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Collection of handcrafted wooden brain teaser puzzles and disentanglement puzzles arranged on a white surface

Exposing Fake Data and Cutting nCAC from $40 to $15 for a Puzzle Retailer

RESULTS THAT SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES

Key Stats & Results

$40 → $15

New Customer Acquisition Cost (nCAC).

-22%

Reduction in ad spend year over year.

10,000+

SKUs across 10+ brands, properly segmented.

FROM CHALLENGES TO SUCCESS

The ROAS Looked Great. The Business Didn’t.

This well-known niche retailer sells brain teaser puzzles to a loyal hobbyist community, carrying 10,000+ SKUs across 10+ brands with a $60 AOV and high repeat purchase rates. The account looked healthy on the surface, but growth had plateaued. Our Growth Strategy revealed why: misconfigured conversion tracking was inflating reported performance, Google Ads was double-counting and misfiring on conversions, and the entire catalog was crammed into a single PMax catch-all campaign that buried the best-selling products.

Challenges

A Black Box of Wasted Spend

The account was effectively hiding its own best performers. Between broken tracking and a lack of structure, the business was making decisions based on faulty numbers while best-selling products were starved of budget.

  • The “fake data” trap: The previous tracking setup was misfiring and double-counting conversions. Google Ads reported page views, add-to-carts, and purchases all as primary conversions, inflating reported ROAS while the backend told a completely different story.
  • The catch-all bucket: The entire 10,000+ SKU catalog was dumped into a single PMax campaign. Low-margin, low-interest items were stealing budget from the store’s most profitable, high-demand puzzle brand.
  • Invisible on Search: Despite having a strong brand presence in the hobby community, they were missing from Search and Shopping for their top-tier brand terms, leaving high-intent buyers to competitors.

Solution

Rebuilding with Intention and Control

We stripped the account down to the studs and replaced the “set it and forget it” setup with a manual, granular approach. The goal: stop paying for customers the brand already had and start paying for new growth.

1

Data Integrity First

We fixed the conversion tracking immediately, implementing Elevar (a third-party CAPI service) to feed accurate Shopify purchase data back to Google. One primary conversion action: Purchase. No page views, no add-to-carts inflating the numbers.

2

New Customer Optimization

With high repeat purchase rates from loyal hobbyists, we changed the conversion optimization goal to New Customers Only. This stopped Google from burning budget on fans who would buy anyway and forced the algorithm to hunt for fresh growth.

3

Manual Shopping & Brand Segmentation

We broke everything out of the PMax catch-all and launched manual Shopping campaigns with proper feed optimization. The most popular, high-margin brands got dedicated budget and visibility across both Search and Shopping networks.

Results

Stop Buying Your Own Customers Back

The biggest win wasn’t just fixing the broken data. It was stopping the algorithm from burning budget on people who were already going to buy. By shifting the goal to New Customer Acquisition and taking manual control of the best-selling products, we turned a stagnant account into an active growth engine.

  • nCAC dropped from $40 to $15 by eliminating fake conversions and focusing on true new customers
  • 22% reduction in ad spend year over year while growing the customer base
  • Massive new customer growth visible in November 2025, just before Black Friday
  • GA4 and Google Ads data now aligned after replacing the broken tracking with Elevar CAPI

nCAC from $40 to $15 while cutting spend 22%

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