Competitors outspend them. Every pound has to work harder.
Soul & Surf is a founder-led surf, yoga and wellness retreat brand with sites in Ahangama, Sri Lanka and the Algarve, Portugal. Ten-plus years in, it competes with brands that run full-time performance teams or agency programmes at far higher spend. Two locations, two seasons and two audiences sit under one brand, retreats are a considered purchase with several trust touchpoints before anyone books, and organic search was under-used and held back by an indexing problem. Every pound of spend had to earn its place.
Separate markets, provable attribution, a weekly audit habit.
“We're a small team and every pound has to work. Abhiraj and ADG Advisory gave us something we'd never really had: a clear line from an ad to a booking. They slotted straight into the AI tools we already use internally, so reporting, flags and fixes moved at the pace of our week with no extra process. The cost of getting a booking dropped steadily through the summer, and when something wasn't working they told us straight and fixed it. It feels like having a sharp, honest marketing team in the room, not an agency sending a monthly PDF.”
The India audience became the strongest line in the account.
Built within days of the brief, the India audience campaign runs at roughly £55 a week for 2 to 3 bookings most weeks and is the top-converting campaign tag on the site. Meta cost per purchase moved from £121 to £66 and Google from £71 to £37 (July to September, September to the 28th). A purchase here is a booking created on the site; not every booking created is paid, so the trend matters more than the absolute figure, and closing the gap between created and paid bookings is the next fix. Spend was scaled up with the client's approval as results justified it.
A small budget beats a big one when every pound can be traced to a booking. Separate what behaves differently, make attribution provable before scaling anything, and audit weekly so a failure costs days, not a quarter. The same discipline that surfaces the wins also surfaces the gaps in your own data, and saying so is what makes the numbers credible.