A heritage winter gear brand — nearly seventy years of making gloves and cold-weather accessories — lives and dies by a brutal seasonal window. Roughly ninety percent of the year's paid search revenue lands between October and February, which means there are no do-overs: misread the ramp, and the season is gone before you can react. Coming off a season that closed under a 2x return, the mandate was blunt — make the winter actually profitable, without a bigger budget.
What We Did: We rebuilt the season around product-line segmentation and disciplined flighting. Performance Max was split by product line — gloves and socks each got their own campaign with dedicated feeds and budgets, plus a feed-only campaign carrying the catalog — so the algorithm optimized each category on its own economics instead of averaging them together. Brand search was protected on manual bidding to keep high-intent clicks cheap, with an automated-bidding test run alongside it rather than gambling the season on it. Budgets were flighted to the demand curve: lean through September and October, aggressive through the November–January peak, tapered out in spring.
The Results: The brand's best paid search season on record. $288K in tracked revenue from September through March — up 51% year-over-year on only 8% more spend — at a 2.7x blended ROAS versus 1.9x the season before. The peak told the real story: November through January drove $220K at a 3.3x ROAS, versus $148K at 2.0x in the same window a year earlier, and December alone delivered $93K in tracked revenue at 3.4x — the single biggest month in the account's history. Same brand, essentially the same budget. The difference was structure.