How we engineered profitable new-customer acquisition beyond branded search for a category-leading Romanian footwear brand.
dEpurtat (depurtat.ro) is a strong, well-established Romanian fashion footwear brand specializing in women's shoes and boots, with a loyal customer base and excellent retention.
Because retention was already best-in-class, the real lever for growth was not keeping existing buyers, it was bringing in new customers. Advirals handled strictly Google Ads.
The account was heavily skewed toward branded search. Roughly 95% of activity ran on brand terms, producing ROAS figures that looked almost too good to be true and costs per acquisition of just $0.22 to $0.44.
In reality, this was harvesting existing brand demand rather than acquiring anyone new. For a brand this established, those numbers were a comfort trap, not a growth engine.
Real, durable growth had to come from new-customer acquisition outside the brand bubble, on Shopping and PMax inventory where the brand was not yet competing for non-branded demand.
We shifted weight away from branded search and into Shopping, then rebuilt the PMax setup to cover more product categories, moving budget dynamically across them based on profitability rather than brand familiarity.
We rewrote product titles, added missing descriptions and set rules on Google Merchant Center attributes, cleaning up the feed so Shopping and PMax could match more non-branded queries and surface the right products.
We layered in additional product-type labels to gain granular control over campaign structure, giving us the flexibility to segment, prioritize and scale categories on their own merits.
We built fresh creatives showing products both worn (on-foot, in context) and as clean standalone product shots with slashed prices, pairing aspirational styling with a clear promotional hook to win cold, non-branded shoppers.
Q4 closed with purchase revenue of $1.6 million (GA4, Sep 1 to Dec 31), up +17.7% year over year and clearing $1.5 million, growth of roughly +15% versus the prior year.
New customers rose +15%, exactly the lever this established brand needed, while average ROAS held around 20 across the account.
The takeaway: for a high-retention, category-leading brand, the biggest unlock is not squeezing branded search, it is engineering profitable new-customer acquisition beyond it.
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