Da Life Outdoors: 712% ROAS on Google Ads.
Hawaii rappel + hiking tours. Two Performance Max campaigns, $32/day cap. $8,658 in ad spend, $56,357 in booking revenue, 160 bookings in 6.5 months. Here’s exactly how it ran — and what it says about scaling paid search for a service business.
The breakdown below covers the first 6.5-month window. The account has kept running since: over the full window (Oct 2025 – Jul 2026) it now sits at 752% ROAS all-time ($13.2K → $98.8K, 18.1K clicks).
What we ran, and why.
Da Life operates rappel and hiking tours on Kaua’i. The booking value is high enough ($352 average) that Google Ads can mathematically work even at moderately bad performance — but a sustained 7x return takes deliberate setup, not just spend. We launched two Performance Max campaigns in October 2025, each tied to a distinct tour product:
- Waterfall Rappel — the higher-spend campaign (60% of budget). High-intent searches, premium booking value.
- Hike & Swim — smaller spend, more efficient. Tighter targeting, narrower audience.
Both fed the same booking conversion action so we could measure ROAS clean across the account.
Campaign-level breakdown.
| Campaign | Spend | Bookings | Revenue | Cost/bk | ROAS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Waterfall Rappel | $5,164 | 85 | $33,905 | $61.00 | 657% |
| Hike & Swim | $3,493 | 75 | $27,810 | $46.37 | 796% |
| Total | $8,658 | 160 | $56,357 | $54.11 | 713% |
Both are profitable but tell different stories: Waterfall Rappel is the volume driver, Hike & Swim the efficiency leader. Most service businesses overweight one and starve the other.
Efficiency went up, not down.
The typical paid-media curve is launch hot, plateau, then degrade as creative fatigues. We saw the opposite. From January onward, daily spend trended down while conversion-value-per-cost climbed — consistently above 7x, with peaks above 14x. Three things drove it: Google’s optimization fully exited the learning phase by January; creative refreshed quarterly so CTR held at 1.07%; and landing pages matched the ad promise exactly. The biggest lever now is the daily budget on the top campaign — Google flags Waterfall Rappel as "limited by budget" at the $32 cap.
Same patterns, your business.
The exact campaigns don’t transfer to your haircare brand or your HVAC business. The underlying playbook does:
Conversion action is everything. Get a clean booking or purchase event firing into Google Ads before you spend a dollar. Without it, ROAS measurement is theater.
Performance Max is the right starting type for most service businesses and small-catalog online stores. Noisy in months 1–2 (the learning phase), then it hits stride.
Budget cap is a feature, not a bug. Hitting the cap proves the campaign has demand to consume more. The lift comes from raising the cap on winners, not spreading thin.
Refresh creative quarterly. Most accounts I review run the same image set they launched with 18 months ago. CTR halves, cost doubles, nobody notices until revenue dips.
Review the landing page before you blame the ads. Ad-to-landing alignment is the single most-common conversion leak.