8
Trading & campaigns
Account directors and Google Ads specialists who run the campaigns and hold the weekly trading call. Each carries a maximum of three clients.
The house
Twenty-two people who only understand one thing.
Hawthorne Ads was founded in Edinburgh in 2015 by a former retail buyer and a Google Ads manager who kept finding they were optimising toward numbers the finance team did not recognise.
I — Origin
A disagreement about a spreadsheet
Our founders met in a meeting where the marketing team was celebrating a return on ad spend of six, and the finance director was pointing out, patiently, that the products in question sold at a 22% gross margin with a 30% return rate and free delivery. On those figures a return of six was a loss.
Nobody in the room was being dishonest. The marketing team simply did not have the cost data, and nobody had thought to ask for it. That gap — between the number Smart Bidding optimises and the number a business banks — is the whole reason Hawthorne exists.
We have stayed narrow deliberately. Google Ads only, retail only, physical product only, and a fixed fee so our income does not rise when your spending does. It has cost us work. It has also meant every process we own is built for the problem we actually solve.
Hawthorne, plainly
Founded2015
Team22
OfficeEdinburgh
PlatformGoogle Ads
Clients16
Spend managed£28m
Average tenure3.8 yrs
II — Structure
How the house is arranged
Four teams. Analytics reports to the managing director rather than to the campaign leads, which is the single most important line on this page.
6
Product data
Feed engineers who rebuild and maintain catalogues, clear Merchant Center disapprovals and keep custom labels honest as products, prices and stock move.
5
Analytics & profit
Analysts and a data engineer who own the contribution profit model. They report independently of the trading team and can contradict it in front of a client.
3
Creative
Designers and an editor producing the image and video assets that Performance Max, Demand Gen and YouTube campaigns need to work properly.
III — Standing rules
Five commitments, written into our contracts
Each of these has lost us at least one prospective client. We have kept all five.
I
We report in profit
Return on ad spend appears in our reports as a diagnostic and never as a headline. If a client insists on being managed to ROAS alone, we decline the work.
II
Analytics is independent
The team that measures performance does not report to the team that runs the campaigns. When they disagree, both views go to the client with the disagreement documented.
III
Flat fees, no rebates
A fixed monthly retainer published in the contract. No percentage of spend, no rebates, no commission from feed tools or partner programmes, ever.
IV
Merchandising is in the room
Our weekly call includes your buying and trading team. We will not make catalogue-level bidding decisions without people who know the stock position.
V
We recommend the cut
Where a campaign type or product family cannot show contribution across two quarters, we recommend stopping it and reduce our own fee to match the reduced scope.
We would rather be the right agency for sixteen retailers than an adequate one for sixty.
Founding partner — Hawthorne Ads Ltd
Working with us
Test the claims on this page.
Ask which client we told to reduce their budget last year. Ask to see a profit report, redacted. Ask what our analytics team disagreed with the trading team about. We would rather answer those questions in the first meeting than the sixth month.
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