Forplay

Forplay is a costume and apparel e-commerce brand whose year hinges on one month: October. We run their advertising on both channels, and the Meta side has its own case study. This is the Google Ads side: the engine behind a $1.2M Halloween.

The Challenge

Few businesses are as seasonal as a costume brand. In 2025, October alone produced 87% of the year's Google Ads revenue. That concentration leaves no room for error: ad spend has to scale from under $9K in a quiet month to over $400K in October, the account structure has to be proven before the season starts, and efficiency has to hold while budgets multiply.

There was also a ceiling to break. October revenue had been stuck between $820K and $890K for three straight years: $823K in 2022, $838K in 2023, $887K in 2024.

The Solution

• Split search into a dedicated brand campaign and separate non-brand campaigns for generic Halloween and costume phrases, so cold acquisition is measured on its own
• Segmented Performance Max by role: an all-products campaign, a best-sellers campaign, and a generic non-brand costumes campaign
• Ran feed-only Performance Max for costumes at a 500% ROAS target to isolate Shopping placements from display and video
• Ran asset-only Performance Max campaigns (costume themes, no product feed) to capture upper-funnel placements separately
• Led the October surge with promo campaigns: a Halloween 25%-off Performance Max push and a dedicated Shopping sale campaign carried $195K of peak-season spend between them
• Held explicit ROAS targets of 310% to 500% per campaign so efficiency survived the 45x seasonal budget scale-up

The Results

October 2025 broke the three-year plateau. Spend scaled from $8.8K in August to $401K in October, and the return held at 3.0x through the peak.