$2.07M in.
$8.13M out.
One quarter.
A pet-care brand. Four markets. Customers who come back and buy again.
In Q2 2026 we put $2.07M into ads — 55% more than the same quarter a year before. The business did $8.13M: $2.60M more than a year earlier.
The account took 55% more money without falling over. And we measured the result on the brand's own revenue, not on Google's conversion column.
Month by month
Revenue and ad spend · Triple Whale blended · USDJune is peak season and gets planned a year out. Look either side of it: April took $295K of budget, June took $1.13M. Nearly four times the money in eight weeks — and the return went up while that happened, 3.58× to 3.98×.
June still missed the $5M internal target. Mid-month an unpaid invoice hit the credit ceiling and Google paused the account over a peak-season weekend. We got the credit line raised from €500K to €2M with 30-day terms. That work never shows up in a ROAS report, and it decided whether peak season happened.
Every market grew
Q2 2026 versus Q2 2025| Market | Revenue | Year over year | Return | Share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| United States | $6.27M | +40.0% | 4.02× | 77% |
| Netherlands & BE | $1.23M | +75.8% | 4.00× | 15% |
| Germany | $524K | +77.4% | 3.22× | 6% |
| Norway | $109K | +70.4% | 2.99× | 1% |
Germany grew 77% and got more efficient doing it, 2.52× to 3.22× — a market that was underfunded, not tapped out. The US is 77% of the business, which is also the account's biggest single risk.
Where the money went
Q2 2026 · return is a diagnostic here, not a verdict| Channel | Share of spend | Return | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Performance Max | 65% | 3.11× | Two thirds of the budget. Carries the volume. |
| Search | 22% | 7.63× | A fifth of the budget, 43% of the value. |
| Shopping | — | 2.38× | Holding. |
| Demand Gen | — | 1.36× | Cold traffic. Barely covers itself. |
Read it strictly and the blended number is flattered by branded search — people who were already looking for the brand. Strip that out and the honest position is this: the account is very good at collecting demand that already exists, and has not yet proved it can create any. Demand Gen at 1.36× is where that gets solved, and it isn't solved yet.
Nothing scaled before it was tested
Bundles · Q2 2026Every bundle ran on a small budget in Search first. Winners moved into Performance Max, where the volume is. $51K of spend was cut in the same quarter — campaigns that returned nothing after a fair test.
| Test | Where | Return | What we did with it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sofa Bed BOGO | Search · US | 13.42× | Tiny spend, best return in the account. Scaled. |
| Cooling Mat 1+1 | Search · NL | 9.75× | €53K of revenue on €5K of spend. Scaled. |
| Cooling Bed BOGO | PMax · US | 3.51× | $335K of revenue. The volume engine of the quarter. |
| Cooling Mat Complete Set | PMax · NL | 2.14× | Works, but thin. Kept running, not scaled. |
What Google Ads couldn't see
That cut list started out longer. Several campaigns looked like waste inside Google Ads and paid for themselves once we measured them against the brand's total revenue — the US Cooling-Bed BOGO among them. On platform numbers we would have switched them off, and the quarter would have been smaller.
Google shows you what Google can see. It can't see the rest of the business. Every number on this page comes out of the brand's own Triple Whale.
What this doesn't prove
- No payback window. These are blended, platform-attributed numbers. No cohort has been verified, so we claim no payback — and a return tells you nothing about margin or what a new customer cost.
- The return fell while spend grew — 4.13× to 3.93× year over year. That is what more volume costs. Whether it was worth it is a cohort question.
- Nearly all of this is Google. Their Meta agency kept running the whole time. We have never asked a client to drop one.
- This is the founder's Icarus track record, not an ARQ client. It answers whether this has been done at scale.