Portland Gear: Systematically reallocating spend to maximize incremental impact

Opportunity 

Portland Gear was experiencing strong brand momentum, but its paid search program had significant untapped potential. The opportunity was to scale non-branded customer acquisition more aggressively while improving branded efficiency and building a system capable of sustaining long-term expansion.

Work

We restructured and expanded paid search into 38 distinct campaigns, creating clearer segmentation across branded, non-branded, shopping, and Demand Gen. Non-branded search was scaled methodically, while Demand Gen introduced incremental reach to new audiences in a way that blended awareness with performance and expanded non-branded reach.

Impact

The results were transformative: DTC revenue increased 269% year over year, with Google Ads conversions up 215% and organic traffic growing 53%. Paid search evolved from a primarily defensive channel into a proactive acquisition driver that balanced efficiency with expansion, resulting in a structured framework capable of compounding performance across both branded and non-branded search.