A rankings-obsessed account, rebuilt around revenue
How we cut Hobbies Direct's ad spend 20% while growing revenue 77%, then doubled paid revenue again, year on year, at the same return.
Where Hobbies Direct was when we walked in.
Hobbies Direct is one of Australia's leading online RC and hobby retailers, stocking thousands of RC cars, trucks, boats, planes, parts and model kits. By the time they approached Firewire, their Google Ads account had grown over years into a tangle of overlapping campaigns, fragmented budgets, and inflated brand-driven results. Ad spend was climbing. Margin wasn't.
They didn't need another set of hands. They needed a search partner who could clean up the account, separate brand from non-brand, prioritise the highest-margin regions and products, and back the paid work with sustainable organic growth, so that every dollar in the account could be traced to a dollar on the P&L.
- Too many campaigns spreading spend thin and slowing optimisation
- Poor-performing campaigns still spending without profitability analysis
- One-size-fits-all national targeting, leaving high-performing regions under-scaled
- Brand traffic inflating results across campaigns intended to measure non-brand
- Demographic and ICP signals ignored, letting low-value segments chew through budget
Hobbies Direct "Firewire built the attribution framework before any content was created, so we always had clean data on what each channel contributed. The SEO wasn't cannibalising paid. It was bringing in customers we weren't reaching before. We would recommend them without hesitation."
Three moves that rebuilt the account around revenue.
- 01
Mapped every keyword to a product margin
Revenue per query, not clicks per query.
We rebuilt the keyword universe against Hobbies Direct's actual product margins and LTV data. Every query was tagged to a product family and ranked by its real commercial value, so budget could flow toward the queries that actually paid the bills.
- 02
Rebuilt the account architecture from intent
Brand separated, non-brand measurable.
We restructured into a tiered Shopping + PMax architecture: broad coverage at controlled cost, focused PMax against top-margin products, and a ring-fenced brand layer. For the first time, non-brand performance could be measured cleanly.
- 03
Synced SEO briefs with shopping feeds
One engine, not two channels.
SEO content briefs and Shopping feed optimisations were briefed against the same keyword-to-revenue map. Paid amplified organic wins; organic compounded paid efficiency. The two channels stopped competing for budget and started reinforcing each other.
- P&L-mapped keyword strategy Wk 1–2
- Account architecture rebuild Wk 2–3
- Shopping feed + SEO sync Wk 3–6
- Margin-weighted bid restructure Wk 4
- GEO/AI citation tracking setup Wk 6
- Weekly revenue reporting cadence Ongoing
- Quarterly executive review Ongoing
The full picture, by the numbers.
Monthly revenue from Firewire-managed search channels. Pre-Firewire baseline shown for comparison.
For the buyer who wants to see how the engine was built.
Three sections, expandable. Skip if you've seen enough.
Account architecture How we rebuilt the campaign structure
We rebuilt the account into a tiered structure that gave us granular control over where budget flowed and how each layer performed.
Targeting & waste reduction How we cut wasted spend without cutting volume
To improve efficiency, we made four changes simultaneously:
- Consolidated campaigns so budgets were meaningful and could generate statistically useful data
- Paused or restructured poor-performing campaigns that were spending without driving revenue
- Split geo targeting to prioritise top-performing regions and adjust bids where demand and margins were strongest
- Implemented brand exclusions so non-brand campaigns were measured on true non-brand performance
- Refined audience and demographic targeting to remove segments that consistently spent but didn't convert
This shifted a large portion of the budget away from low-value clicks and into proven, high-intent segments, reducing total spend by 20% while revenue climbed 77%.
SEO + paid integration How organic growth made paid more efficient
In parallel with the paid restructure, Firewire worked on SEO and on-site improvements:
- Improved organic discoverability for high-margin product categories
- Strengthened non-paid visibility for high-intent RC and hobby terms
- Synced SEO content briefs with the same keyword-to-revenue map driving the paid account
Over the engagement period, this contributed to a 38% increase in organic traffic and reduced Hobbies Direct's reliance on paid alone, meaning every dollar of paid spend was also being amplified by improving organic share on the same queries.
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Want a similar result?
30 minutes with a senior Firewire lead. We'll diagnose where revenue is being left on the table in your account, and tell you honestly whether we're the right partner to recover it.
- A revenue-mapped view of your search opportunity
- A first-pass diagnosis of your GEO, SEO and Ads accounts
- Honest view on fit: we will tell you if we are not right
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