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 tells you about scaling paid search for a service business.
What we ran, and why.
Da Life Outdoors 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 the path to 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 / booking | 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 campaigns are profitable, but they tell different stories: Waterfall Rappel is the volume driver, Hike & Swim is the efficiency leader. Most service businesses overweight one and starve the other.
Efficiency went up, not down.
The typical paid-media curve: launch hot, plateau, then degrade as creative fatigues and audiences saturate. We saw the opposite. From January onward, daily spend trended downward while conversion-value-per-cost climbed — ratios consistently above 7x, with peaks above 14x.
Three things drove it:
- Google's optimization fully exited the learning phase by January. Conversion data crossed the threshold the algorithm needs to predict reliably.
- Creative refreshed quarterly — new ad assets shipped before fatigue could erode CTR. CTR held at 1.07% across the run.
- Landing pages aligned with the ad promise. The booking flow on the site reflected exactly what the ad showed. No mismatched expectations, no friction.
The single biggest lever right now is the daily budget on the top campaign. Google flags Waterfall Rappel as "limited by budget" — meaning we are leaving bookings on the table at a $32 cap.
Same patterns, your business.
Da Life is a tour operator. The exact campaign types and creative don't transfer to your online haircare brand or your San Diego HVAC business. But 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 campaign type for most service businesses and small-catalog online stores. It's noisy in months 1–2 (the learning phase), then 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 are running 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.
A 712% ROAS isn't luck. It's the campaign type matched to the business, a clean conversion action, creative that doesn't fatigue, and a landing page that delivers the promise.
Want this for your business?
Start with The Roadmap — I'll review your ad accounts, conversion setup, and landing page in a 90-min call. Or jump into The Setup, which includes a full Google or Meta campaign launched and optimized over the 30-day sprint.