Paid Search Case StudyCannabis Retail
How Ascend Turned an $18,000 Google Ads Pilot Into $11.9M a Year
Cannabis retailers get a fraction of the advertising options every other business takes for granted. Ascend Wellness Holdings had 40-plus dispensaries across seven states and no paid search program at all. A two-market pilot in October 2022 changed that, and the program it grew into paid for itself more than twenty times over.
The Results
The Numbers Ascend Reported to Its Own Board
The Challenge
A Category Google Barely Lets You Advertise In
Google’s policies treat cannabis like a banned product even in states where it is legal. Ads get disapproved without warning, campaigns get limited for days at a time, and landing pages cannot use the words a customer would actually search for. Ascend had the stores, the brand and the demand, and no way to buy the clicks its competitors were buying.
The tracking made it harder. Ascend’s menus ran on a third-party platform, so a purchase started on letsascend.com and finished somewhere Google Analytics could not see. Leadership was being asked to fund a channel whose revenue it could not verify.
“
Thank you for being a strong partner and for helping us trailblaze the SEO/SEM journey in cannabis. Your thought leadership and engagement were key in building the foundation of the digital footprint we have today.
— Conrad Balbinot, Executive Vice President, Marketing, Ascend Wellness Holdings
Our Approach
Prove It Small, Then Move the Money
We did not ask for a budget. We asked for two markets and six weeks, and let the numbers argue for the rest.
1
Started with a pilot Ascend could afford to lose
October 14, 2022, five stores in Boston, Newton, Fairview Heights, Springfield and Collinsville, each with its own campaign and brand, competitor and non-brand ad groups, $6,000 for the first five weeks. By the end of the year the pilot had spent $18,128 and returned $599,180 in attributed revenue, a 33x return at an average cost per click of $0.90 (BCC report to Ascend, July 2023).
2
Moved the budget to where the clicks were cheap
In spring 2023 New Jersey was costing about $5 a click and returning $3,000 a month. Collinsville and Fairview Heights were costing $0.50 a click. We cut New Jersey to $20 a day and moved the difference to Illinois, which returned $135,224 over the same six weeks (March 1 to April 11, 2023). Through July 2023 the program had generated $1.73M at a 14.7% click-through rate.
3
Fixed the tracking, then scaled
Cross-domain conversion tracking between the site and the menu platform was rebuilt in early 2024 so every paid order showed up in Google Analytics. On March 26, 2024, Ascend’s leadership approved a budget increase on the strength of the verified numbers. Spend went from $5,760 in February to $38,090 in March to $64,899 in April, and attributed revenue went from $319,114 to $917,878 to $1.33M (Google Analytics).
4
Fought the platform every week
Cannabis ads get disapproved constantly, and in early 2025 Google’s match-type changes pushed Chicago from about $1 a click to $11. So we stripped every cannabis reference off the landing pages, consolidated campaigns by market, rebuilt the Google Ads account when disapproval history started throttling it (May 2025), added cart-abandoner remarketing, and tested price messaging against convenience messaging state by state. By July 2025 the average click was back to $3.80, and the Pennsylvania landing page rebuild in February 2026 lifted conversion rate 7%, to 51%.
BUILT TO LAST
Spend Did Not Always Scale, and We Said So
The easy story is “more budget, more revenue.” Ascend’s data did not always agree, and we told them when it did not. An extra $14,500 pushed into New Jersey in October 2025 lifted revenue but cut that market’s return from about 13x to 5x. A 46% budget cut in August 2024 lowered cost per click 19% and raised cost per conversion only 2%. Both went into the monthly report, because the point of paid search is the return, not the spend.
That is what kept the program running for three and a half years, through a period Ascend’s own president described on a call as the biggest investment the company was making. Holiday weeks brought 40% to 130% more search traffic and clicks that cost up to $12.50 instead of $3.55, so each surge got its own capped budget with pause triggers rather than a blank check. In the first two weeks of March 2026, after a landing page and bidding pass, return on ad spend rose 60% month over month at a 65% conversion rate, and Chicago, the biggest market, was still the most efficient one.
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