Sous Chef is one of the UK’s leading speciality cooking and ingredients retailers, offering a curated catalogue of over 7,000 ingredients, cookware and tableware items sourced from small-scale producers around the world.
Selling exclusively through their online store at souschef.co.uk, they serve a community of passionate home cooks and professional chefs who value craftsmanship, authenticity, and access to rare ingredients used by top chefs worldwide.
Sous Chef partnered with AdSuccess to scale their paid search programme with a clear dual mandate: grow top-line revenue year-on-year and grow net profit across an extensive long-tail catalogue.
Sous Chef operates in a long-tail, highly seasonal market where roughly 80% of products generate little traffic, and where many bestsellers carry low margins while some niche products are highly profitable – making revenue-led bidding a poor proxy for business impact. The account needed a strategy that prioritised actual profit, gave visibility to high-margin niche products, and could absorb significantly more investment without sacrificing ROAS.
Implemented a profit-based strategy in Google Ads to shift bidding from a revenue-led to a profit-led model.
We tracked profit per conversion and segmented the catalogue into profitable, unprofitable and low-traffic tiers.
Core campaigns were restricted to profitable products only, ensuring spend was directed where it generated the most net profit per pound – not just the most revenue.
The account was structured into category-focused PMax campaigns, each with its own budget, POAS-based target, and tailored creative assets.
This gave granular control over product prioritisation and prevented strong categories from being starved by weaker ones.
We built a dedicated campaign for low-traffic products, with adjusted POAS targets to give visibility to items the main campaigns were overlooking.
The campaign quickly became one of the most profitable in the account, unlocking incremental revenue from the long tail of the catalogue.
We built dedicated seasonal campaigns with bespoke product collections and distinct optimisation goals.
Sale and seasonal products were ring-fenced post-promotion to prevent algorithm confusion when prices reverted, protecting the learning of evergreen campaigns
We introduced a new layer of feed management focused on product categorisation, data quality and enrichment.
Automated rules were built to categorise, standardise and clean product data; the feed was enriched with optional attributes to strengthen ad relevance and eligibility for richer Shopping placements; and a structured title optimisation programme was rolled out across hundreds of key product lines.
AdSuccess are seasoned professionals who are a pleasure to work with and who have delivered great results for us in Google Ads.
