PickandMix.com: 24x Revenue growth with Google and WooCommerce

PickandMix.com is an online sweet shop based in the UK that allows customers to choose custom mixes of candies and sweets and have them delivered to their homes. They launched the online business in 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic closed their physical locations. 

PickandMix.com generates over £1m in annual revenue and maintains over 3,000 SKUs on their website as variable products (they sell by weight), value bundles, and limited edition bundles for the holidays.

We recently sat down with William Hale, Founder and Managing Director at PickandMix.com, to learn more about their business on WooCommerce and how they’ve averaged over 5x lifetime return on investment (ROI) on their Performance Max campaigns with Google for WooCommerce.

• From their launch on Google Ads in September 2021 through December 2024, PickandMix.com saw a 24x increase in revenue. 
• Achieved an average of 7.7x return on ad spend (ROAS) in 2024, seeing as much as 8x during their peak season.

• Google Ads and Google Performance Max campaigns
• Google for WooCommerce

In an industry where many brands are selling a similar range of sweets, business is highly competitive. Layer that on top of the fact that they’re selling a product that is a treat rather than a daily essential (for some of us, of course), and it could be easy to fall under the radar of potential customers. 

But, not for PickandMix.com: “We take a great deal of pride in the quality of our sweets and usability of our website — which sets us apart from the competition,” Hale shared. “We have to plan our marketing really carefully by analyzing behavioral trends and maximizing our marketing accordingly.”

The PickandMix.com marketing team is small — just three, including William — and focuses on paid and organic social media, their website, PR, and offline marketing. But, they make it clear that a small team can produce big results.

In 2023, William and team averaged a 6.7x return on ad spend (ROAS), with the majority of their marketing budget allocated to the final quarter of the year and holiday season. Because sweets are not an everyday necessity, the team relies on impulse purchases from folks who just need a little treat (don’t we all, though?). 

“Getting our key messaging and product photography in front of target audiences is vital,” noted Hale. “Google Ads and paid social channels have been incredibly effective at delivering messaging to the right audience.”

With strong results from their Google search campaigns, PickandMix.com wanted to try out a Performance Max campaign through the Google for WooCommerce extension. They’d already integrated a product feed with the Google Ads plugin, so setting up a campaign was easy: “It was a simple case of allocating a daily budget, choosing which products we wanted to promote, and the platform did the rest.”

Hale is happy with the setup: “We use one of the automated bidding strategies and set a daily budget for the campaigns. I’ve found it to be very reliable at keeping within our set budgets and it’s very easy to make adjustments to the bids and daily budgets if we need to.”

The platform’s automatic selection of target search terms has worked in their favor, ensuring that their WooCommerce website appears for their target customers. “The Performance Max campaigns have outperformed our standard campaigns. We now have a much higher daily budget and we leave Performance Max to operate almost unrestrictedly.”

Hale called out another advantage of the platform, citing that the integration with WooCommerce enables them to make changes as soon as they’re needed: “We can monitor product performance on Google Ads and if a product is underperforming, we’re able to quickly make improvements to photography or copy and see either conversions increase or cost per acquisition (CPA) decrease — or both!”

“The ROI is beyond our expectations. I was anticipating a lower ROI with Performance Max being automated, but the Performance Max ads have outperformed standard campaigns. We’re consistently seeing upwards of 500% ROI, and 700 to 800% during the Christmas and holiday season.”

— William Hale, Founder and Managing Director, PickandMix.com

For PickandMix.com’s small but mighty marketing team, Google’s Performance Max campaign options save a substantial amount of time in their work. Rather than manually setting up and updating campaigns, the team now only has to add or remove products seasonally, and update based on performance analytics. 

They’ve seen benefits in other areas, too: They’ve experienced an uplift in sales on less-popular products, and have seen their ads appear across YouTube and Google Maps, in addition to Google’s Search and Shopping pages. The team closely tracks their conversion rates from Performance Max campaigns, using the results to improve and evolve their website. 

“To stay ahead of competition in our industry, keeping our website as user-friendly and interactive as possible is of paramount importance,” Hale said. “WooCommerce is known for being fully customizable. We’re yet to run into any roadblocks: The website has a fast load time, and it’s handled thousands of concurrent users at peak seasonal times.”

The customization options were useful to the team, because in the early days of the business, they weren’t sure what customers would want from their website. 

“WooCommerce has allowed me to evolve the website as we’ve grown and learned what our customers are looking for. It has also allowed me to integrate the website with our warehouse management software, shipping provider, accounting software, and, we’re able to connect our payment provider with negotiated rates.”

The team is constantly adding new customizations and features to the site — the standout feature currently being the Create Your Own selector. “It’s so simple, but it’s an instinctive way for customers to pick out their favorite sweets, and it has massively boosted our conversion rate.”  

On the trajectory of massive growth, PickandMix.com doesn’t plan on slowing down any time soon. With expansion into Europe and a possible subscription offering on the horizon, the future looks sweet. 😉

Regardless of the changes on the horizon, Hale’s priority remains the same: the customers. “The experience for our customers is at the heart of what we do, and hopefully we will continue to be one of the most trusted places to buy pick and mix from in the years to come.”

For those businesses just starting out, Hale recommended a similar focus: “Customer retention is something all small business owners should focus on. … My advice to start up businesses is to strongly consider using WooCommerce for your online store, and integrate it with Google Ads. Performance Max campaigns will get your products in front of the right audiences and keep your ad costs down.”

About

Vanessa Petersen

Vanessa has spent her career writing helpful things for people across the tech space. Outside of work, she enjoys training for triathlon, rotating through hobbies, and exploring new places both urban and natural. She has two fluffy cats, maintains a few succulents, and has far too many books on her TBR shelf.