A 12.9x ROAS Is Only Useful If You Trust It: MOOG Audio on Google Shopping

By Kevin Veitia

Client

MOOG Audio, a Canadian retailer of musical instruments and music software

Currency

US dollars, converted from Canadian dollars at about 0.71, the average rate for the period

Channels

Google Ads (Shopping and Search), Meta Ads

Timeframe

About three months in spring 2025. The figures below cover 1 April to 5 May 2025.

Engagement

Google Ads audit, then management of Google and Meta

Goal

ROAS on Google; purchases and leads on Meta

The challenge

MOOG Audio is a Canadian store for musicians and producers: synthesizers, DJ gear, microphones and music software. It sells Moog synthesizers among many other brands, but it isn't the company that makes them.

When we started in spring 2025, its Google Ads were already reporting a ROAS above 12x on about $14,000 a month. On paper, it didn't need help. Underneath, it wasn't so tidy. The highs were real, but they came and went. Our audit found an inconsistent link between ad spend and sales: some weeks lined up well, and on a few days the account spent several hundred dollars while net sales went negative after returns. Spend had roughly doubled over two years while revenue stayed flat, and conversion rates on Shopping were down about 40%. About 90% of Google sales came through Shopping, and nothing in the data could tell a new customer from a returning one.

So the brief was unusual. Not "fix this", but "protect this, and make it hold".

What we did

Audited before touching anything

A strong account is easy to break. Before changing a bid, we audited it line by line and studied how MOOG Audio's customers bought: which categories, which brands, and how long between purchases. We wanted to know which parts were doing the work before we touched them.

Organized Shopping around the brands that sell

Most of the money ran through two Shopping campaigns: Brand Push, for the brands that sold best, and Generic, for everything else. We rebalanced which brands sat in each, gave a big vendor like Pioneer DJ its own campaign so it could be bid on its own numbers, and moved budget toward products that could take more impression share without losing efficiency.

Inside the Generic campaign, a new ad group ran alongside the old one from 2023. Over the same five weeks, the new one returned 12.82x on about $1,300 of spend, and the old one returned 4.3x on about $3,700. A comparison like that, in the same campaign and the same weeks, tells you where the next dollar should go.

A small French-language branded search campaign returned 50.5x on about $250. That number says more about how many people already wanted MOOG Audio than about the ad. Branded search is cheap insurance, not a growth engine.

Kept the weak lines small

Not everything worked. Separate Shopping campaigns for Shure microphones and for music software returned 1.2x and 1.59x, on about $570 and $250. They stayed small. We include them because a case study that only shows winners isn't telling you much.

Ran Meta alongside

Meta was the smaller channel, about $3,500 over the same five weeks. Catalog ads, which show people the products they've already looked at, were the most efficient format at $8.28 per result, and a free sample pack offer for the software side brought in leads at $2.73. Almost 87% of results came from men. Meta reported results here, not revenue, so we don't quote a Meta ROAS.

Results

• A blended Google Ads ROAS of 12.9x from 1 April to 5 May 2025, on about $18,700 of spend and 429 conversions
• Brand Push, the biggest Shopping campaign, at 10.66x on about $9,900. Pioneer DJ at 9.45x, and Generic at 6.47x
• A new generic ad group at 12.82x, against 4.3x for the old one
• Most important for the brief: the account held that level for the whole engagement, instead of spiking and dropping

The question that needed a test

The owner had a fair question. Brand Push spent most of its money on people searching for products from brands MOOG Audio already sold. If most of them would have bought from the store anyway, was a 10x ROAS real, or were the ads taking credit for sales they didn't cause? With spend up and revenue flat over two years, and no way in the data to separate new customers from returning ones, we'd have asked the same thing.

It's called cannibalization, and ROAS can't answer it, because ROAS only counts the sales the ads claimed. The way to answer it is an incrementality test: switch Brand Push off for a set of brands, or in part of the country, for a few weeks, and compare revenue with where it stayed on. If sales hold, the ads were taking credit. If they drop, you know what the ads are worth, measured in your own store's revenue.

We never ran that test. The conversation turned into defending the numbers week after week, and that's time that should go into improving them. An account can't be run well when the people paying for it don't trust how it's measured, so we ended the engagement. What we'd do differently is propose the test in week one, before anyone has to take a dashboard on trust. It's also why our fit check asks how we'll prove the ads are working, before we start.

What you can take from this

• A ROAS that spikes and drops isn't ready to scale. Make it steady first.
• Compare campaigns in the same weeks. A new ad group at 12.8x beside an old one at 4.3x tells you where the next dollar goes.
• ROAS can't tell you whether an ad caused a sale. An incrementality test can.
• If a number looks too good to believe, test it. Don't argue about it.
• Agree on how results will be measured before the first campaign launches.

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