Chapter 01
Rebuilding Google as an acquisition engine
Three structural changes that move Google from harvest to acquisition.
Most brands think Google is just for scooping up branded clicks. But built right, it becomes an acquisition channel that hunts for new demand. This account proved it: 70% of revenue came from cold traffic, sustained month after month, not as a single lucky spike.
We stopped playing defence and built a structure designed to hunt.
Three coordinated changes
- 1
Intent-tiered search campaigns
Separated campaigns by search intent rather than just keyword. High intent ("best [product] for X") and discovery intent ("is [product] good for...", "how does [product] work") into separate campaigns. Each tier got its own budget and target. The bidder learned the right pattern for each tier rather than averaging them.
- 2
Feed + creative optimisation
Synced product feeds to real-time search queries. Layered funnel-aware creatives: dynamic headlines that swap based on intent, descriptions built for education on discovery-stage queries and for urgency on high-intent ones.
- 3
Prospecting-first budget structure
Pushed 90% of media budget to cold traffic. The point: we built our own remarketing pool from cold-funnel conversions. Branded search still grew because we fueled the pipeline ourselves rather than relying on existing demand.