BeFitNow Canada is a Maple, Ontario-based Shopify store selling commercial-grade fitness equipment — Smith machines, dumbbells, plates, and accessories — to home gym owners across Canada. When they came to me, their Google Ads were delivering mediocre 2–3x ROAS and Amazon had proven unprofitable for their SKU margins. The challenge: rebuild their paid strategy around a high-intent, purchase-ready audience that could actually scale.
BeFitNow had something most fitness brands don't — their own manufacturer relationship, a genuinely Canadian brand story, and commercial-grade machines at accessible price points. The problem wasn't the product. It was the paid strategy.
Existing campaigns weren't structured around product margin tiers. High-ticket Smith machines and low-ticket accessories were competing for the same budget with no differentiation in bidding strategy, feed optimization, or audience segmentation.
The client had tried selling SKUs on Amazon but the economics didn't work — FBA fees, Amazon's commission, and aggressive competitor pricing on commodity fitness items made it impossible to run profitable ads. We made the call to exit Amazon entirely.
Competing against NorthernFitness.ca (1M+ monthly visits), TreadmillFactory.ca (988K visits), and FitnessAvenue.ca (527K visits) — BeFitNow was pulling ~26K monthly visits. The budget had to punch above its weight.
SimilarWeb data, Mar–May 2026
BeFitNow outpaces GTAFitness.ca despite a fraction of the budget — and is the only brand in this set showing consistent upward traffic momentum.
A full restructure of the paid channel mix — killing what didn't work, doubling down on what could.
Amazon's fee structure — commissions, FBA costs, advertising overhead — made their margin-sensitive fitness SKUs fundamentally unprofitable on the platform. We cut Amazon Ads entirely and redirected that budget toward owned-channel Google Shopping where BeFitNow controlled the customer relationship.
The Google Merchant Center feed was generic — no custom labels, no margin segmentation, weak titles. I rebuilt it: custom labels by product tier (high-AOV machines vs. accessories), optimized titles with high-intent Canadian search terms like "home gym Smith machine Canada", and enriched attributes for better Shopping eligibility.
Separated Standard Shopping for the high-margin hero products (Smith machines, commercial trainers) — where manual bidding control mattered — and layered Performance Max campaigns for the accessory catalogue. PMax's asset group structure allowed product-specific creative at scale across Search, Display, Shopping, and YouTube.
Fed PMax strong audience signals: Shopify customer lists segmented by AOV, site visitors who viewed machine PDPs, and custom intent audiences built around competitor brand searches (NorthernFitness, TreadmillFactory). This gave PMax's algorithm a far better starting point than cold traffic.
SimilarWeb showed 85.6% of BeFitNow's traffic was mobile. Yet bids and landing page experience were desktop-first. We adjusted mobile bid modifiers, ensured Shopify product pages loaded fast on mobile, and realigned ad copy to match bottom-of-funnel mobile intent signals — "buy Smith machine Canada" rather than informational queries.
Rather than setting a static tROAS, I used a ROAS ladder approach — starting conservative to build conversion history, then tightening targets as the algorithm accumulated data. This let campaigns exit the learning phase faster and compound efficiency gains without sacrificing volume during scale-up.
Conducted a full audit of existing Google Ads and Amazon Ads accounts. Amazon was losing money on every ad-attributed sale after fees. Decision made to pause Amazon Ads and consolidate budget. Existing Google campaigns were running broad match without negative keyword discipline — search terms were pulling in irrelevant queries wasting ~30% of spend.
Rebuilt the Merchant Center feed from scratch. Added custom labels for margin tiers, rewrote product titles for Shopping intent, and added product type attributes that were missing. Launched segmented Standard Shopping campaigns: one for hero machines (Smith machines, commercial trainers), one for accessories. Early ROAS climbed to 3–4x.
Introduced Performance Max with strong audience signals — customer lists, PDP visitors, competitor brand intent audiences. Structured asset groups by product category with dedicated headlines, descriptions, and images per group. PMax began picking up conversion paths Standard Shopping wasn't capturing — particularly mobile users discovered through YouTube and Display.
With conversion data built up and feed quality high, tROAS targets were tightened progressively. The algorithm had enough signal to defend efficiency at scale. Paid Search traffic share hit 45.4% of all site traffic — confirming Google had become BeFitNow's dominant growth channel, now growing at 4.72% month-over-month.
SimilarWeb channel data (Mar–May 2026) shows paid search as the dominant driver — a direct result of the Google Shopping + PMax rebuild.
Campaigns segmented by product margin tier and intent level — not by channel alone
| Campaign | Channel | Focus | Bid Strategy | Role |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
BFN_Smith_Machines
⭐ Hero
High-ticket machines
|
Standard Shopping | Smith Machines, Commercial Trainers | tROAS (high) | Revenue driver |
|
BFN_Accessories_Shopping
Dumbbells, plates, mats
|
Standard Shopping | Accessories & conditioning | Maximize Conv. Value | Volume + AOV support |
|
BFN_PMax_Machines
PMax
Cross-channel machine discovery
|
Performance Max | Full funnel — Search, YT, Display | tROAS | Reach + retargeting |
|
BFN_PMax_Accessories
PMax
Accessory catalogue
|
Performance Max | Dumbbells, benches, plates | tROAS | Catalogue scale |
|
BFN_Brand_Canada
Brand defense
|
Search | BeFitNow branded terms | Max Clicks | Competitor interception |
|
BFN_Commercial_Sales
B2B
Wholesale / gym outfitters
|
Shopping + Search | Commercial gym buyers | Max Conv. Value | High-AOV B2B |
Cutting Amazon wasn't a defeat — it was the right call. For a brand with moderate margins and a direct Shopify store, Amazon's fee structure made profitability structurally impossible at any reasonable ad spend. Redirecting that budget to Google Shopping where they kept the customer relationship and avoided platform fees was the move that unlocked scale.
In Google Shopping, the feed is your creative. Without clean product titles, accurate custom labels, and proper margin segmentation, no bidding strategy will save you. The feed overhaul was what moved the needle first — before a single bid strategy change. ROAS went up just by fixing what the algorithm was reading.
Running Standard Shopping and PMax in parallel — with exclusions to prevent overlap — gave the best of both worlds. Standard Shopping for high-intent transactional queries on the hero products. PMax for full-funnel discovery of the accessory catalogue across placements no manual campaign would have reached. Together they delivered 6x+ ROAS at scale.
Whether you're stuck at a ROAS plateau, bleeding spend on Amazon, or haven't cracked PMax yet — I can build the Google Shopping infrastructure that makes your Shopify store scale profitably.