Sustainable Paid Media Growth | Ultimate Activity Camps

What we were up against

Ultimate Activity Camps runs day camps across the UK, offering more than 40 activities for children aged 4 to 14. Their audience is parents and guardians looking for somewhere their kids can spend the holidays.

When we took over their Paid Media, they were coming from a previous agency and a frustrating position. They wanted year-on-year growth, but had no clear way of knowing whether they were achieving it. Their understanding of results leaned almost entirely on GA4 attribution, which gave them a partial and sometimes misleading picture, and without reliable benchmarks they couldn't tell what good looked like or where the real opportunities sat.

The strategy they'd inherited was simplistic too, focused on the bottom of the funnel, the people already searching and ready to book. That space was becoming increasingly competitive, and competing there alone was an expensive way to grow with a ceiling on how far it could go. The brief was to change that: grow year on year, scale sustainably without acquisition costs running away, and finally give the business a clear view of what its marketing was actually doing.

How we tackled it

We started by giving the business something it had never really had: a clear, honest view of performance. Because third-party attribution was unreliable, we built a bespoke Looker Studio dashboard that consolidates data from Google Ads, Meta and GA4 into a single full-platform view.

That did two things. It let us see true cross-channel performance rather than trusting one flawed source, and it created the transparency to have open conversations about data discrepancies and make confident decisions about when to move budget between platforms. With that in place, we set internal benchmarks so growth could finally be measured against something real.

Then we rebuilt the strategy around the whole funnel rather than just the bottom of it. With an annual budget to manage, we split spend roughly 40% to Meta and 60% to Google, and deliberately pushed investment up into the middle and upper funnel to build brand awareness, instead of fighting an ever more expensive battle for ready-to-book searches alone.

The tactics followed the funnel. For the middle, we ran Demand Gen on YouTube to drive awareness among the right audiences. For the top, we moved away from the blunt approach of broad radius targeting and built a postcode-based strategy using CRM lists, so ads reached parents in genuinely relevant areas rather than simply anyone near a school. Together it replaced a one-dimensional setup with a layered strategy that built demand as well as capturing it.

What we achieved

We looked at the May to June window, the client's peak Summer Saver period, comparing 2026 against the same stretch in 2025, and the growth was substantial across the board.

•Total website revenue up 66% year on year
•Total purchases up 81%
•Within Google Ads, conversions up 57% and return on media spend up 23%, reaching over 1,200%
•All of this achieved alongside a 50% increase in media spend

The headline isn't just that revenue grew, it's that it grew profitably. Spending more and getting proportionally more back, while improving return on ad spend, is exactly the sustainable scaling the client had been missing, and they now have the reporting to see it clearly for themselves.