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BIDWELL
Performance media for ecommerceLeedsEst. 2017Google · Meta · TikTok

In the twelve months to 30 June 2026 we were responsible for

£41.6 million of paid media managed in the twelve months to 30 June 2026, across 23 ecommerce accounts, at a blended return of 4.12.

of other people’s money, across 23 ecommerce accounts. It came back as £171.4m at a blended 4.12.

Three of those accounts went backwards in the first quarter. Ask us on the call and we’ll tell you which three and why.

We buy paid media for ecommerce brands turning over £1m to £25m. We don’t do SEO, email, or organic social, and we bill a flat retainer rather than a slice of your spend. Being paid more when you spend more is a strange way to earn trust.

Retainers from
£4,500
Audit
£2,400
Book a paid account auditRead the three long cases

Audits run three weeks. Next slot: week commencing 24 August 2026.

£41.6m

Media managed, 12 months to June 2026

23

Live ecommerce accounts

4.12

Blended return across the book

2.1 yrs

Average client tenure

11

People, all of them in Leeds

3

Accounts we handed back in 2025

Figures cover 1 July 2025 – 30 June 2026 and are taken from platform reporting reconciled to client Shopify and Xero exports. Blended return is revenue divided by media spend across the whole book, not a best-account number.

The work

Six of the twenty-three. Three written up long, because the interesting part of a paid media case study is what was wrong before, not the percentage at the end. Every figure here is reconciled to the client's own revenue reporting, not to platform-reported conversions.

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Showing 6 of 6 accounts.

Bramfield & Sons

Cast-iron cookware, founded 1908. DTC since 2021.

Sector
Homeware
Where
Sheffield
Channels
Google, Meta
Client since
March 2025

8 weeks

Length of the geo holdout that finally put a price on brand search

£14,200 to £212,800 a month in non-brand revenue

Bramfield & Sons: before and after figures
MeasureBeforeNow
Non-brand revenue / month£14,200£212,800
Blended MER2.814.31
New-customer CAC£38.90£27.40
Brand search spend£31,400£11,620
Contribution margin / order£21.15£29.80

What we walked into

Seventy-one per cent of their Google spend was sitting on the words “bramfield” and “bramfield and sons”. Non-brand search had been switched off in October 2023 because a previous agency reported it at 0.8 ROAS. Nobody had checked whether brand search was doing any work at all, because nobody wanted the answer.

What we did

  1. 01Ran an eight-week geo holdout to put an actual price on brand clicks: brand search paused across Scotland and the North East, live everywhere else.
  2. 02Rebuilt non-brand around what people type when they don't know the brand: “induction safe cast iron”, “season a cast iron pan”, “cast iron casserole 24cm”, rather than the category word “cookware” that nobody searches for.
  3. 03Moved Shopping off Performance Max onto a manual-priority structure with a £0.28 bid floor, so the cheap accessory SKUs stopped eating the budget.
  4. 04Rewrote the conversion action to fire on contribution profit, not revenue, using their real per-SKU margin file.

Brand spend came down 63%. Brand revenue fell 4.1%, which the holdout let us measure rather than argue about. That released £19,780 a month. Non-brand revenue is now £198,600 a month higher than when we started, so every pound that moved is carrying about ten pounds of revenue behind it.

Non-brand search revenue, £000 per month

Chart scrolls sideways. Or read it as a table below.

062.5125187.5250Mar 25AprJunAugOctDecFebApr

December spike is seasonal. January dip is seasonal. The line underneath both is not.

“We'd been told brand search was protecting us for four years. The holdout cost us about £9,000 in lost brand revenue to find out it wasn't. Cheapest nine grand we've ever spent.”

Gemma OllerenshawEcommerce Director, Bramfield & Sons

Thornbeck

Technical outerwear, made and repaired in Cumbria.

Sector
Outerwear
Where
Kendal
Channels
Meta, TikTok
Client since
September 2025

£486,000

Revenue from the one ad angle nobody in the room wanted to run

First-purchase CAC from £41.10 down to £26.40

Thornbeck: before and after figures
MeasureBeforeNow
First-purchase CAC£41.10£26.40
TikTok share of new customers0%31%
Winning-ad hit rate1 in 191 in 6
Prospecting frequency4.81.9
Concepts shipped / month0.414

Ashgrove Living

Rugs and floor covering. £610 average order value.

