Reversing a Declining Year for Just Tyres and Delivering Record-Breaking Growth

Summary

Client: Just Tyres
Sector: Automotive Retail (12,500+ SKU inventory, 95+ UK locations)
Period: June–November (final 6 months of financial year)
Challenge: -10% revenue YoY, -9% profit YoY (Dec–Jun)

Results (Jun–Nov after Chilli Digital took over):

• +6% YoY revenue growth
  
• +10% YoY profit growth
  
• Achieved record profit in October and then again in November
  
• Non-brand revenue increased by ~50% within four months
  
• Average monthly Revenue and Profit both increased by 17%

1. Situation: A Year in Decline and No Clear Path to Growth

When Chilli Digital onboarded in June, Just Tyres had already completed six months of their financial year.

From December → May, the business was experiencing –10% YoY decrease in revenue and –9% YoY decrease in profit. Increased budgets but no corresponding uplift with a heavy reliance on a broad Performance Max campaign. This made it difficult to scale non-brand traffic without ROAS collapsing. Overall it was a fragmented search and shopping structure across dozens of micro-campaigns with wasted spend across the long tail of 12,500 SKUs.

However, despite all this, ROAS that looked strong in the Google Ads interface but wasn’t translating into real sales. Their ad account appeared to be performing — but the backend data didn’t match.

The root issue

Performance Max was driving huge amounts of brand traffic (low-cost, low-incrementality), inflating ROAS and making it look like everything was working. But non-brand performance — the true incremental growth engine — was buried. Scaling spend only caused PMAX to scale brand, which delivered:

❌ No meaningful new revenue
❌ No incremental customers
❌ Misleading ad account performance
❌ CPC spikes when trying to scale non-brand
❌ Flat or declining revenue despite increased advertising costs

Just Tyres needed a structural rebuild — fast.

2. What We Achieved (In the First 5 Months)

Chilli Digital took over in June. By November, we had completely reversed the year.

Month 1 (June): Gradual rebuild of account structure - Brand and Non-Brand correctly separated and a full audit and implementation carried out

‍Month 2 (July): Revenue +6% YoY, Profit +7% YoY, Non-brand ROAS within Pmax  jumped from 7.6 → 8.93 in four weeks

Month 3–6 (Aug–Nov): Consistent month-on-month increases in both revenue & profit (~50% increase in non-brand revenue from July → October) with record profit month in October and then again in November. The restructure enabled us to consistently find new opportunities to scale non-brand conversions whilst staying within ROAS targets.Once new account structure was implemented throughout June, performance for July–November period:

➡️ Revenue up 8% YoY
➡️ Profit up 12% YoY

This was after a –9% revenue and –8% profit decline in the first seven months. A complete turnaround.

3. How We Did We Do It?

Below is the exact set of strategies and proprietary methodologies we used — the ones now forming part of the Chilli Digital methodology library.

A. Isolating Brand vs Non-Brand Traffic to Unlock Incremental Growth

The problem

Performance Max was lumping together brand traffic (easy, low-cost, low-value) and non-brand traffic (incremental, competitive, valuable). This inflated overall ROAS and hid the real non-brand performance. Because of that, scaling was blocked as backend revenue looked “flat” despite ad-platform growth.

Our solution: Brand vs Non-Brand Isolation Framework

• Dedicated Brand Search Campaign‍
  
  • Exact + Phrase brand terms
  • Full control over bidding & messaging
  • Ensured brand efficiency and defensive coverage
    

• Negative Brand Terms in All PMAX + Shopping Campaigns
  
  • Forced PMAX to behave as a pure non-brand engine
    
  • Clean incrementality
    
  • Clean measurement
    
  • No inflated ROAS from brand stuffing
    
    
• Brand-Only Shopping Campaign
  
  • Built to prevent competitors showing Shopping ads for “Just Tyres” brand searches
    
  • Bespoke script that allows this setup
    

Impact

Non-brand ROAS improved from 7.6 → 8.93 in month one, and scaling became possible for the first time. Non-brand revenue also increased by ~50% within four months. This separation created the foundation for every other improvement.

B. Unlocking SKU Efficiency: Bucketing 12,500 SKUs by Profitability

Before our involvement:

• All 12,500 SKUs were treated equally
  
• One PMAX campaign controlled everything
  
• The algorithm was left to guess
  
• High performers were held back
  
• Poor performers wasted significant budget
  
• No visibility into SKU-level profitability
  

We discovered:

• Only ~300 SKUs were profitable
  
• The remaining 12,000+ SKUs were delivering ~1.5 ROAS
  
• These long-tail SKUs were dragging down overall performance significantly
  

Our solution: SKU Bucketing Framework

Every SKU was categorised using historical ROAS performance:

• Over-Index (well above target ROAS)
  
• Index (meeting target)
  
• Near-Index (promising but low data)
  
• Under-Index (unprofitable despite data)
  
• No-Index (not enough data; discovery pool)
  

Impact:

• Allowed targeted spend into winners
  
• Stripped wasted budget from losers
  
• Increased overall efficiency
  
• Supported scaling into non-brand segments
  

D. Quality Score Rebuilds for Tyre-Size Search Campaigns

Several high-demand tyre-size search terms were running with quality scores as low as 3–5.. This meant inflated CPCs, unnecessary CAC increases, the algorithm bidding aggressively to compensate.

Our solution

• Rebuilt ad groups for maximum message–keyword matching
  
• Improved landing page alignment
  
• Created dozens of highly-specific RSAs
  
• Broke down broad ad groups into granular, single-intent clusters
  

Impact:

• Quality scores increased from 3–5 → 6–10
  
• Resulting in lower CPCs and higher impression share
  
• Supported PMAX as part of a broader non-brand growth engine
  

E. Eliminating Fragmentation: Consolidating Location Campaigns

Just Tyres had 100+ locations and ~35 campaigns to serve those individual campaigns per radius with split budgets, insufficient data per campaign leading to major inefficiency in bidding & optimisation

Our solution

We consolidated all location campaigns into one centralised structure with multiple geo-targets. This means the algorithm was able to learn faster, leading to more efficiency in bidding. ROAS improved from 8.5 → 9.7 and conversion volume increased dramatically.

4. Final Outcome: A Completely Transformed Year

By rebuilding the account from the ground up — structurally, strategically, and operationally — we transformed a year that was headed for decline into one of the most successful periods in Just Tyres’ recent history.

Before Chilli (Dec–May):

• Revenue: –10% YoY
  
• Profit: –9% YoY
  

After Chilli (Jun–Nov):

• Revenue: +6% YoY
  
• Profit: +10% YoY
  
• Record profit month in October
  
• Record profit month again in November
  
• 50% growth in non-brand revenue
  
• Scaled non-brand traffic efficiently