Australian Veterinary Wholesalers — Google Ads for an online vet-supply store

Australian Veterinary Wholesalers sells flea, tick and worming treatments, heartworm prevention, dental care and treats for dogs, cats and small animals. Most of its orders start with someone who already knows what they need, often a named product like Bravecto or Credelio in a specific weight band, and is searching for the best place to buy it. That makes Google Ads the natural channel for the store: the intent is already there, and the job is to be the store that shows up, at a return the margin can carry.

From January to November 2024, it was not working. The account spent more than it brought back: for every dollar spent on Google Ads, the store recorded 61 cents of sales, from 237 orders in eleven months. The store was still selling, with most of its revenue that year coming from email marketing and Meta Ads, but paid search was a cost line, not a channel.

We refocused the account on paid search that turns into orders and cut the spend that was not paying back. The results below are measured from the store's own order database, by UTM source, comparing December 2024 to October 2025 with the eleven months before. Over that period Google Ads brought in 2,515 orders and returned 7.86 times its spend. Ad spend was 23.6% lower than the year before, and revenue from paid search rose 884%. In the later period, Google Ads accounted for more than half of the store's revenue.

The months were not smooth. March 2025 was the best, at 437 orders; June fell to 111. The period included site downtime and the store's move onto new website infrastructure. In October 2025 the campaigns were suspended for a large part of the month and then hit a payment-method failure, which is why the last two months sit well below the rest. Both issues were resolved.

Two caveats belong next to the headline, so we are putting them here rather than leaving them out. First, the before figure is a floor, not a clean baseline. In January to November 2024, 4,192 orders were recorded with no source at all, against 54 in the later period. Some of those unattributed 2024 orders will have come from Google Ads, so the true 2024 return was higher than 0.61; the data cannot say by how much. The 7.86 is measured on clean attribution and does not depend on that. Second, the store as a whole took less revenue in the second period than in the first, because email and Meta Ads, the channels behind 2024, slowed down. Google Ads grew; the business did not grow with it.

The audit closed with the plan that follows from that: dedicated Search and Shopping campaigns on the store's three highest-margin products, including a campaign for Nugard, the Australian-owned flea and worming range the client asked us to prioritise; a catalogue-wide campaign aimed at repeat purchases; and renewed investment in email and Meta Ads alongside paid search rather than instead of it.