Sector
Furniture
Where
Macclesfield
Channels
Google, Meta
Client since
January 2025

−22%

Google non-brand conversions in the North West with Meta switched off

A six-week regional blackout settled a two-year argument

Ashgrove Living: before and after figures
MeasureBeforeNow
Meta contribution (measured)9%31%
Trailing-12-month revenue£4.10m£7.36m
Media spend£148k/qtr£238k/qtr
Contribution profit£402k/qtr£716k/qtr
Sample → full order18.0%26.5%

Fenn & Row

Children's shoes, fitted by width. · Norwich

Footwear / Google · Meta · TikTok

£11,400 a month of spend was going to widths they didn't have

Performance Max had no idea that an F-width and a G-width in the same style are different products with different stock. We pulled 68% of budget into standard Shopping segmented by width fitting, wired the feed to real-time stock at width level, and let PMax keep only the long tail.

  • Return on ad spend2.40 moved to 3.86
  • Spend on out-of-stock widths£11,400/mo moved to £640/mo
  • Return rate31% moved to 22%

Grindle Coffee

Subscription coffee, roasted Tuesdays. · Glasgow

Food & drink / Meta · TikTok

CAC payback cut from 94 days to 51

The £1 trial bag was recruiting people who wanted a £1 bag of coffee. We moved the offer to a full-price first box with the grind guide included, which raised CAC 18% and roughly halved payback because the second order actually happened.

  • Trial → second order46% moved to 61%
  • CAC payback94 days moved to 51 days
  • 90-day customer value£31.20 moved to £58.40

Verity Lane

Bespoke engagement rings, Jewellery Quarter. · Birmingham

Jewellery / Google · Meta

A quarter fewer enquiries, 13% more revenue, same budget

They were paying £6.80 a click for “engagement rings” against national jewellers. We cut to a 240-term exact-match core around setting, stone and budget language and put the rest of the money into a consultation-booking flow. A quarter fewer enquiries, half again as many of them turning into rings, and average order value did not move: £4,220 before, £4,220 after. The revenue is coming from a better conversation, not a bigger one.

  • Google spend£18,200/mo moved to £18,000/mo
  • Enquiries / month141 moved to 106
  • Enquiry → sale12% moved to 18%
  • Revenue from Google£71,400/mo moved to £80,500/mo

How the first ninety days go

There is no onboarding deck. There is a document, a rebuild, and then a rhythm you can set your week by. The order matters more than any individual step: we refuse to optimise anything we cannot yet measure, which makes month one look slow and month six look fast.

  1. 00Weeks 1–3

    The audit

    £2,400, paid up front. We go through account structure, measurement, creative and your margin file. If we can't find at least 15% more contribution profit we write that down and we don't pitch.

    31 audits run · 4 ended in “don’t hire us”

  2. 01Weeks 4–5

    Measurement before optimisation

    Server-side tagging, a conversion action defined on contribution profit rather than revenue, and a holdout calendar for the year. Nothing gets optimised until we can tell whether it moved. This is the least glamorous month and the one that decides the other eleven.

    Two Bidwell analysts working through account performance figures written up on a whiteboard
  3. 02Weeks 6–9

    Structure

    We rebuild the account. It almost always ends up with fewer campaigns than you started with. The median is a 61% reduction, because most accounts are carrying structure that made sense to whoever built it in 2022. Budgets move to where the holdouts say the money is.

  4. 03Weeks 10 onward

    Creative volume

    Eight to fourteen new concepts a month, produced by our team, shot wherever your product actually is. Most media agencies stop at buying. We won't quote you a platform's own number for how much of the outcome is the creative, because that number is marketing. What we will quote is our own book: on Thornbeck the audience never changed and the hit rate went from one winning ad in nineteen to one in six.

    Two colleagues reviewing a creative brief on a laptop in the brick-walled studio
  5. 04Every week after

    The cadence

    Numbers land in your inbox at 09:30 on Monday. Thirty minutes on Thursday, camera on, no deck. One named buyer and one named analyst. The people on the call are the people in the account on Wednesday.

