First £1m week
Five-a-side football centres, UK. Sport and leisure.
First £1m week · +163% revenue from non-brand search · +30.1% email campaign revenue
The business
GOALS runs five-a-side football centres across the UK, selling pitch bookings, leagues, kids' parties and corporate events. Offers change often and at short notice, with around a dozen running at any one time, so marketing has to move as fast as the business does.
The brief
Two jobs ran side by side. The first was the digital rollout of the GOALS x Lucozade Cup, which took teams from local club heats through regional finals to a national final at GOALS Wembley. The campaign had to make three things clear: what teams were playing for, how they progressed and how to enter.
The second was a harder question. Most of GOALS' Google Ads revenue came from people searching for GOALS by name. Paying heavily for brand keywords can make performance look stronger than it really is, because a lot of that traffic is already looking for GOALS. The job was to find customers who weren't.
What we did
Campaign strategy. We shaped the Lucozade Cup messaging and ran the rollout through email and paid social.
Google Ads. We deliberately shifted spend away from brand keywords and towards people searching for five-a-side, parties and events without a venue in mind.
Email. We more than doubled the number of campaigns sent, with each one built around a specific offer or moment.
Meta ads. We rebuilt paid social around individual offers, so each one is measured on its own return.
The results
Between 2 February and 11 September, 2025 against 2026:
Revenue from non-brand search rose 163%, on 11% less total Google Ads spend. Brand keywords' share of Google Ads revenue fell from 93.5% to 78.8%.
Email campaigns sent rose 103%. Email revenue rose 30.1%, orders rose 15.2% and unsubscribes fell 56%.
Meta returned 4.67x its spend in 2026, led by corporate events at 11.14x, B2B at 8.94x and kids' parties at 8.40x.
During the Lucozade Cup rollout, GOALS recorded its first £1m week.
- First £1m week
- £1m
- Less reliance on branded Google search
- 15%
- Revenue excluding brand keywords
- +163%
- Year-on-year campaign revenue
- +30.1%
- Unique orders placed
- +15.2%
- Campaigns sent
- +103%
What we can claim
Moving away from brand keywords made the headline Google Ads figures go backwards: revenue fell 19%, cost per acquisition rose 20% and return on ad spend fell 9%. That was the expected cost of paying less for customers who were already coming, and of finding new ones instead. Email open rates also fell from 51.0% to 40.9% as sending volume doubled. There is no 2025 Meta comparison, because the previous account data sits with a third party. The first £1m week was a business-wide result, with our work one part of it.