The GelBottle
The GelBottle – Performance Marketing Rebuild for Scalable Ecommerce Growth in the UK & US
See how Strike Digital partnered with The GelBottle to restructure paid media across key markets, shifting from reactive demand capture to a scalable, acquisition led growth engine.
Project Overview
The GelBottle is a highly recognisable global brand within the professional nail industry, best known for its BIAB and gel products. With strong brand equity and consistent organic demand, the business already had meaningful scale. However, paid media performance was not reflecting the brand’s true growth potential.
Despite healthy demand, paid media was constrained by structural and strategic limitations. Accounts were not built with full funnel growth in mind, activity leaned heavily toward mid and bottom funnel campaigns, and early stage product promotion was restricted. As a result, paid channels were largely capturing existing demand rather than actively driving new customer acquisition.
For a brand of this size, this created a clear ceiling on growth. Without the ability to consistently reach and educate new audiences, scaling spend became increasingly inefficient and heavily dependent on existing brand awareness.
The objective was to rebuild performance marketing from the ground up. The focus was on introducing clear structure, full funnel coverage, and a scalable acquisition framework that could support long term growth while maintaining efficiency. This work sat at the intersection of Strike Digital’s Paid Media services.
Project Execution
Google Ads
Period covered: January 2025 to Dec 2025
Google Ads became a core growth lever once the account was restructured around a full funnel strategy. Prior to the rebuild, the account was heavily weighted toward high intent, bottom funnel activity. This created an over reliance on brand search and existing demand, limiting reach into new audiences and restricting sustainable scale.
Category First Account Structure
We began by rebuilding the Google Ads account around The GelBottle’s core product category. This created cleaner signals, clearer performance insights, and a stable foundation for scaling. Only once efficiency was established were additional categories gradually introduced.
This type of structured foundation reflects Strike Digital’s broader philosophy around sustainable performance systems, discussed in our insights on building long term digital growth rather than chasing short term wins.
Full Funnel Implementation
A clearly defined funnel was implemented to reduce dependency on bottom funnel traffic and support long term acquisition.
Top funnel campaigns focused on prospecting and discovery, introducing the brand to new audiences and testing creative and messaging angles.
Mid funnel activity built consideration through engagement based audiences, reinforcing familiarity and product value.
Bottom funnel campaigns captured demand efficiently through high intent and remarketing activity.
This full journey coverage aligns with Strike Digital’s view that paid media should act as a demand creation engine, not just a conversion tool, a concept explored further across our strategic content for scaling ecommerce brands.
Creative-Led Prospecting and Holistic Coverage
Upper funnel campaigns prioritised creative testing and value communication. As users progressed, lower funnel activity reinforced trust, product credibility, and purchase intent.
Search, Shopping, Performance Max, and YouTube were deployed together to ensure consistent visibility across the entire customer journey, supporting a more integrated approach to performance media rather than siloed channel execution.
Meta
Meta was initially the most constrained platform, both structurally and strategically. Activity was limited to BIAB only promotion, mid funnel campaigns, and a fragmented account setup. This restricted reach, limited creative testing, and significantly capped new customer acquisition.
Rebuilding Meta From First Principles
We rebuilt the Meta account entirely, introducing a clear top funnel to mid funnel to bottom funnel structure. This allowed Meta to evolve from a supporting remarketing channel into an active acquisition engine.
Once performance allowed, product promotion expanded beyond BIAB into broader category coverage, unlocking additional scale. Account structure was simplified to improve signal quality and optimisation, supporting more efficient learning and delivery.
Creative testing and audience expansion became central to Meta’s role, reflecting the acquisition mindset Strike Digital applies when helping brands move beyond reliance on remarketing and brand demand capture.
Results
UK Performance
Following the restructure, Google Ads evolved from a predominantly branded account into a scalable acquisition platform.
2025 vs 2024
Spend increased 275% YoY
Revenue increased 18.7%
Conversions increased 29.4%
Clicks increased 130.8%
Impressions increased 240.8%
Shopping revenue increased 44.5%
Shopping conversions increased 45%
Perhaps most importantly, the proportion of new customers generated through non branded activity increased from 13.5% to 55.5%, demonstrating a successful transition from demand capture towards genuine acquisition.
Business Level Growth
Platform metrics were supported by measurable commercial impact.
Across the measured period:
UK new customers increased by 14%
New customer sales targets were exceeded.
Momentum accelerated significantly during the second half of the period:
Q4 new customers increased 26.4% YoY
Q1 2026 new customers increased 76.7% YoY
New customer sales increased 104.2% YoY in Q1 2026
US Expansion
The same acquisition framework was successfully applied within the US market.
As investment increased, the account maintained strong efficiency while significantly improving new customer acquisition. By Q1 2026:
Spend increased substantially.
Conversion value exceeded targets
New customers figure exceeded targets
ROAS remained stable at 9.67 despite the higher level of investment
The results demonstrated that the new product tier structure could successfully absorb larger budgets while maintaining profitability and supporting continued acquisition.
The Bottom Line
By rebuilding Google Ads around acquisition rather than branded demand, Strike Digital helped Lisa Eldridge transform Google into a scalable growth channel capable of driving profitable new customer acquisition beyond product launches.
Instead of relying on launch periods alone, the account now supports sustainable year round growth through a product led acquisition strategy, structured campaign architecture and data driven budget allocation. The outcome was stronger commercial performance, greater resilience between launches and a significantly larger contribution from new customers.
