Case studies / Digital ads

KUKUI.

Running Google Ads inside a team across more than 3,000 accounts and over $8 million of annual budget, without the work coming apart at that size.

Client
KUKUI
Services
Year
2024
3,000+ ad accounts managed/ $8M+ annual ad budget/ 8+ years in marketing/ 12 countries buying in year one/ 203 keywords ranked #1/ 41% lower cost per booked job/ 2.3x more applications/
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01 / The scale

The size of the job, in numbers.

0
Google Ads accounts managed
0
Annual ad budget under management
One
Set of standards, applied to all of them

There is no single conversion rate to quote here, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. The result of this engagement is that thousands of accounts were run the same way, every month, by a team.

02 / The challenge

Scale is a different problem than performance.

One Google Ads account can be handled by attention. Three thousand of them cannot. At that volume the thing that breaks is not the bidding, it is consistency: two people solving the same problem two different ways, in accounts nobody will look at again for weeks.

With more than $8 million of annual budget running through those accounts, small process gaps get expensive quickly. Budget drifts. Naming stops matching. A change made in one account cannot be found in the next one. Nobody can tell whether an account is healthy without opening it.

So the job was never to squeeze one account. It was to make thousands of accounts behave like one system, and to make that system survive being run by a team rather than a person.

03 / What we did

Four rules that made the volume workable.

01 One account structure A standard build every account follows: how campaigns are split, what lives in an ad group, what a new account looks like on day one. Open any account and you already know where things are.
02 Naming conventions that hold Campaigns, ad groups and assets named to a fixed pattern, so anything can be filtered, compared or reported on across thousands of accounts at once instead of one at a time.
03 Budget pacing as a routine Spend checked on a schedule rather than when someone notices. Across $8M+ a year, catching an account that is running hot or barely spending is worth more than any single clever optimization.
04 Reporting that works at volume Reporting built so the accounts that need attention surface themselves. The alternative, reading three thousand accounts by hand every month, is not a plan.
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05 / The outcome

Boring, on purpose.

This is not a case study with one dramatic chart in it. The outcome is that 3,000+ accounts and $8M+ of annual budget were run to the same standard, month after month, and that new people could be handed accounts without the quality changing.

What that buys you is not glamorous. Fewer accounts quietly going wrong. Less time spent working out what a previous person did. Problems found because the process finds them, not because a client called. At this size, that is the whole game.

It is also where the habits behind every other project here came from. The ads work I do now is built on standards that had to survive three thousand accounts first.

"The accounts stopped being a pile of individual jobs and started being one process we could actually run."
Client name, KUKUI
06 / Start here

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