Auditing: The new asset group was benchmarked against the original, specifically reviewing CTR (Click-Through Rate) and CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) to validate performance uplift.
This cycle has become a standard, permanent process across all agency accounts, ensuring that creative fatigue is eliminated and ad relevance remains at its peak.
The "Visible Ads Blueprint": Rule-Based Budget Management
To manage the client’s capital with precision, the agency developed a simple yet highly effective rule-based budget management framework. This blueprint ensured that successful campaigns were aggressively scaled while underperforming ones were quickly mitigated.
Dynamic Scaling Logic:
10% Weekly Increase: Applied to any campaign where the 900% ROAS target was exceeded.
20% Weekly Increase: Applied to high-performers exceeding a 1200% ROAS target.
Proactive Mitigation: If a campaign fell below a 500% ROAS, the budget was reduced immediately to preserve the client’s ad spend and protect overall profitability.
We respond to seasonal demand fluctuations by adapting campaign budgets on a weekly basis. This stabilises ROAS, enabling us to outperform minimum profitability KPIs whilst ensuring client peace of mind!
Transparency & Real-Time Reporting
Full accountability was maintained through a dual-layered reporting structure across both Google and Amazon channels:
Granular Reporting: Weekly and monthly performance was documented via ROI-tracking Google Sheets and detailed PDF reports.
The "LIVE ROI Dials" Dashboard: A custom-built, real-time dashboard was developed for senior management, providing an instant, visualised snapshot of the current Ads Return on Investment at any given moment.
This combination of creative iteration, disciplined financial scaling, and total transparency was the engine behind the 146.27% increase in sales revenue.
Please refer to this link to see the live, multi-timeframe ROAS report dashboard:
Innovation & Optimisation
To address the client’s flat revenues and the loss of a major B2B account, we implemented a dual-platform strategy focused on high-efficiency recovery and sustainable D2C growth. Our approach prioritised margin-first optimisation over raw volume to meet or exceed the strict 500% minimum ROI target.
Multi-Channel Synergy (Google & Amazon):
We moved away from siloed management, synchronising bidding strategies across Google Ads and Amazon Advertising. By identifying top-performing SKUs in organic Amazon search, we prioritised those same products for Google Search and Performance Max campaigns, ensuring the £500 monthly management fee was utilised with maximum precision on proven winners.
Precision Budget Allocation:
With a strict 24% net margin constraint, we utilised granular bidding techniques to ensure media spend was heavily weighted toward high-intent "Direct to Consumer" search terms. This allowed us to pivot from the flat £5m in annual sales revenue baseline toward a more profitable, scalable D2C model.
Performance Monitoring & Agile Adjustments:
We established a rigorous weekly and monthly reporting cadence to senior management which we continue to this day (see weekly report for w/c 2nd march 2026 below). This allowed for real-time lifecycle optimisations, such as pausing underperforming ad groups immediately and reallocating budget to peak shopping windows, which was critical in navigating the inflationary pressures and rising interest rates of 2023.
Creative Relevance & Trust Building:
To compensate for the loss of Tesco as a client in 2022 and rebuild the brand's retail presence, we optimised ad copy and product listings to highlight CFW’s status as a "one-stop shop."
By emphasising customisable packaging for food pop up shops as a product and the client’s deep catering expertise in the creative, we improved Click-Through Rates (CTR) and conversion intent among both B2B and high-value B2C buyers.
The bidding strategy employed was always ROAS-based across all campaigns with the target-ROAS mostly set to the minimum 600% base-KPI. For our top performing campaigns we even had target-ROAS of 1000% and higher. Many of these campaigns have continued to achieve an actual ROAS of 1500% and above!
We worked closely with the client to implement conversion rate optimisation tactics such as flawless checkout. We did this by ensuring that convenient payment methods (PayPal & Apple Pay) were always available, the top-selling products had high-quality image and video assets and high-quality on-page product ratings.
Reporting
Live URL's
A “LIVE ROAS monitor” dashboard was built for Senior Management
Monthly Reports
Multi-Channel Monthly Report
Weekly Reports
Results & Commercial Impact
Remarkably, these results were achieved with a lean total management fee of just £1,000 per month, split between four separate PPC accounts across the UK and USA.
By isolating the £250 monthly fee for the UK Google Ads channel, the campaign's efficiency becomes even more evident:
The Growth Engine: Strategic Scaling and Efficiency
Throughout the 2025 calendar year, Visible Ads transformed the digital trajectory for Chocolate Fountain Warehouse, proving that aggressive scaling and improved efficiency can coexist. Despite more than doubling the ad budget to capture market share, the agency simultaneously enhanced account performance:
Ads-Driven Revenue: Achieved £2.31m in sales, representing a massive 146.27% increase (£1.372m uplift) over 2024.
Efficiency Milestone: Increased overall account efficiency by 1.62 points, moving from a 9.87 ROAS in 2024 to a final 11.49 (1,149.25%) ROAS in 2025.
Investment Managed: Successfully deployed £201k in ad spend to secure a dominant market position.
The "Value-First" Partnership: Return on Agency Fee (ROAF)
While top-line growth was substantial, the most striking metric for the judges is the Return on Agency Fee. By maintaining a lean and high-impact management structure, the agency delivered a level of profitability rarely seen in the industry:
Elite Efficiency: Based on the isolated monthly fee of just £250 for the UK Google Ads account, the campaign delivered a 184.8x total return on the management investment.
Profit per Pound: Effectively generated £184.80 in net profit for every £1 invested in professional agency fees.
Incremental Growth Impact: Looking strictly at year-on-year growth, the agency produced £109.76 in additional profit for every £1 of fee—a 10,976% incremental return.
Conclusion
This campaign demonstrates that through meticulous A/B testing, rule-based budget management, and a "trusted partner" approach, Visible Ads was able to scale a business to over £2.3m in annual revenue while maintaining an industry-leading 184.8x return on fee. The result is a high-growth, highly profitable engine that has established Sephra Europe as the dominant leader in its sector.
Additional Information
Proof of information:
The following graphics show the total sales revenue growth and ROAS trend for the account since 2022 inside the Google Ads account.
Before Visible Ads took over this Google Ads account, sales for Sephra Europe / Chocolate Fountain Warehouse were flat throughout 2020 and 2021. 11 ROAS on £380K ad spend resulted in £4.14M in sales; profitably scaled over 3 years.
Key statistics of Ad Spend, ROAS and Conversion Value (Sales Revenue) in the Google Ads account for 2025 compared to 2024.