    The Thursday account review: the Bidwell team around a table with laptops open

Nobody at Bidwell has the job title “account manager”.

It is the single most common thing clients tell us they wanted and didn’t get elsewhere: to speak to the person who actually touches the account. Eleven people, twenty-three accounts, no layer in between.

03

Seven things we won’t do

A list like this costs us work every year. We keep it because the briefs it loses are the briefs that would have gone badly.

  • SEO, email, content or organic social

    Three specialists beats one generalist. We'll happily sit on a call with your other agencies; we won't pretend we can do their job.

  • Percentage-of-spend billing

    It pays us to spend more of your money and it is the reason so many accounts are bloated. Flat retainer, reviewed every six months, up or down.

  • Awareness budgets with no measurement attached

    You can absolutely spend money on being known. You cannot then ask us in March what it did, unless we designed a way to find out in January.

  • Attribution-window arguments

    Nobody has ever won one. We run geo holdouts and blackouts instead, and we accept the result even when it's embarrassing for us.

  • Brands under about £80k a month in revenue

    A £4,500 retainer would eat your margin. At that stage you need better product photography, a working Klaviyo flow and one person who owns the ad account.

  • Two brands in the same category

    If a direct competitor of yours approaches us, you hear about it from us before we answer them. We turned down three briefs on this basis last year.

  • Junior-run accounts

    The person on your Thursday call is the person in the account on Wednesday. We have no juniors shadowing seniors on client work, which is also why we hire slowly.

Do the maths before you call us

This uses one number from our own book: across twenty-three accounts, the median change in blended return in the first six months was +0.71. That is the middle account, not the best one. Four accounts moved less than +0.20 and two went backwards before they went forwards.

Your numbers

£45,000

What you hand to Google, Meta and TikTok each month, not including our fee.

2.90

Total revenue divided by total media spend. Take it from your P&L, not from Ads Manager.

54%

After cost of goods, packaging and shipping. Most of the brands we work with sit between 52% and 64%.

At £45,000 a month of media you’d be on the Foundation retainer, £4,500 a month. Media is paid by you, direct to the platforms. We never touch your card.

What that looks like

Today£25,470

monthly contribution profit after media, on £130,500 of revenue

At the median lift, after our fee£38,223

on £162,450 of revenue at a blended 3.61

Today
£25,470
With Bidwell, after the fee
£38,223
Monthly difference+£12,753
Break-even lift+0.19 ROAS
Return on our fee3.8×

Hold us to the middle number: +0.19 on blended return is all we have to find to pay for ourselves. If the audit can’t show a credible route to that, we’ll say so and you’ll have spent £2,400 on a document instead of a year on a retainer.

Simplified on purpose: it assumes your margin holds as you scale, and it ignores the working-capital cost of carrying more stock. Both of those matter. We model them properly in the audit.

Bidwell's Leeds studio: colleagues working at desks in a converted industrial space with tall windows

Third floor, Marshall’s Mill, Holbeck, Leeds

A 1791 flax mill with terrible acoustics and one very good window.

Eleven people

Everyone here has bought media with their own hands in the last month, including the founder. We last hired in February and we won't hire again until we sign account twenty-five. Hiring ahead of the work is how agencies end up needing the work.

Ruth Bidwell at her desk in the Leeds studio

Ruth Bidwell

Founder, media

Seven years buying media in-house for an outdoor retailer on Kirkstall Road before starting this in 2017. Still buys on four accounts because she doesn't trust anyone who doesn't.

Dele Okonjo working at his laptop with colleagues at the desks behind him

Dele Okonjo

Head of measurement

Four years building incrementality models for a Leeds sportsbook, then decided he'd rather work on numbers small enough to actually change. Owns every holdout we run.

Owen Hartree writing notes beside his laptop against the mill's exposed brick wall

Owen Hartree

Paid search lead

Came from a comparison site, which means he has strong and slightly frightening opinions about feed hygiene. Runs the Shopping structure on nine accounts.

Nadia Rahman reading through a stack of creative test results at her desk

Nadia Rahman

Creative strategy lead

Was a documentary researcher before advertising. Writes the angle briefs, watches every piece of session-recording footage nobody else will watch.

And the other seven

  • Kirsty MallinsonPaid social lead
  • Sam WhitlowMedia buyer, search
  • Grace AdemolaMedia buyer, social
  • Jonty FairhurstAnalyst
  • Aisling DoyleCreative producer
  • Ben CattermoleMotion designer
  • Marta KowalczykStudio manager
3.4 years
Average time someone has been here. In this industry that is a long time.
2 days
Longest anyone has waited for an answer to an email in the last quarter. We measure it.
23 : 11
Accounts to people. We stop taking briefs at about 2.5 accounts each.
£0
Referral fees, platform kickbacks or affiliate revenue taken from anyone, ever.

What it costs

Published because we got tired of the dance. Four numbers, no setup fee, and a three-month initial term followed by thirty days' notice, which is short enough that we have to keep earning it.

Audit

Any size

£2,400one-off

Three weeks. Forty to sixty pages. Yours whether you hire us or not.

  • Account structure and wasted-spend teardown
  • Measurement audit: tagging, conversion definition, attribution
  • Creative review with the last 90 days of ad-level data
  • A contribution-profit model built on your real margin file
  • A written answer to “is there 15% more profit in here”, including “no”
Book the audit

Foundation

Under £60k media / month

£4,500per month

One buyer, one analyst, both named on the contract.

  • Two channels
  • Four creative concepts a month
  • Monday 09:30 numbers, Thursday 30-minute call
  • Server-side tagging maintained
  • One incrementality test a year
Enquire about Foundation

Compound

£60k–£200k media / month

£7,800per month

The biggest single group: ten of our twenty-three accounts.

  • Three channels
  • Ten creative concepts a month, produced by us
  • Quarterly incrementality test with a written readout
  • Feed management and merchant-centre ownership
  • Contribution-profit reporting into your P&L format
Enquire about Compound

Full stack

Over £200k media / month

£12,500per month

Four accounts. We take one more of these a year, maximum.

  • All channels including retail media and affiliate oversight
  • Fourteen-plus concepts a month
  • Dedicated analyst, marketing-mix model maintained monthly
  • Board-ready reporting your CFO will actually read
  • On-site with your team one day a month
Enquire about Full stack

The small print, written like a person

  • All prices exclude VAT. We're VAT-registered; the number is in the footer.
  • Your media budget is paid by you, directly to Google, Meta and TikTok. We are never in the money chain and we hold no card details.
  • Retainers are reviewed every six months and the review runs both ways. Since 2023 we have cut five and raised sixteen.
  • Three-month initial term, then thirty days' written notice on either side. No auto-renewing twelve-month lock.
  • Creative production is included in the retainer. Third-party costs such as talent, licensed music and product samples are billed at cost with the invoice attached.
  • If you leave, the account, the pixel, the feed and the measurement documentation are yours. We hand over inside five working days and we don't make it awkward.

What £4,500 actually buys

Roughly five and a half days of senior time a month, plus the tooling, plus four creative concepts. We are not cheap per hour and we’re not going to pretend otherwise. What you should compare it against is the difference it makes to contribution profit. That is why the calculator above exists, and why the break-even number is the one we put in front of you first.

For context: a competent in-house paid media manager in Leeds costs about £48,000 plus employer’s NI, and can hold one channel.

07

Tell us what’s actually wrong

Not a discovery call. Write down the thing that’s bothering you: CAC drifting, a channel you can’t justify, a board asking questions you can’t answer. We’ll come back with an actual opinion.

Leeds Dock on an overcast afternoon, a ten-minute walk down the canal from the studio
Studio
Third Floor, Marshall’s Mill, Marshall Street, Leeds LS11 9YJ
Phone
0113 468 2204, answered by a person until 5.30pm
Email
hello@bidwellmedia.co.uk

This decides whether we’re the right call. We’d rather say no here than on week three.

Where you’re spending it (optional)

We’ll use this to reply and nothing else. It does not go into a mailing list or a CRM sequence, and we don’t pass it on. If we don’t end up working together we delete it after ninety days.